SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the backstabbing-on-the-syrian-front dept.
US to stop arming anti-IS Syrian Kurdish YPG militia - Turkey
The US is to stop supplying arms to the Syrian Kurdish militia the YPG, Turkey has said. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said President Donald Trump had made the promise in a phone call to his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The White House said it was making "adjustments" to its support for partners inside Syria but did not explicitly name the YPG.
Turkey has long complained about US support for the group. Washington has viewed the YPG as a key player in the fight against so-called Islamic State (IS), but Ankara brands the group's fighters as terrorists. Turkey says the YPG is as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a group it has been fighting for decades in south-eastern Turkey. The US, however, has seen the YPG as distinct from the PKK. In May it announced it would supply arms to the Kurdish elements of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which were poised to drive IS from its stronghold of Raqqa. It had previously armed only Arab elements of the SDF.
Goodbye, Kurdistan?
Also at Reuters, NPR, Daily Sabah, and RT.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 26 2017, @11:51AM (1 child)
Regarding that "imaginary" Kurdish nation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_S%C3%A8vres [wikipedia.org]
The Treaty of Sèvres (French: Traité de Sèvres) was one of a series of treaties[3] that the Central Powers signed after their defeat in World War I. Hostilities had already ended with the Armistice of Mudros. The treaty was signed on 10 August 1920, in an exhibition room at the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres porcelain factory[4] in Sèvres, France.[5]
The Sèvres treaty marked the beginning of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, and its ultimate annihilation. The terms it stipulated included the renunciation of all non-Turkish territory and its cession to the Allied administration.[6] Notably, the ceding of Eastern Mediterranean lands allowed the creation of new forms of government, including Mandatory Palestine and the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon.[7]
The terms of the treaty stirred hostility and nationalist feeling amongst Turks. The signatories of the treaty were stripped of their citizenship by the Grand National Assembly led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,[8] and the treaty ultimately led to the Turkish War of Independence in which Atatürk led the Turkish nationalists to defeating the combined armies of the signatories of the Treaty of Sèvres including the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. This led to a new treaty, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, in which Turkish sovereignty was preserved through the establishment of the modern-day Republic of Turkey.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday November 26 2017, @09:47PM
The Sykes–Picot Agreement [wikipedia.org] was the stab in the back for the Arabs and Kurds (and all the other people of the Middle East who should have been given independence) by France and Britain.
It was kept secret because Britain was lying to it's allies the Arabs about what they were going to get post-war.