.jpg)
By Dr. M. Koohzad:
After the defeat of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in WWI (1914 – 1918), European victors dissected the world’s most potent Muslim Empire. In the middle of the Great War, the Allies predicted the result of the conflict and planned to take over by signing the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. The two, a British and a French, racist Orientalist servants mercilessly divided the region and imposed their arbitrary political boundaries based on the availability of natural resources, mainly crude oil, and creating modern unitary nation-states their Orientalist design.
After the war, the majority of the Arabic speaking tribes/nations obtained at least a nominal independence. In the process, only Kurdistan was abused, oppressed, and ignored.
It is true. The Kurds did not cross the bloody borders. It was the border that crossed them. The Kurds are seen as foreigners on their own land. Presently, a few Kolbars, border porters, carrying commodities on their backs between Iraq and Iran who had to cross the bloody border are killed by Iran’s border guards. An estimated 70,000 Kolbars are operating in Iran’s Kurdish area. Hundreds of them are killed or injured every year by Iranian border guards and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Many of these young men are university graduates who cannot find other jobs in the poverty-stricken Kurdish region. There has been a total of 245 incidents in which Kolbars were either killed or wounded in 2019. Jubin Katiraie (August 5, 2020) reported that in five months, a total of “21 Kolbars were Killed in Iran Since March.” According to Fazel Hawramy (September 2, 2020), “Iranian border guards shoot four Kolbars dead in one day.”
The Turkish Tyrant, President Erdogan, an infamous Kurdish killer, has, can, and will order the murdering of civilian Kurds in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, simultaneously. During the rise of ISIS, the Turkish Air Force killed more innocent civilian Kurds than ISIS members trained, armed, and imported into Syria by the CIA, MI6, and MIT. By 2020, he was allowed to send his terrorists to Libya in support of Muslim Brotherhood Terrorists. After Ataturk and Saddam, Erdogan has killed more Kurds than any political leader in the Middle East. He is the second person in Turkey who committed genocide against civilian Kurdish people in Turkey.
For all of the Kurds’ oppressions for the last century, 1923 – 2020, the stateless, leaderless, and the ignored Kurdish people did not go away that easily. Although now it is wishful thinking, particularly for Ankara and Tehran, they will not go away soon. They demand unconditional freedom from the yokes of the occupiers of their homeland.
According to Stephen A. Jones and Eric Freedman (August 26, 2020), the great majority of the American Presidents, 44 of them were either racist or were slave owners, justifying slavery, or supporting white supremacist agendas. Also, they all exhibited characteristics of chauvinism, hubris and xenophobia). Thus, it is easily understood that none of them would care about a stateless nation such as the Kurds. However, the Kurds must not forget President Obama as the worst War Criminal in Kurdistan’s history. It is highly unlikely that a street should be named after him.
The great majority of the American Presidents from George Washington to Woodrow Wilson hardly knew or cared about the Kurds and Kurdistan. The problems of the Kurds and Kurdistan were seen as domestic issues related to the countries that still occupy the region. In the Western Powers’ perspectives, the Kurds have not been a popular ethnic group going back to the Crusaders Wars and seeing the Kurds as relatives of Saladin who finally defeated them. Of the seven more recent American Presidents named here: Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Trump; none cared much about the well-being of the Kurds. At one time or another, the Western Powers, now the US and NATO, helped the countries, including Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, forcefully occupying Kurdistan. The four could not have committed atrocities, oppressions, mayhems, murders, and genocides without the Western Powers’ assistance and blessings.
Woodrow Wilson (In office 1913 – 1921), in his address to the joint session of the United States Congress on January 8, 1918, formulated under 14 separate points, the essential nature of a post-World War I settlement. He initiated the establishment of an independent and integral state of Kurdistan at the Paris Peace Conference, the Versailles Conference in 1919. He insisted on independence for the Arabs, Armenians, and the Kurds. It was a time when some Kurdish families named their baby boys Wilson. Only the first two eventually obtained independence, but not the Kurds. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne led to the international recognition of the new Republic of Turkey’s sovereignty as the successor state of the defunct Ottoman Empire. Isaiah Bowman (1878 – 1950), a famous Canadian American geographer and the chief territorial adviser to President Wilson, was biased towards Armenian Christians. He most often compared the crude Kurds with enlightened Armenians.
