It came as a big surprise that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently labeled the members of the US-led coalition as promise breakers and supporters of terrorists. According to the Turkish leader, this coalition provides support to various terrorist groups, including ISIS, YPG, PYD … and Ankara has the evidence to back up that claim.
But what exactly offended Ankara so much? Over the past few days, Turkey has been suffering extremely painful attacks from the Islamic State in the Syrian city of Al-Bab. Previously the troops employed in the Euphrates Shield operation successfully took western suburbs of Al-Bab and were planning to occupy the heights overlooking the city. However, ten days ago the “shield” cracked when ISIS units opposed Turkish troops in a frontal assault, inflicting heavy losses upon the Turkish army. Radical militants report that in just one assault Turkey lost up to 70 soldiers and three modern tanks. Immediately after the announcement ISIS started spreading videos showing their destruction of Turkish armored vehicles. The Turkish General Staff announced that it lost 14 servicemen, 10 German-manufactured Leopard tanks, an M-60 main battle tank, personnel carriers, and a Cobra armored vehicle. The pictures that can be found now on the Internet depict Turkish armored vehicles severely damage by TOW missiles that in recent years have “suddenly” started appearing in the hands of ISIS radicals.
But nobody should be really surprised at this point, as Turkish media were reporting in late December that Washington was stepping up its weapons supply efforts to radicals in Syria. It’s been noted that as the US Ambassador to Ankara, John Bass, kept persuading Turkish reporters that Washington was not supporting militants directly, the airfield in the Syrian city of Rumeylan saw an ever increasing number of US transport planes landing. The payload that they were carrying would soon be transported by US helicopters to different parts of the country. According to Turkish journalists, the last large delivery of weapons occurred on the evening of 27 December. It is also been noted that weapons are being delivered to Syria via hundreds of trucks, carrying their deadly cargo from the Iraqi city of Erbil to the areas controlled by the Syrian Kurds. Obama is obviously continuing to terrorize Syria till his last day in office.
We have seen various commentators noting that under the guise of military assistance to the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Obama administration is actively assisting various extremist groups in Syria by secretly supplying them with all sorts of weapons, along with the so-called “advisers” in a bid to topple the legitimate Syrian government.
It’s no coincidence that after the liberation of Aleppo, Syrian troops found stockpiles of weapons and explosives manufactured in the US, Germany, and Bulgaria, including a large amount of anti-tank missiles.
While the Aleppo operation has been a turning point in the Syrian armed conflict, the White House is still in a hurry to provide maximum support to the so-called “moderate opposition” in Syria, but now it’s clear for pretty much everyone that Washington is assisting ISIS. Last December alone Turkish bloggers spotted the passage of three large cargo ships through Turkey’s Bosporus Strait [connecting the Aegean Sea to the Black Sea], presumably carrying arms for the insurgents. In particular, in mid-December a freighter, Karina Danica, left Bulgaria heading to Saudi Jeddah with weapons on board, as reported by the Bosphorus Observer on Twitter. This data is confirmed by a specialized tracking site known as MarineTraffic. It is a well known fact that the freighter Karina Danica is a Danish vessel, chartered by the American company Cherming, which is the official supplier of non-standard NATO weapons for the US “allies” in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. It’s curious that the Bulgarian Vazovski Machine-Building Plant that sells weapons to Cherming, increased its sales 12 fold in 2016, making a profit of 170 million dollars.
What makes this whole arms supplies story awkward is the scandal that broke out in 2015, when the Chairman of the Iraqi Parliamentary Committee on Defense and Security, Hakim Zamili, asked PM Haider al-Abadi to intervene immediately to stop the $300-million ammunition deal with Romanian weapons being delivered to ISIS directly, while financed by one of the neighboring countries. In 2016, the director of the Conflict Armament Research, James Bevan, stated that the weapons from Eastern Europe that were officially designated for the so-called “moderate opposition” are falling in extremist hands.
The decision to supply anti-government troops in Syria with all sorts of weapons, including MANPADS, that was signed by President Barack Obama on December 23, may lead to a renewed escalation of the Syrian conflict and new victims.
So there’s more than enough reasons for Ankara’s resentment of the Obama administration since it is directly responsible for every single Turkish soldier murdered by radical militants.
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