Turkey allows ‘death squads’ into Syria to fight its former ally

Massive influx of Syrian-Kurd refugees to Turkey is “fallout” of Ankara’s policies as it facilitates “death squads” going into Syria to overthrow the sovereign government in Damascus, journalist and activist Sukant Chandan told RT.

RT:Is Ankara still backing the anti-Assad insurgency as strongly as ever?

Sukant Chandan: I think all the indicators point to it being the case. If we see the obvious deal that was done with the so-called Islamic State with the fifty-odd consulate staff in Mosul by the Turks, it was very clear that the Turkish state has done a deal with the death squads holding the consulate staff. If we understand that 12,000 so-called jihadists – these are not jihadists but death squad members - some of which have gone from London, France and Belgium, have gone through the Turkish-Syrian border and nothing can be clearer. While Turkey facilitates the death squads going into Syria to overthrow a sovereign government, at the same time they are stopping Kurds going to defend their compatriots across the border on the Syrian side. So really the whole situation is very clear and this is a strategy that is part and parcel in harmony, synchronization and coordination with the leading NATO powers, especially France, Britain and the US, to develop the circumstances for bombing Syria, not to confront the so-called IS, because they have been facilitating their rise there, but actually to have strategy in place to bomb the Syrian Arab Army and the Syrian government because they really want to finish the job, but it remains to be seen whether it could be possible.

READ: New clashes erupt at Syrian-Turkish border as 100k+ refugees flee

RT:Is Turkey in a position to deal with such a massive influx of refugees?

SC: Turkey has really to deal with the fallout of its own policy. If you are going to conduct war and Turkish state-sponsored terrorism against your neighbor which you had hitherto been an ally to, then you have to deal with some of the fallout.

Obviously Turkey has a long-standing intergenerational policy actually of anti-Kurdish policy, whipping out tens of thousands of the villages in the late 1990s in the Kurdish area of Turkey. So this is nothing new and Turkey will use the death squads in Syria to then come across the border into Turkey to help to fight its own internal enemy that is the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and the other Kurdish revolutionary and liberation organizations. So this is a continuation and intensification of not only Turkish policy which some Kurdish media correctly called the neo-Ottoman strategy of developing paramilitaries, i.e. death squads. But this is ongoing policy of the leading NATO powers to overthrow [as] one leading US policymaker called [it] “the Cuba of the Middle East”, i.e. the Syrian Arab Republic.

RT:Some top US officials say there's no way to avoid a ground operation if Washington and its allies want to defeat Islamic State. Why is the US government objecting to this?

SC: It doesn’t need to put in any ground troops because, frankly, on all strategic issues, in any way you look at it, what is developing in Iraq and Syria is to the strategic benefit of the leading NATO powers and its allies: Israel and the Gulf monarchies. There is no reason. That is why they have “pivot to Asia” because for the West in general everything, especially as it set off the Arab Spring, and has been going perfectly well for Western strategic interest. So why are you going to put boots on the ground? In any way there is obviously military intelligence and boots on the ground in Syria and Iraq that have infiltrated guiding and directing the death squads as they have been doing so in Libya since February 2011.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.