The first systematic genocides of the Kurdish people ordered by General Kemal Ataturk in Turkey began in the 1920s. Washington began to pay more attention to the region by the end of WWII during the so-called Cold War when the Middle East became a contesting arena between the U.S. and the USSR, and the most important sources of oil in the world. The U.S. backing of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq has been instrumental in suppressing any Kurdish nationalist political movement. Located near the border with the communist USSR, the Kurds and Kurdistan became the first victims of the rivalry between the two superpowers at the beginning of the Cold War. Without American support, Tehran was incapable of destroying the first Republic of Kurdistan in 1947. In 1953, the US brought back the fleeing last Shah of Iran to power, and by creating strong central government and state police, the Kurdish movement was almost gone.
By the time President Richard Nixon (1969 – 1974) was elected and Dr. Kissinger became the most important American foreign policy decision maker, Iraq had already developed a very friendly relationship with the former USSR. Washington did not like this cozy-client link between Baghdad and Moscow. As a result, a tripartite plan was formed between the US, Iran, and Israel. In this plan, the Kurds were given adequate support to keep Baghdad busy and take its energy, but not enough to achieve any meaningful results. Some old and rusty Russian-made weapons captured by America in Vietnam and those seized by Israel from its Arab neighbors were given to the Kurds in Northern Iraq. The Baathist forces withdrew from Kurdistan and a much weaker Iraqi government made both Iran and Israel very happy.
Unfortunately for the Kurds, during an OPEC meeting in 1975, Saddam and the last Shah of Iran agreed to settle their differences and signed a treaty of friendship, known as the Algiers Agreement. In this treaty Iraq formally conceded to Iranian territorial demands in return for the Shah terminating support for the Iraqi Kurdish rebels. Dr. Kissinger, the American Super Secretary of State, approved this agreement that marked the end of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq.
Indeed, the Shah was more worried about the uprising of the Iranian Kurds than about what was going on in Iraq. However, as a weak puppet, the Shah was only doing what Dr. Kissinger told him to do. The end result, nevertheless, was the collapse of Kurdish resistance and the onslaught of Saddam’s Anfal plan and killing machine of genocide. This is one of American’s worst records of cynical-bloody betrayal of the Kurd.
Abandoning the Kurds in Iraq by Kissinger went on during Gerald Ford’s (1973 – 1977) presidency. He had no idea who the Kurds were! Ford is the only person to have served as both vice president and president without being elected to either office by the Electoral College. Shortly after the withdrawal of American help, a reign of terror began in all of the countries where the Kurds lived, but the worst was carried out in Iraq, resulting in the systematic killing and genocide of hundreds of thousands of civilians. According to Kurdish leaders, some 182,000 mostly unarmed civilian Kurds were murdered. Barry Lando (February 4, 2010) wrote that in cooperation with Iran and Israel, Kissinger’s plan for the Kurds, “was a ruthless, deceitful process, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of Kurds being slaughtered and displaced over the years.”
President Jimmy Carter (1977 – 1981) was running a desperate campaign for a second term. Ayatollah Khamenei, rather than Ronald Reagan, defeated him. On September 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. Saddam Hussein was given encouragement and aid to do so. The war that went on for eight years was the longest and costliest in the Middle East’s modern history. Both sides were spending one billion dollars every month to kill each other. Most of the Kurds sided with Iran against Iraq, but a few did fight the Iranians. Help from the Kurds was one of the most important reasons for Iran’s continuous success in the Northern Front. But the Kurds suffered both in Iran and Iraq. Kurdistan was damaged more than any other place in the war zone.
Between 1980 and 1988, the largest numbers of Kurds were killed. Most of the bombs for eight years fell on the Kurdish land. Today, one of the largest numbers of land mines in the world is still in Kurdistan.
