Turkish Forum

Tag: Syria

  • Turkey forces aid group Mercy Corps to shut down its operations

    Turkey forces aid group Mercy Corps to shut down its operations

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    Mercy Corps provides aid to around 500,000 people inside Syria each month Credit: AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis
    • Raf Sanchez, Middle East correspondent

    Turkey’s government has abruptly forced a major international aid organisation to stop working to help Syrian refugees in Turkish territory.

    Mercy Corps, one of the world’s largest humanitarian groups, was informed by the Turkish interior ministry that it no longer had permission to work in Turkey and must shut down its operations.

    The aid group said Turkey gave no reason for the sudden halt and that it had been working from Turkey in close cooperation with the government since 2012.

    “Our hearts are broken by this turn of events, which comes after five years of cooperation with the government of Turkey and other local partners,” Mercy Corps said.

    Turkey has taken in around 3 million Syrians since 2011 Credit: Sam Tarling/Telegraph

    Turkey’s government has shut down hundreds of NGOs since a failed coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in July 2016, often claiming that the groups had links to terror groups.

    Critics of Mr Erdoğan say he has used the coup as an excuse to crack down on civil society and stifle dissenting voices.

    The Turkish press has carried allegations against Mercy Corps and other international groups in recent months, claiming that the NGOs were supporting armed groups against Turkey’s government.

    Mercy Corps strongly denies the charges and says it is a strictly non-political group.

    “We have every confidence in the impartiality and the integrity of our operations. We’re not a political organisation and our reason for being is to deliver assistance to civilians who need it the most,” said Christine Nyirjesy Bragale, the group’s director of media relations.

    Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses a meeting in Istanbul Credit: AP

    Turkey’s government has not commented publicly on the closure.

    Mercy Corps said the decision would not stop it from delivering aid to civilians inside Syria but would prevent it from helping the roughly 3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey.

    The group receives funding from the US, UK and EU and says it spent $34 million (£28 million) in Turkey in 2016.

    “Our priority right now is to limit any adverse effects our departure from Turkey may have on the innocent men, women and children who depend on our assistance,” the group said.

    The decision has forced Mercy Corps to lay off its Turkish staff and send its international staff home. The group said it was hopeful to open “a dialogue” with Turkey and receive permission to resume its operations soon.

  • Inside the Syrian Dust Bowl

    Inside the Syrian Dust Bowl

    The Assad family’s favorite international development organization tried to turn Syria into an agricultural powerhouse. Its failure sparked a civil war.

    • By Peter Schwartzstein

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    On July 15, 2012, Mahmoud Solh at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) received the news he’d long been dreading: Syrian rebel fighters had drawn too close to the center’s headquarters near Aleppo for the board of trustees’ comfort. As the director-general of an organization with 600 employees and a net expenditure of $71 million in 2014, he was going to have to shut most operations down.

    The uprooting of the Middle East’s largest agricultural organization was an ominous early warning of the chaos that has since engulfed most of Syria. But it did not come as much of a surprise to the employees at ICARDA’s sprawling 2,500-acre research station in the village of Tel Hadya. As members of an organization charged with boosting food security in Syria, they knew that one of the underlying causes of the conflict — the poor agricultural conditions that fueled popular discontent across the country — was not getting any better. For years, they had witnessed the hardship of Syrian villagers up close, as extended bouts of low rainfall cut crop yields and pushed farmers off their land, which ultimately led some of them to take up arms.

    “After the first year without rain, we started to see people struggle a lot. After the second, there was desperation,” an ICARDA plant breeder said, speaking on the condition of anonymity as he sometimes still works in Syria. “And after the fourth, it wasn’t really a surprise to see them rise up.”

    Solh, too, saw some of this coming. “What it did was that it forced migration from rural areas to cities,” he told me when we met at the organization’s temporary headquarters in a residential apartment building in an upscale Beirut neighborhood. “With more migration, there was more unemployment. Certainly among the young, there was a lot of frustration.”

