Turkey military campaign against PKK crude trick: Analyst

Press TV has conducted an interview with Webster Griffin Tarpley, author and historian from Washington, to get his take on Turkey’s stance towards the ISIL Takfiri group and the Kurds.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: How much could one say Turkey’s so-called anti-ISIL operations are meant to suppress the Kurds

Griffin Tarpley: It seems that the classic date and switch, they keep trick .... They announced it, it looked like they were finally admitting and stopping this policy they had in supporting and harboring the ISIS (ISIL) terrorists…,they have let ISIS terrorists to operate on their territory, have bases there, go across, the whole ISIS logistics, the oil, the recruits, the money, all of this depends on Turkey. Turkey could essentially shut down ISIS from one minute to the next. Yesterday, the big announcement was they were finally bombing some of the ISIS sites, which I think, you could attribute that to self-defense. But now this other aspect is coming. Right the obsession of the Turkish authorities with the Kurds and the fact that in the past year or so the PKK Kurds as well as the KYP Kurds, in other words the PKK probably more in Iraq, the KYP probably more in Syria, these have been some of the most effective fighters against ISIS, so along with some others. So, what you’ve got looks like a policy designed to push ISIS away from the Turkish border, give them some kind of the buffer zone, which have been constantly harping on, and push them into northern Iraq, essentially push them in the direction of the US forces and the Iraqi state.

So it’s a very crude trick and of course whenever things like this happen we’ve got to look at General John Allen, the ISIS Czar in the Obama administration, in the State Department, really acts as a kind of ambassador of Qatar and Turkey and Saudi Arabia to Washington. And he delivers their demands to Obama, and tells Obama he should do what they want. But it’s a very treacherous tactic. It raises the question of whether Turkey should not be kicked out of NATO, whether it’s possible to have a normal alliance relationship with a government of this duplicity, trickery and cynicism.  

Press TV: What kind of a situation are we to see if the Kurds start to react to Turkey’s attacks?

Griffin Tarpley: Again the problem is [that] there are two sides to the front, and again the current tactic seems to be channeling the ISIS people by pushing them away from Turkey and pushing them towards the PKK and indeed the Peshmerga, in other words, the cities in northern Iraq, which is really known [as] a Kurdistan entity, they will come under attack... and of course not too far away from that is Iran. So, it’s a very cynical thing and it’s going to give us a wider war. And I don’t know if the State Department has said anything about it. I can’t see anything that they’ve done. US should condemn that and demand that they stop.

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