President Carter’s re-election and Kurdistan were both ruined by the hostage crisis and the war. For eight years, functioning as the battleground, Kurdistan was destroyed more than any other region. The Kurds were killed not only by the two combating nations, but the Turks too chased and killed the Kurds in the shadow of the war. Right before the war’s conclusion, with the help of the Western powers, Saddam gassed and killed more than five thousand civilian Kurds in the city of Halabja, called the Kurdish Halabshima. For this most massive genocide of any ethnic group, Saddam was supported by the Reagan administration. All of the helicopters and most of the poisonous chemicals were American made.
In 1982,the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department’s list of countries that allegedly supported terrorism. On December 19-20, 1983, President Ronald Reagan (1981 – 1989) sent a special envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, to forge an alliance with Saddam. A few months later, on March 24, 1984, Rumsfeld was again in Baghdad. He was shaking the hands of the Iraqi dictator, thus sharing his crimes against humanity. Oddly enough, Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense when the US invaded Iraq in 2003, destroying Saddam and the country.
By the early 1990s, particularly with Bill Clinton’s presidency (1993 – 2001), sex scandals were the most important headline news inside Washington’s beltway. Over-coverage of the gossips became yet another “Gate,” name Monica Lewinsky. For over a decade, 1978 – 1999, during the Kurdish uprising lead by the PKK in Turkey, the US, NATO members, and Israel helped Turkey provide Ankara with hardware, torture technics, and intelligence. Ankara survived with the generous help of the Western powers. The most frightening weapon of killing civilian Kurds in the mountainous rural area of North Kurdistan in Turkey was the American-made Cobra gunship helicopters.
In a covert operation by the MIT, CIA, Israeli Mossad, Greek, and Kenyan secret services, Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK founder, was finally arrested in Nairobi on February 15, 1999. This was the first time in history that a multinational force cooperated to capture a single Kurdish warrior. He was brought back to Turkey on the same day. A Turkish state security court found him guilty of treason and separatism, but not terrorism. His death penalty was reduced to life in prison because Turkey wanted to become a full member of the EU. He is imprisoned on the island of Imrali. He is the sole inmate in a high-security prison with a thousand Turkish Special Forces as guardsmen, (1 Kurd, 1 Island, 1000 Turkish Commandos). Ocalan is kept as a hostage and a showcase to indicate to the EU that Turkey is doing something about restoring human rights to their Kurdish population.
The Kurds helped Americans in Iraq beginning in 2003. Americans were guided and saved by the Kurds. No Americans died in Iraq as long as the Kurdish Peshmergas accompanied them. Yet, George W. Bush (2001-2009) had no respect for the Kurds. He even helped Ankara to kill more Kurds. He was the first American President who put Kurdish “people, mountain ranges, and Turkish troops” together in a long sentence in November of 2007. In a news story that became known as “Bush vs. Mountain Turks,” before the meeting set for Monday, November 5, 2007, he said: “I look forward to visiting with Prime Minister Erdogan on this important subject as to how we can work together to prevent people from coming out of mountain ranges to do harm to Turkish troops,” Bush told reporters on Thursday, November 8, 2007.
Before becoming the leader of the free world, thinking about his American dreams, in his book, The Audacity of Hope, Mr. Obama (2006), wrote, “in years hence I may be seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history” (p. 265). He called for a new kind of politics—a politics that builds upon those collective compassions that pull Americans together. When elected, President Barack Hussein Obama II (In office 2009 – 2017) unfortunately, did stand on the wrong side of history and geography and carried on business as usual! Under his leadership, similar to the former empires, the U.S. government repeats the same mistake over and over, expecting different results. With so much at stake, no American government, Democrat or Republican, would risk fossil fuel sources and the Middle East’s cash markets. The Obama administration had to follow suit.
About three months after being elected President of the world’s only superpower, Mr. Obama ended up going to Turkey. On April 6, 2009, he gave his remarks in front of the Turkish Grand Assembly in Ankara. On the following day, he gave another remark, in a town-hall style, at Student Roundtable in Istanbul. As his first trip abroad, the whole world watched the brand new eloquent American President talking to the Turks for precisely 70 minutes. The Turkish lobby thoroughly brainwashed him in Washington, the second most powerful after the Israeli one. Happy with victory, hyper, on a nicotine attack, and with jetlag, President Obama had no idea what he was talking about. Playing with the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood’s feelings, Mr. Obama achieved one crucial goal, pleasing the new Islamist leadership, Erdogan, and his Islamist AK Party. In the process, he indicated his animosity towards the Kurds living in Northern
Kurdistan occupied by the Turks.