    But in 2012, after the kidnapping of two lab technicians by a local rebel group, along with an uptick in skirmishes on the adjacent highway, ICARDA’s departure suddenly took on a new urgency. The organization put previously laid evacuation plans into motion, ferrying more than 100 expat agronomists and hydrologists to Aleppo’s airport and flying them out of harm’s way. Syrian staff then hastily set about transferring the station’s most valuable technology to their annex in the city center while also dispersing ICARDA’s 400 sheep among local farmers for safekeeping. More than two-thirds of the flock was stolen and eaten before its transport to new pastures in Lebanon could be arranged.

    As the situation continued to deteriorate through the fall of 2012, 100 remaining staff members, all of them Syrians, hurried to complete the drawdown. They took last-minute readings for decade-long research projects and scoured the black market to secure diesel to power generators for the station’s treasured seed bank.

    When rebel militias, including the Salafi group Ahrar al-Sham, assumed total control of Tel Hadya in 2012, the last researchers were forced to leave ICARDA’s headquarters. Like more than half of the Syrian population, they have been scattered across the country and into neighboring states.

    With the war showing few signs of abating, there’s little suggestion their technical know-how will be put to use in rebuilding the country anytime soon.

    With the war showing few signs of abating, there’s little suggestion their technical know-how will be put to use in rebuilding the country anytime soon.

    But some experts and former staff members, assessing ICARDA’s past activities, wonder if that might not be a bad thing. The projects that the organization pursued within Syria in cooperation with the country’s government are now earning the scrutiny of critics. And it’s not just the organization’s moral judgment they question, but also its professional competence.

    ICARDA and the Assads

    There is plenty of tragedy, but also some irony, in ICARDA’s forced departure from Syria. The reason the organization was based there in the first place was in large part because Hafez al-Assad, the country’s longtime dictator and father to Bashar, hoped it would prevent a catastrophic drought of the sort that is now fueling the country’s ongoing war.

    Founded at the height of the Middle East’s population boom in the 1970s, ICARDA’s mandate was to improve agriculture in “marginal” environments around the world, where poor soil and water conditions made large-scale crop production difficult. The organization originally intended to operate from across the border in Lebanon but began fishing around for alternative bases when the civil war struck Beirut in 1975. The elder Assad, keen to increase Syria’s food production and thereby insulate his regime from external pressures, made the fledgling group such an attractive offer of land to the south of Aleppo that two years later it didn’t feel able to refuse.

    Today, ICARDA receives funding from a range of states and development groups, including the Afghan government and the U.S. Agency for International Development, to operate in dozens of countries around the world. At the time of its flight from its Syrian headquarters, it had more than 120 projects outside Syria in progress, from Sudan to Uzbekistan.

    But much of the organization’s attention was devoted to Syria. Even now, the financially stricken authorities in Damascus pay ICARDA its annual dues of half a million dollars. (Senior directors say money for projects in the eastern Mediterranean is increasingly hard to come by as donors redirect their giving toward Syria’s refugees.)

    And the organization did assist Syria in earning a reputation, until recently, as the region’s agricultural powerhouse. For more than a decade, the country was self-sufficient in cereals and had been exporting wheat to Jordan and Egypt. To many neighboring states, which regularly spend large sums of money to buy foreign foodstuffs, Syria seemed the picture of agricultural health.

    But all wasn’t well, and the measures taken to turn Syria into an agricultural power in the first place had a lot to do with this. The government sponsored the expansion of farmland, which grew from about 1.5 million acres in the mid-1980s to roughly 3 million acres by 2000. It also almost doubled the number of wells, which contributed to a rapidly falling water table. At the Tel Hadya station, ICARDA recorded a 40-meter drop in local water levels between 1984 and 2010. When the rains failed starting in 2006, farmers turned to groundwater for supplemental irrigation as they had during past droughts — but found that many of the wells had run dry or turned saline.

