NEWS CENTER – “These are legitimate concerns. This is about terrorism, this is about arms exports,” Stoltenberg said at a joint press conference with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto when he visited him at his summer residence in Naantali, Finland, today (Sunday).
Jens Stoltenberg is a Norwegian politician from the Social Democratic Labor Party and served as Minister of State, that is, Prime Minister of Norway, from March 2000 to October 2001 and from October 2005 to October 2013, and is currently Secretary General of the imperialist war alliance NATO. So, this is not the first time that the reality of the statement “who betrayed us the social democrats” is repeated.
As Mustafa Karasu noted during his interview to the ANF news agency, the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg also uses one-to-one the language of the Turkish occupying state and takes its side. Thus, he stated that the security concerns expressed by Turkey in its opposition to the NATO membership applications of Finland and Sweden were legitimate.
The Turkish occupying state is currently the only country in NATO blocking the membership application of Sweden and Finland, which made such a request in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month. The Turkish occupying state wants to use its veto to make Sweden and Finland allies in the war against the Kurds, claiming to have so-called security concerns about the two countries, which, according to the fascist government in Turkey, support and harbor Kurdish militants and other groups it considers terrorists.
Stoltenberg made his attachment to the Turkish occupying state obvious during the press statement, referring to Turkey’s strategic location on the Black Sea between Europe and the Middle East and making it clear that Turkey is an important ally for the alliance. In addition, he pointed to the support Turkey has provided to Ukraine since Russia deployed troops to its neighbor on Feb. 24. He stated, “We must remember and understand that no NATO ally has suffered more terrorist attacks than Turkiye,” using the pronunciation of the country’s name that Turkey recently requested from the UN to avoid being titled in English like a turkey, which the UN promptly confirmed.
In his statement, however, remains out of the question that he here facts reversed into the opposite, because it is clear that Turkey commits more terrorist attacks than any other NATO ally and Turkey itself is a security problem, to refer once again to the interview with Mustafa Karasu and the daily reports of HPG which point to the massive use of banned chemical weapons and poisonous gases, as well as the drone attacks on civilians in north-eastern Syria, Şengal, Mexmûr and southern Kurdistan and the many other offenses that the important ally of the NATO alliance is guilty of inside and outside Turkish state borders.
THE US-TURKEY RELATIONSHIP
Turkey has invaded and occupied the territory of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) twice in the past four years and is threatening to do so again. Its invasions of Afrin, Ras al-Ain and Tel Abyad have prolonged Syria’s war and contributed to regional instability, granted ISIS and other jihadist groups a new lease on life, and led to serious, pervasive human rights abuses against Syrian civilians.
A possible third attack, likely targeting major cities like Manbij, Kobane and Qamishlo, would be worse. The Rojava Information Center, a local research institution, has warned that such a military operation could displace up to a million people and leave those who remained without access to critical resources and infrastructure.
Turkey was only able to take control of this zone in the first place because of a series of US diplomatic failures. Despite American rhetoric about Turkey’s “legitimate security concerns” in the region, Turkey’s aggressive approach to northern Syria has little to do with any concrete security threat from the AANES or the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Instead, Turkish attacks on the region are wars of choice – rooted in an authoritarian, militarist hostility to all forms of Kurdish political and cultural expression that has been the official policy of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government since the breakdown of peace talks between the state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 2015. Achieving stability in northern and eastern Syria will be prohibitively difficult, if not impossible, without a political solution to the wider Turkish-Kurdish conflict.
In the months immediately prior to Operation Peace Spring (2019), conditions for new efforts to seek a negotiated solution were better than they had ever been. The United States was engaging directly in dialogue with Turkey and with the SDF. Imprisoned PKK founder and leader Abdullah Ocalan had been granted meetings with his lawyers, allowing him to communicate with the outside world – an opportunity he used to call for peace in Syria.
Cemil Bayik, co-chair of the Union of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK) even published an op-ed article in The Washington Post titled, simply, “Now is the moment for peace between Kurds and the Turkish state. Let’s not waste it.”
Yet instead of taking advantage of these circumstances, US policymakers chose to isolate the situation in northern and eastern Syria from its political and historical context. American diplomats expended limited time, effort, and diplomatic capital not on a sustainable political solution to the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, but on an unenforceable “safe zone” deal that forced the AANES and SDF to make unnecessary and impractical concessions and imposed no consequences on parties for violations.
When former US president Donald Trump abruptly withdrew US troops from northern Syria in October 2019, Turkey immediately abandoned its commitments under the agreement. It is highly likely that Erdogan’s government never intended to uphold its end of the deal in the first place.
The United States was aware that Turkish leaders did not approach negotiations with the SDF from an honest standpoint. It should also have taken Erdogan seriously when he spoke about his idea of a “safe zone,” a fully occupied strip of Syrian territory along the Turkish border, governed by the same opposition-affiliated militias that had terrorized Kurdish civilians in Afrin as part of the same strategy of forced demographic change.
Turkey never indicated publicly that it intended to coexist peacefully with a Kurdish-led political entity on its borders; US planning knew that since the begginig.
The task before the Biden administration today is a difficult one: preventing a crisis caused by failed Trump policies, and then engaging in the kind of diplomacy that the Trump administration was unable or unwilling to initiate. Yet the costs of failure for regional stability and security are simply too high.