President Obama insisted on aiding Ankara to continue its violence and repression of the Kurds. It is baseless, shameless, and ridiculous to believe that the insurgent Kurdish nationalists are Jihadist terrorists. Did President Obama pinpoint that the Kurdish freedom fighters, the Peshmerga partisans, even the PKK, have never been called Islamists or Jihadists by anybody? It is interesting to note in this business of name games. The Al-Qaeda members have never been called Separatists either!
President Obama did not know, was not told, or conveniently forgot the fact that the first systematic genocide against the Kurds was ordered by the murderous General Ataturk, Turkish first President nicknamed the Father of the Turks. The Kurdish families were put on fire inside the mosques and were burned alive. Some Turkish soldiers recently acknowledged that after decades they still hear the mothers screaming and begging that their babies be shot first. Turkish security forces imprisoned thousands of Kurds in the rural areas in caves, filled them with poisonous gas, and closed the caves’ entrances. It is well known that Hitler acknowledged he learned a few technics of mass-murdering from Ataturk. Saddam and Erdogan also learned and repeated Ataturk’s Genocide against the civilian Kurds. The Peshmerga freedom fighter, including the PKK, are survivors of Turkish State Terrorism that is still ongoing.
In five years, Mr. Obama had ordered deadly American drones to kill far more people, some terrorists and many civilians, including American citizens, in the Muslim World and the Mideast than eight years of George W. Bush. Most of the assassinations were carried out in Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. The Western mainstream media did not know or just ignored a case of Kurdish civilians being targeted by American drones. The Roboski Massacre of the innocent civilian Kurds is a recent example of American support of Ankara. On December 28, 2011, at 9:37 p.m. local time, the American-made Turkish Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon killed 34 impoverished Kurdish border porters in an airstrike on the Iraq border. At least 28 of them belonged to the same extended family.
It is known as the Roboski Massacre of civilian Kurds when most of the victims were teenagers, and almost all came from a pair of villages in the mainly Kurdish township of Uludere. Their families had trouble separating the remains of their children from mules that also were mutilated. Those slaughtered were poor smugglers, who routinely brought in Iraqi fuel and cigarettes with local authorities’ full knowledge. Uludere, Roboski in Kurdish, located in Sirnak Province in southeast Turkey is an oppressed and poverty-stricken region. Smuggling is one indication of being needy, unemployed, and impoverished.
President Obama may never have heard or read anything about American involvement in the Roboski Massacre. Indeed, he could have guessed and had enough common sense that the young Kurdish men were murdered because they were Kurds! The United States, under Mr. Obama’s leadership, gave unconditional full support to Ankara to commit crimes against the Kurds. Washington was directly participating in brutal bullying, forced mass-assimilation, forced-mass deportation, and mass murder of the Kurds. Mr. Obama had the blood of many Kurds on his hands. Not even animals have been treated this way. There is a time when an ethnic group has to say enough is enough. The Kurds cannot withstand this much cruelty and abuse of their fundamental human rights by Ankara and Washington.
Similar to Bill Cosby, President Obama was a racist person. He had no respect for poor African Americans. He blamed the victims of a White Supremacist society, and during his presidency race relations in the US worsened. It escalated to a degree when Ajamu Baraka called Barack Obama an “Uncle Tom.” According to Ian Reifowitz (Dec 06, 2017), a Professor of History at SUNY University, Mr. Baraka, a Green Party Veep Nominee, insisted that Obama was not different than an Uncle Tom, that is a reference to a black man, a subservient, who will do anything to stay in good standing with the white man including betraying his people. President Obama was/is a racist, a swindler, and a charlatan who pretended to have some skill or be something he was not. He deceived people by sweet talks and lying. Obama was able to fool most of the people most of the time. Obama’s no “White” American boots on the ground in Syria was what Uncle Tom would do. In Syria, the Kurds served as American boots on the ground while being massacred in Turkey by Erdogan, Obama’s fifth-best friend. During his terms in office, President Obama was known as spineless, with a crappy legacy, and a war criminal. Melanie Batley reported (February 17, 2014) that Hollywood
filmmaker Oliver Stone has said President Barack Obama was a “weak man” because he “has abandoned the principles he espoused on the campaign trail about civil liberties and foreign policy.” About President Obama, Mr. Stone said, “The man stunned us with a lack of spine…He’s a weak man.” The people in the Middle East, mostly the Kurds, wished President Obama was just a weak, spineless, pathetic, and cowardly man. Unfortunately, he became a bloody war criminal!