    The Syrian government wasn’t blind to the perils of fast-depleting aquifers and moved to tackle the overuse of well water. But some of its solutions, while likely necessary from a purely environmental perspective, only contributed to rural hardship. In May 2008, authorities in Damascus dramatically cut diesel subsidies, raising the price of fuel from 7 Syrian pounds ($0.14) per liter to 25 pounds ($0.53) overnight. For many farmers, whose income had already tanked with reduced yields, the heightened cost of operating their pumps and transporting their goods to market was the final straw.

    “Everything from the weather to the government was bad, but after the oil price [increase], we just gave up,” said Ahmed Talib, a former farmer from the town of Binnish, which is about 5 miles from the ICARDA station.

    The fact that ICARDA was a close partner of the Syrian government as Damascus pursued these unsound policies means it must now shoulder a share of the blame, two middle-ranking employees of the organization suggested. Perhaps its senior directors, who enjoyed close relations with regime officials, could have pushed their friends to change tack.

    “It was a culture of deference,” the ICARDA plant breeder said.

    “No one was willing to be brave.”

    “No one was willing to be brave.”

    Mahmoud Solh, the director-general, rejects this argument, insisting that ICARDA had a limited local remit and that it held up its part of the bargain for several decades by helping boost overall food production in Syria. “This is why the government still appreciates us,” he said.

    Solh also acknowledges, however, that the country’s use of water was “unsustainable.” The situation, he said, “was not optimal.”

    ICARDA had good reason to be worried about the consequences of opposing the Syrian government. Ordinary citizens were fearful of speaking out against a government renowned for its intolerance of dissent. International organizations seemingly were too.

    “If you are too critical, then they won’t cooperate with you,” said Adriana Bruggeman, a hydrologist at the Cyprus Institute who previously worked for ICARDA in Aleppo for 11 years. “Syria was our host. We were their guests, and you can’t keep on kicking your hosts.”

    As the water situation spiraled out of control, farmers very soon also found themselves battling an array of botanical diseases, some of which agronomists attribute to climate change. An outbreak of wheat stripe rust, which stunts plant growth and shrivels wheat grains, killed off many crops in northwest Syria in the years prior to the war. With sky-high population growth raising demand for scarce resources by the year, no manner of innovations could overcome the challenging environment.

    “Poverty, climate change, food security, [and] increasing populations are all worsening at a pace that I think is faster than the rate we can make improvements,” said Hassan Machlab, ICARDA’s Lebanon director.

    The result for farmers like Talib was their forced exodus from their homes. Talib ended up in one of Aleppo’s fast-expanding migrant neighborhoods in 2010, before traveling south to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley when the war worsened in 2012. The town sided with the rebels early in the conflict and was subsequently heavily shelled by government forces. Not entirely coincidently, perhaps, Binnish is also the hometown of Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s former chief propagandist who was killed this week, and a number of other senior jihadis.

    Syria’s Brain Drain

    If Syria is ever to recover from a war that shows few signs of ending soon, the likes of ICARDA will be sorely needed. Up to 50 percent of citizens derived at least some of their income from agriculture before the uprising, and with swaths of the country’s irrigation infrastructure now crippled and some soils denatured from wartime farming without fertilizers, the rural economy will need all the help it can get.

    For this reason, ICARDA has worked to maintain a presence in Syria throughout the war. Several dozen employees have remained behind at the group’s Aleppo offices in the government-controlled district of Azamieh, where they keep an eye on ICARDA property and participate in several agricultural studies with their Syrian government counterparts on the city’s outskirts.

    On the other side of the battle lines, the organization maintains loose connections with villagers, a number of whom keep tabs on the status of the Tel Hadya station and report back through Viber. They’re often paid in cash by couriers who cross the front line during lulls in combat. ICARDA received an exemption from the U.S. Treasury Department to conduct transactions in a sanctioned country.

    Above all,

    ICARDA is intent on preventing the destruction of its precious seed bank

    ICARDA is intent on preventing the destruction of its precious seed bank, which was built to maintain genetic crop diversity in the Middle East and contains 143,000 deposits. Many of its samples existed nowhere else in the world until 2012. In a much publicized rescue operation, employees drove through the night and over the back roads of northern Syria to deliver more than 20,000 unduplicated gene samples to the Turkish border. And, so far at least, the news is good, with the facility still functional despite intermittent electricity supply.

