Obama Favors Anti-America Turkey Over Our Loyal Kurd Allies

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08/04/2015 

War On Terror: Besides Israel, no nation has helped the U.S. fight Islamist terror more than the world's largest people without a country, the Kurds. America should stop taking them for granted.

Despite its NATO membership, and its misleading image as supposedly the most Western of Muslim nations, Turkey is quite anti-American, more so than many Mideast Islamic states.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been little help against the Islamic State. As mayor of Istanbul in 1997, celebrating the city's Ottoman conquest, he is on record as saying: "The image of the Jews is no different from that of the Nazis."

Turkey openly supports the al-Qaida-allied Syrian groups Jabhat al Nusra and Ahrar ash Sham. And Erdogan was just in Beijing, forging links with our global adversary China, which over many years helped Iran build its nuclear program.

Today, Erdogan's armed forces play a game of simultaneously combating Islamic State and Kurdish separatists. The unexpected deal allowing the U.S. to use the strategically well-located Incirlik Air Base — from where it can utilize 30 fighter jets and 300 troops against Islamic State locations in northern Syria — must be viewed in that context of Turkey's dubious long-term objectives.

After Turkish intelligence was apparently helping Islamic State forces move to and fro across Turkey's Syrian border, now all of a sudden the Turks are getting serious about airstrikes against the Islamic State — as they hit Kurdish forces hard too.

Too great a Kurdish victory over the Islamic State in the coming weeks would spell a de-facto Kurdish state on Turkey's southern border, which Erdogan has made clear he won't tolerate.

So President Obama is actually coordinating with Turkey, when it is the Kurds who have been our most effective allies against the Islamic State — the unspeakably savage Islamic State, of course, being an entity brought into being by Obama's policies of abandoning Iraq.

Modestly armed, this valiant people, fighting alongside regional Arab and Christian forces, defeated the Islamic State barbarians again and again, in Kobani, Tel Abyad, and Hassakeh, to name just a few victory sites. And unlike ethnic-cleansing Shiite militants, they didn't leave a trail of beheaded innocents in their wake.

Since Iraq's and Syria's borders are in flux thanks to the Islamic State, we should think seriously about backing the Kurds — who have so loyally backed us — in their long-delayed and much-deserved national aspirations.

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