Dave Lindorff (October 5, 2016) had nothing positive to say about Obama’s presidency. A law professor, Obama captured the imagination of many idealistic individuals. Mr. Lindorff argued that Obama leaves behind considerable wreckage, disappointment, and a legacy of death and destruction, plenty of it physical, but also much of it in the legislative and political arena.”
He concluded, “It’s hard, amid all this presidential wreckage, to find a significant area where Obama is leaving any progressive legacy of substance. If anyone can think of something, it is sure to be dwarfed by the monumental pile of crap that he has allowed or even actively encouraged to pile up during his sorry two-term watch as president.”
Paul Craig Roberts (January 11, 2017), argued that President Obama was a war criminal, as were “his military and intelligence officials and most of the House and Senate.” He added that Obama was “the first president to keep the US at war for the entirety of his eight-year regime. During 2016 alone, the US dropped 26,171 bombs on wedding parties, funerals, kid’s soccer games, hospitals, schools, people in their homes and walking their streets, and farmers tilling their fields in seven countries: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.”
Obama’s Death and destruction befell on the civilian Kurds in Iraq, the Yazidis. President Obama’s worst war crime was to allow his trained terrorist, ISIL, to commit one of the worst crimes against the defenseless civilian Yazidi Kurds. He may have “looked the other way,” but he was quickly able to prevent it. A telephone call to his best friend would have helped. It is why both Obama and Erdogan should be tried as war criminals by the International Criminal Court. Indeed, Obama must be accompanied by his War Criminal Team, including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and a few others.
In fact, President Obama was Commander-in-Chief of a Team of War Criminals that included Biden, Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power. Anytime Biden arrived in Ankara, it was followed by the death of many Kurdish people in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Hillary/Killery was happy to see Qadhafi dead and creating another Fail State that is now controlled by Jihadist terrorists of the Muslim Brotherhood helped by Erdogan’s terrorists. Dr. Susan Rice served on the National Security Council staff and as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during President Clinton’s second term. During the Rwanda Genocide of 1994, Dr. Rice allegedly said, “The only thing we have to do is look the other way.” Samantha Power justified bombarding Libya as humanitarian aid. Later, Obama blamed the “mess” in Libya on French president Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron.
On August 4, 2014, Obama’s terrorists, the ISIL, attacked Sinjar Mountain region and began the persecution of the Kurdish Yazidi people of Iraq, leading to their exile, the abduction and enslavement of Yazidi women, and massacres of thousands of civilians. Later, the UN confirmed 5,000 men were executed, and 7,000 women are now kept as sex slaves. Yazidi refugees were lined up, shot dead, and then bulldozed into mass graves. The Western-made Jihadists came into villages and selected women as young as nine years of age at will to make slaves. The Yazidi people’s persecution has been viewed as qualifying as “genocide” by groups such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
In both cases, whether Obama was aware of the plan or not, he was guilty. A horrendous atrocity was being committed on his watch. One does not have to be the parent of a nine-year-old girl to feel what she went through. The young girls were treated as sex slaves raped by the hairy, dirty, smelly subhuman terrorists. All of these were done according to Islamic Sharia Laws that Erdogan and Obama believed. Even very young girls know about suicide before being raped. We know one girl jumped off the truck, hit the asphalt, and died immediately. Out of mercy, a German ISIS couple purchased a very young Yazidi girl in the slave market in Mosel. She got sick with diarrhea, common in summer in many less developed societies. The German Jihadist couple took the Yazid girl chained her to a wooden peg in the yard in the summer sun. Within a short time, she passed away.
