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By Dr. Jan Best de Vries:
Turkish tanks at border near Kobane
To my friend Salih Muslim
“Under the pretense of stopping an ISIS attack on Turkey (for ISIS fighters constantly attack Kobane from Turkey – JBdeV) , the Turkish army bombarded the center of Kobani with tanks and artillery”, Kurdish newspaper Rudaw quoted Anwar Muslim, the co-chairman of Kobani, as saying on Saturday, 29 November 2014. “A number of civilians and fighters have been wouded,” Muslim added. “Welcome to the war with Rojava, Mr. Erdogan”. “And with the Netherlands”, I should add after Turkey’s recent, vehement attack on the government of my country for being “aggressive and racist” against my compatriots of Turkish descent. With Israel and Jordan as the exceptions, nearly all states are now actively involved in the regional war of West Asia (Saudi Arabia and Qatar, like Turkey, are supporting ISIS with money and/or weaponry).
It all started with the Assad regime waging war in Syria upon its own population, but in no time, from Lebanon Hezbollah and from Iran Pasdaran units took part in the conflict on the side of Mr. Assad against both fighters of the Free Syrian Army and Kurdish male and female defense units in Aleppo. Since Turkey threw its own and foreign fanatic, Sunni jihadists into the battle, the main attention of Iran has shifted from Syria towards Iraq, there supporting the Kurdish Peshmergas and Iraqi army against ISIS, the latter being from the very beginning an ally of Turkey (as a spokesman of ISIS once openly stated).
And even the fighter jets of Assad are now bombing Raqqa, the capital of the ISIS caliphate, but not the Kurds in Kobane. The Iranian shift of attention from Syria to Turkey/ISIS – in Syria there is, after all, not much left to destroy in the cities after their destruction by the Assad regime – means that the war zone has been extended to Turkey and that, in fact, the struggle for hegemony in West Asia between the Shiite Islamic state Iran and the Sunni Islamic states Turkey/ISIS has begun. Within the present borders of the meanwhile crumbling state Syria, the three cantons of secular, democratic, feminist, and humanitarian Rojava lie in between these two competing fanatic, Islamic giants. A precious diamond – absolutely worthwhile to die for, my friend.
Dr. Jan Best de Vries is an archaeologist and historian, decipherer of the so-called Byblos Script from Aleppo and Alalakh (‘How to Decipher the Byblos Script’, Aspekt Publishers 2014, ISBN978-946-153-420-0)
