News

Turkey’s Erdoğan protected ISIS leader Baghdadi
Thursday, October 31, 2019

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan protected Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - and U.S. President Donald Trump should have known.

In his national address announcing that U.S. Special Forces killed Baghdadi, Trump commended Turkey while turning a blind eye to Turkey’s collusion with ISIS.

While Trump thanked “the Syrian Kurds for certain support they were able to give us,” he downplayed the importance of intelligence provided by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). But the SDF’s information was critical to the mission.

Syria: Never again
Friday, October 25, 2019

By: J. Kenneth Blackwell and David L. Phillips, Voices Contributors

Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to “cleanse” northern Syria of Kurds. Though the term “ethnic cleansing” originated during the Bosnian War in the 1990s, genocide and ethnic cleansing are functionally interchangeable. Both are crimes against humanity to which the U.S. must be adamantly opposed.

If Trump won’t sanction Turkey, Congress must
Wednesday, October 23, 2019


By David L. Phillips

TURKEY TARGETS SYRIA’S CHRISTIANS
Tuesday, October 22, 2019

By David L. Phillips

Repeating a lie often enough does not make it true. Trump adopted talking points from Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan, asserting that the Kurds were killing Christians in northern Syria. The exact opposite is true. Kurds have protected Armenians and Chaldean Christians, while Turkey and its Islamist militias target them. Syria’s Christian population is in peril as a result of Turkey’s invasion, which came on the heels of Trump’s betrayal of America’s allies, the Kurds. 

“A GREAT DEAL?”
Thursday, October 17, 2019

By David L. Phillips

Not so fast.

Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo got rolled by Erdogan. The “great deal” gives Turkey everything it wanted. It rewards Turkey for attacking our allies, the Kurds, assigning it control of a 22-mile buffer on the Syrian side of the border. The deal is in effect for five days, after which Turkey can continue its killing spree.

The Syrian Kurds were not involved in negotiations. A senior official for the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), which represents Syrian Kurds, says the SDC has no information about the agreement.

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