Through a fanfare op-ed, the dysfunctional United Nations attempted to find out who the Yazidis were. After parading flags and much commotion, they found out the Yazidis were Kurds and “could not look the other way.” The mostly mute South Korean UN Secretary-General looked so condescending in a picture taken with Nadia Murad, a young Yazidi victim who won the Noble Peace Prize. As a puppet of the Western Powers, Ban Ki-moon once in a while, he hesitated to complain about North Korea. As for the most responsible original planners of the genocide, Erdogan was happy to see so many Kurds dead. However, for Obama, who had two young daughters, the question is, could he sleep at night peacefully. If he did, he must have been a ruthless monster without any feelings.
Even before becoming the President of the US, Donald Trump did not respect the Kurds. He was against the American invasion of Iraq because he saw Saddam as a benevolent dictator. The 45th American President always looked at politics in terms of business bargaining. President Trump likes powerful dictators that could finalize political or business deals effectively. Trump’s embracing dictators and autocrats in the Middle East includes Erdogan of Turkey, General Sisi of Egypt, and Mohammed bin Salman, MbS, of Saudi Arabia. Based on the principals of politics as a business, he dealt with the North Korean dictator. He is still expecting an invitation from Tehran for behavior change and, he has no problem sitting down with any dictator anywhere in the world and talking about politics. Trump did not care about the Kurds who fought against his friend Saddam. However, Trump is less of a war criminal because, based on his business approach to politics, he stopped paying to Obama’s terrorist and ended the endless war on Syria
by the Western Powers.
On the other hand, Trump always made sure that his Tower in Istanbul was safe. The Turkish lobby in Washington has still facilitated the business proposal from Ankara. Turkey was the first to pay Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national advisor, to smooth a few critical deals between them. Erdogan, pronounced as Erdo-gone by Trump, came to Washington, his bodyguards punched in the faces of some Kurdish demonstrators, and nobody could say anything.
Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdish Regional Government in Northern Iraq, planned a Referendum of his Kurdistan. He foolishly trusted the US and Israel, feeling that both would support a referendum for Kurdistan’s independence scheduled for September 25, 2017. As soon as ISIS was being weakened and Exxon cut a deal with Baghdad, Kirkuk oil fields protected by the Kurds were returned to Iraq. The result of Barzani’s referendum of 92.7% for independence was ignored by the occupiers of Kurdistan and the Western Powers, including the Trump administration. Shortly after the referendum, Masoud Barzani resigned as president of the KRG. However, his clan is still in control of the wealth of the nation from petrodollars.
With a green light from Washington, Erdogan attacked Rojava’s Afrin region in Syrian Kurdistan on January 20, 2018. Turkish soldiers and their adapted Jihadist terrorists committed many war crimes against civilian Kurds. First, they destroyed a Kurdish mythical national symbol. A statue of Kurdish hero Kawa, the Blacksmith, a symbol of resistance against oppressors, was torn down. Then began their looting, raping, kidnapping for ransom, ethnic cleansing, and imposing Turkish language at newly built Turkish schools. They stole anything of value, including tractors, motorcycles, even appliances, TVs, and carpets. Perhaps, for the first time in history, the Turkish terrorists stole the year’s olive harvest and took it to Turkey to produce olive oil sold to Spain, the world’s largest producer of that commodity. It has not been surprising that the Turks have been stealing crude oil and olive oil from the Kurds in Syria.
As soon as the Kurds were defeating ISIS at the front line of global forces in Syria at the cost of sacrificing over 11,000 young Kurdish men and women and wounding over 22,000, Trump suddenly betrayed the Kurds and left them alone be slaughtered by the Turkish Tyrant Sultan Erdogan. On the phone, Trump promised Erdogan the pullout of U.S. troops from the area on Friday, December 14, 2018. On the following Wednesday, The State Department Informed Congress of plans to sell Turkey a package that includes included 80 Patriot missiles, 60 PAC-3 missile interceptors, and related equipment worth $3.5 billion. On Thursday and Friday, the American Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis and Mr. Brett McGurk, the US special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, resigned over President Trump’s plan to withdraw American troops from Syria.