    Despite some looting of the sheep that sat next to the perimeter fence and a number of old cars, the entire station appears to be largely undamaged. Tel Hadya has avoided the brunt of government airstrikes. Ali Shehadeh, who managed the seed bank and is the most senior official remaining in Aleppo, says the disparate groups of rebels that have exchanged control of the facility over the past four years appear to understand the seed bank’s value and have left it untouched despite its array of valuable equipment.

    “I think the international media effect … has helped,” he said. “We have the impression that they know how it helps Syria and the world.”

    But even if the conflict comes to a close soon and Tel Hadya remains salvageable, ICARDA won’t ever again operate in Syria as it did before the war. With at least one veterinarian still missing — his fate unknown having being kidnapped shortly after the two abducted lab technicians were released — the memories remain too raw for some employees to return. Everything that has happened also brought home to the senior management the pitfalls of basing all their operations in one location. They’ve since decentralized their work and spread their staff around a range of new installations from Morocco to Ethiopia and India.

    “We were naive. We thought it would be war [for] maybe a year and then we could come back,” Solh said. “But it won’t be like before.”

    Neither, it seems, will anything in Syria.

    LOUAI BESHARA/AFP/Getty Images

  • Geneva Talks III: Light at The End Of The Tunnel or a Mirage in The Syrian Desert?

    Geneva Talks III: Light at The End Of The Tunnel or a Mirage in The Syrian Desert?

    Author: Şakir Alemdar, PhD Candidate, Near East University, Nicosia Date: May 06, 2016

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    *Source: Daily Sabah ©

    Geneva Talks III:
    Light at The End Of The Tunnel or a Mirage in The Syrian Desert?

    Summary

    UN led Geneva III negotiations aimed at solving the Syrian conflict appears to have taken off despite earlier doubts. The first UN attempt after the Security Council resolution 2254 to start the talks was suspended when opposition threatened to leave the talks due to the continued Russian bombings. Then another attempt by the UN Syrian Representative De Mistura was successful and the first round took place between …. and ……. And the second round is scheduled to start on…….Whether Geneva III negotiations will in the end lead to a compromise solution or break down like all previous UN attempts remains to be seen.

    The main reason behind the continuation of the ceasefire and the negotiations so far is that this is the first US-Russian push for a ceasefire and negotiations. It was this strong push which allowed the UN representative de Mistura to bring the parties together, while this had proved impossible to do so until then. So far there has not been any direct talks between the parties in Geneva, but instead a sort of proximity talks, where Mistura is talking to each party separately until a common basis could be built up. It is hoped that after such a common basis emerges it will be possible for de Mistura to bring the parties to face to face talks to reach a compromise.

    The question to ask is what brought the US and Russia to a broad strategic understanding on Syria which opened the way for a joint effort to help the UN initiative. While the two global powers maintained their differences, they had agreed on the need for a solution in the conflict. They saw no benefit from the continuation of the conflict. The proximity talks were getting out of control creating major problems for both powers. The European Union was cracking under the refugee pressure from Syria and the conflict was giving signs of spreading to other countries in the region such as Iraq and the Gulf which risked a wider US Russian conflict.

    Secondly both powers at that stage were feeling strong enough to impose a solution on their side in Syria. Russian air support which saved Assad showed him that he depends on Russia for survival. The moderate opposition groups also saw that without US support they could not win and get a solution at the table which could protect their interests. So both parties saw that without their great power backers, neither side could either continue the conflict for long or reach a diplomatic solution which would protect their interests.

