By Dr. M. Koohzad:

President Erdogan of Turkey came to Washington threatening, demanding, asking, even begging for a few things he badly needed. He wanted the U.S. to dump the Syrian Kurds who are bravely fighting ISIS, extradite his old friend Fethullah Gulen to Turkey to be executed, and fire Mr. Brett McGurk, the American envoy to the coalition fighting ISIS. Evidently, he received no positive reply. The Western powers, including the U.S., EU, and NATO have found out that Turkey has lost its strategic values after the collapse of the USSR. It would be funny to consider Anatolia as a part of the North Atlantic region. As a terrorist state, Turkey also has friendly relations with ISIS. Erdogan declared a full-scale war on the Kurds and killed massive numbers of civilians, mainly women, children and elderly in Turkey during the 21st century. The Turkish Air Force, TAF, has targeted Kurds in three different countries: Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. He was one of a few political leaders in the world who could have prevented the genocide of five thousand Yazidi Kurds. He chose not to.

President Trump still operates in his “Apprentice” mood, temper and practice. Sitting at the head of a big table, he still loves to say: “You’re Fired!” With good reasons or not, he is a billionaire who has fired countless people. In this case, he might be a record holder. Trump’s termination of government employees included the two high-profile firings of General Flynn, his National Security Advisor and Mr. James Comey, the FBI Director. The General was in the lobbying business. He received funds from the Russians and the Turks amounting to $45,000 and $530,000, respectively. Ankara’s bribery was for getting back a CIA agent, a crying-cursing Turkish preacher who is hiding behind the mountains in Pennsylvania. Most importantly of all, he wanted to persuade the U.S. to dump the Kurds who are fighting against ISIS in Syria, while giving him a free pass to kill them in Turkey. But, inside the Beltway, the Russian money made more hoopla than the Turkish funds. Those who were left behind during the Cold War years made sure Russia was not seen as a favored nation but Turkey was.

The new Sultan Erdogan believes in being the successor of the Ottoman Caliphs, who were both political as well as religious leaders of the world’s last, largest, and most powerful empire. As the Islamist mayor of Istanbul in December 1997, Erdogan declared himself an Islamist Jihadist by reciting a poem that included verses, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…” Erdogan’s friends: ISIS Jihadists, fully understand keywords such as barracks, helmets, bayonets, and beheadings. Sultan Erdogan has hosted Hamas terrorists, had a few handshakes with infamous Afghan terrorist leaders like Hekmatyar and welcomed genocidal Sudanese dictator Oman al-Bashir into Turkey. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar personally poured acid over the face of female students on the campus of Kabul University. It was in September of last year that Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, and Columbia University’s Professor of Comparative Literature and Writing, said his country was heading to a ‘regime of terror.’