Before the 2016 American presidential election, there was a race among all candidates on both sides of the aisle to mention, praise, and adore the Kurds for their bravery fighting ISIS. Even the mainstream media learned a little bit about them. Many of them were able to pronounce their names and copy/paste Peshmerga, the Kurdish freedom fighters. The press had a fascination with the Kurdish female freedom fighters and their bravery in fighting the Jihadist terrorists. However, that was it! Fighting in the front line for the world’s liberty did not entitle the Kurds to anything tangible or meaningful. None of the politicians ever mentioned any real reward. It sounded like a conspiracy theory at work. Let’s use them now and dump them later! As soon as Michael Flynn received money from Ankara at the begging beginning of Trump’s presidency, the Kurds were ignored. President Trump personally gave the Turkish President Erdogan the green light in October 2019 to invade Kurdistan in Syria, devastate the place, and go on with his ethnic cleansing plan.
There was so much objection from NATO allies and local Middle Eastern friends concerning the pullout that Trump had to cool off for a short while. Then, on October 6, 2019, The White House made an announcement that shocked its allies in Syria. President Trump’s administration announced that Turkish forces would soon move into portions of northern Syria controlled by Kurdish groups and that US troops in the area would step aside. It happed when Erdogan promised Trump to purchase American made weapons instead of Russian. On the following day, US troops began withdrawing from positions in northern Syria, paving the way for a Turkish operation against Kurdish fighters in the border area. On October 9, 2019, Turkey launched an offensive in northern It took President Erdogan, the Turkish Tyrant Terrorist, and sworn Kurd Killer, about forty days to create his so-called Safe Zone. The Kurdish freedom fighters, the Peshmergas, had to withdraw further south. As usual, most of the victims were defenseless elderly and children.
Thanks to Erdogan and Trump, the Turkish Jihadist terrorist terrorists had no problem killing every Kurd they could find. A documented violent assassination of a young Kurdish political leader, Ms. Hevrin Khalaf, known as the Peacemaker, was carried out on October 12, 2019. She had a civil engineering degree and served as the Secretary-General of the Future Syria Party. She was working to resolve ethnic group differences in northeastern Syria. Along with ten other Kurds, the beautiful, bright, and brave Hevrin was brutally murdered by Turkish trained terrorists. After being beaten up badly, systematically tortured, and having some broken bones, she was then shot in the head once and four more times in her chest. Four of her brothers and one sister were involved in the Kurdish liberation movement, and all died fighting for Kurdistan. Under international law, the assassination, sponsored by Ankara, definitely constituted a war crime. It also heightened the feeling of the US betrayal of the Kurds. The murderers, members of the Ahrar al-Sharqiya, an Islamic militia group armed, trained, and hired by Erdogan, were filming themselves while shooting at the unarmed Kurdish civilians.
Uri Friedman (November 14, 2019) reported that Hevrin Khalaf was “a 34-year-old Syrian Kurdish politician and was hauled from her vehicle by Turkish-backed Syrian Arab militants, who then dragged her so forcefully by her hair that skin detached from her skull and fatally shot her in the head, face, and back” twenty times. Ms. Khalaf was from a Prominent Kurdish family whose four brothers were freedom fighters and were murdered by the Turks. As soon as her execution was announced, a few Kurdish mothers giving birth to baby girls were named Hevrin. Ms. Khalaf’s mother said that she now has more than one daughter. Erdogan’s Islamist militias accompanying Turkish forces, videotaped themselves while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and shooting handcuffed young Kurdish men.
According to Sheri Laizer (November 17, 2019), “The US didn’t warn or provide any humanitarian aid for those like Hevrin Khalaf, who were murdered. Children bombed in Qamishli received no US diplomatic support, in fact, the US has never even acknowledged them or any of the estimated 300,000 people displaced.” Indeed, President Trump acknowledged the Kurds by saying, “the Kurds didn’t help the U.S. during World War II and the invasion of Normandy, known as D-day.” Trump’s speechwriters actually stole this Normandy nonsense joke from Kurt Schlichter who is a fictional writer, uneducated, uninformed conservative commentator, a warmonger, and a Turkish lobbyist. It is not surprising that in his sick mind, Mr. Schlichter could relate the Kurds, a Stateless Nation, to WWII fought between independent countries.