    Thirdly asymmetric importance attached by the US and Russia to Syria made such a broad understanding possible. While Russia attached top priority to Syria where she had military bases, Obama administration did not see Syria as strategically carrying top priority. Instead Obama thought it important to keep Russia as a partner in dealing with world issues in particular to fight against ISIL/DAESH and get a nuclear deal with Iran. This led Obama to avoid attacks on Assad, even turn a green light on for the Russian intervention which saved Assad and shifted the balance of power on the ground in favor of Assad. But once Russia entered Syria she kept bombing the moderate opposition much more that in bombed ISIL/DAESH trying to eliminate the moderate opposition and leave only Assad and the ISIL/DAESH in the ring. Russian thinking is that by leaving these two sides the West would chose Assad rather than the radical terrorist groups. But despite this the Russian-US understanding on Syria continued.

    This US- Russian understanding led to a joint effort by the two to push for a Security Council resolution on a comprehensive solution in Syria. Thus the Security Council resolution 2254 was passed. Although it left many issues unclear and some others untouched, it nevertheless was aimed at a comprehensive solution and remains the basis of the subsequent resolutions or decisions on Syria. The two countries also pushed for a cessation of hostilities which was backed by another UN Security Council resolution 2268. Consequently Geneva III negotiations began.

    The main issues which could derail the Geneva III negotiations need to be looked at here. Firstly the future of Assad is a critical issue which could make or break the talks. Assad might insist on remaining in power beyond the 18 month envisaged in the Resolution 2254. This is particularly so since he has been strengthened militarily by the Russian support and air attacks. Secondly the establishment of a non-sectarian administration in Syria’ agreed earlier is likely to prove quite difficult since Assad administration is a sectarian administration based on the dominance of the minority Shiite groups over the majority Sunnis. Will Assad or the Alewites or even Russia let this system change which would increase the weight of the Sunnis in the system? Thirdly regional rivalries such as the Saudi-Iranian rivalry could make it quite difficult to reach a compromise agreement. Nuclear deal with Iran isolated Saudi Arabia and the friendly Gulf countries that are feeling vulnerable and see Iran as an expansionist power. In the same way, if the interests and worries of other regional powers are not taken into account in a compromise solution, this could lead to a regional tension and crises later. Some see that on the Assad side a deal might upset the Iranians and on the Western side it might create problems with Saudi Arabia or Turkey. Fourthly PYD and some allied groups approved a document that declares a federal system in the North of the country. This is likely to be a major problem because all outside stakeholder states except Russia reject this strongly.

    In conclusion it could be said that some light at the end of a long tunnel seems to be a better description of the situation than a mere mirage in the desert. On the “light” side, there is a ceasefire, which already saved thousands of lives, negotiations, the backing of the two world powers and the huge cost of returning to the fighting again. On the “mirage” side the future of Assad, the regional rivalries, the establishment of a non-sectarian administration, and above all the military imbalance and the continuing Russian-Assad push to take the critical city of Aleppo risks every progress made so far. These can risk every positive step taken so far and turn them into a mirage. I think the scales are slightly heavier on the ‘light’ side at present and the hope is that the negotiations, while being difficult will continue. The longer the negotiations continue on and off, the light will get brighter and the negotiations will go in the direction of partial solutions in various places over time which could be linked up to create a Syrian wide solution. This looks the most promising and realistic path forward.

    Introduction

    Whether the Geneva III talks, which began on 9 March 2016 will put the nearly five-year-old Syrian conflict on to a diplomatic track for a solution is a critical question. It came after the US-Russian agreed cessation of hostilities in Syria which was backed by the Security Council resolution 2268 and came into force on 27 February 2016. The first attempt to get the parties start the talks after the critical 2254 resolution was suspended by the United Nations special envoy for Syria Mr. Steffan de Mistura on March 3, 2016. The reason was the threat by the opposition to leave the talks due to the continuation of the attacks by Russian and Assad forces. The next attempt for negotiations was successful which is now completed. The date for the next round will become clear later.

    The Council Resolution 2268 backing the cessation of hostilities demanded that all parties involved fulfill their commitments. It also urged all Member States, especially ISSG (International Syrian Support Group) members – the European Union, the Arab League, the United Nations, and 17 countries, including the United States and Russia, who have been trying to push forward for several months – to pressure the parties to make sure that they fulfill their commitments and support efforts “to create conditions for a durable and lasting ceasefire.”