After all of the targeted brutal killing and civilian massacres by Erdogan’s Islamic mercenaries, on September 24th, 2019, at the United Nations, the Turkish Tyrant President Erdogan rudely and crudely demanded a Safe Zone in Rojava Kurdistan-East of the Euphrates River in Syrian Kurdistan. He proposed to locate the zone on the land of the sovereign state of Syria that is also a UN member. Omar Sindi (November 15, 2019) noticed that “the intention of this is not to establish a Safe Zone or security zone, the intention is to have an anti-Kurd Zone and an Ethnic Cleansing Zone. The International Community must stand firm against Erdogan’s vision of the invasion of Rojava in Kurdistan.” The Turkish terrorist President standing in front of a world body with a bloody imaginative map must have been a disgrace and humiliating for those including Antonio Guterres, the new Secretary-General who listened to him and were muted by Trump.
It was not the first time America betrayed the Kurds. Ms. Hevrin Khalaf was not the first Kurdish woman to be summarily executed by the Islamist terrorists supported by Ankara. After the 2014 invasion of the city of Kobani, many Kurdish female defenders were beheaded by ISIS while being cheered by Erdogan. For the atrocities and murders of innocent Kurds, the World Court must try both Obama and Erdogan and punish them. Genocide of any ethnic group must not be tolerated by any country, especially the United States of America, assumed to be the free world leader. The Kurdish population of 45 million worldwide is not going to take American betrayals and Turkish terrorism anymore. They demand their rights to self-determination, peaceful policies, and the rule of law.
Sources:
- Batley, Melanie. “Oliver Stone: Obama is a Weak and Spineless Man.” newsmax.com, Monday,
17 Feb 2014 04:19 PM. http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/oliver-stone-obama-civil-liberties-
foreign-policy/2014/02/17/id/553202/ - Friedman, Uri. “What America’s Allies Really Think About Trump’s Syria Decision.”
theatlantic.com, November 14, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive
/2019/11/trumps-green-light-moment-in-syria-shook-the-world/601963/ - Hawramy, Fazel. “Iranian border guards shoot four Kolbars dead in one day.” rudaw.net,
September 2, 2020. https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iran/020920201.
Jones, Stephen A. and Freedman, Eric. Presidents and Black America: A Documentary History.
Los Angeles: CQ Press, 2012. - Katiraie, Jubin. “21 Kolbars Killed in Iran Since March.” iranfocus.com, August 5, 2020,
Lando, Barry. “Henry Kissinger and the Kurds.” alternet.org, February 4, 2010. http://
blogs.alternet.org/barrylando/2010/02/04/henry-kissinger-and-iraq-master-of-treachery/ - Lazier, Sheri. “Hiding in Plain Sight: Turkey’s ISIS Links, Al-Baghdadi’s Last Refuge and the
Jihadist-Controlled “Safe” Zone.” - Lindorff, David. “President Barack Obama’s Crappy Legacy.” counterpunch.org, October 5,
2016. http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/05/president-barack-obamas-crappy-legacy/ - Reifowitz, Ian. “Is President Obama an ‘Uncle Tom’? Green Party Veep Nominee Ajamu Baraka
Just Called Him One.” huffpost.com, Updated Dec 06, 2017. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-
president-obama-an-unc_b_11620304. - Roberts, Paul Craig. “Obama the War Criminal, Butcherer of Women and Children.” Foreign
Policy Journal, Jan 11, 2017. https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2017/01/11/obama-the-war-
criminal-butcherer-of-women-and-children. - Sindi, Omar. “At the UN, Erdogan shouldn’t have been permitted to show his ethnic cleansing
map and call it a ‘safe zone.’” ekurd.net, November 15, 2019. https://ekurd.net/un-erodgan-
shouldnt-have-2019-11-15., Rojava, with airstrikes. Later, Turkey launches launched
a ground offensive in the same region. Ankara restarted the processes of Kurdish Killing, torture,
and ethnic cleansing again.