    The Resolution also demanded the “full and immediate” implementation of the Council Resolution 2254 (2015), passed on December 18, 2015. This was the first Council resolution which focused on a comprehensive solution in Syria and set the framework for diplomatic negotiations. It had set out a roadmap to end the war in Syria: a national ceasefire, UN-mediated political talks and a two-year period to achieve a political transition. Other Council resolutions passed on Syria until then have dealt mainly with the humanitarian situation and the question of chemical weapons.

    The first attempt to find a solution in Syria began in late 2011 when the Arab League launched two initiatives which failed. Then in January 2012 and in November 2013 Russia tried to get the Syrian government and the opposition talking in Moscow without much success. After that a joint effort by the United Nations and the Arab League coordinated by Kofi Annan raised hopes for a sort while. In January and February 2014, the Geneva II Talks on Syria took place, which was organized by the then UN Envoy to Syria Mr. Lahdar Brahimi which again failed to take off. On 30 October 2015, further talks started in Vienna involving officials from the US, the EU, Russia, China and various regional actors such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and, for the first time, Iran. Inclusion of Iran in the talks completed the missing link to get all the major outside actors involved in the negotiations.

    The Syrian Conflict and the Parties

    More than 250,000 Syrians have lost their lives in this brutal conflict. Eleven million have been made homeless; 4.5 five million people left Syria became refugees living in neighbouring countries and about one million refugees entered Europe living in very difficult conditions. In addition the country is totally destroyed (BBC news 2016).

    As Assad used brutal methods to suppress the demonstrations which began in 2011, the reaction grew and the situation escalated to a widespread uprising against Assad. This soon turned into a sectarian fight in a country where Alawite-led government of President Assad has been dominating the political system where majority is Sunni, for decades. Escalation to a full scale civil war followed, which then turned into a proxy war even risking a direct major power Russian-US confrontation.

    Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and those opposed to his rule continue to fight in a complex war which destroyed the country. At present the Syrian conflict has turned into a complex problem where the Syrian Government Regime under President Bashar Al-Assad is supported by the Iranians, Lebanese Hezbollah and the Russians. The opposition/Rebels are made up of Syrian National Coalition, including a break-away portion of the Syrian Army made up of 70-100 separate groups, each with separate leadership, many of whom frequently fight amongst themselves. Lastly there is also a Kurdish element in Syria, PYD (Syrian Kurdish Democratic Unity Party) and its armed wing YPG (The People’s Protection Units / Popular Protection Units). The Syrian National Coalition is supported by the Western powers but in particular the US, and regional allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia. While the Western powers support YPG Turkey opposes strongly seeing it as the extension of the PKK terrorist organization in Turkey. Among the opposition to Assad, there is also the most feared radical terrorist group ISIS/DAESH (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) whose brutal tactics outraged the world. Also there are the Jihadists, including the al-Nusra Front (or al-Qaeda in Syria).

    Negotiations in Syria are conducted between the representatives of the Syrian Ba’athist government and Syrian Opposition, while the Western-backed Kurdish forces have stayed out of the negotiations framework. Also the radical opposition terrorist groups Salafist forces and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/DAESH) have not engaged in any contacts on peaceful resolution to the conflict.

    Major Force Behind Geneva III Negotiations:
    US-Russian Joint Push for a Ceasefire and Negotiations

    Due to the disagreements between the Security Council permanent members on Syria, the Council has not been effective in the Syrian conflict until 2015. Then the US and Russia began to come to a broad understanding on Syria which led them push for negotiations.

    Clearly one reason is that the USA and Russia saw that they have nothing to gain from further conflict and are now able to impose a solution on the parties. They have reached a strategic understanding behind closed doors on Syria and decided to push jointly for a ceasefire and negotiations. The asymmetric strategic value attached to Syria by the two powers made it easier to reach a broad understanding. Putin attached top priority to Syria where Russia had the only two military bases in the Mediterranean region. Russia continued to support Assad right from the beginning and made this clear. The US, on the other hand, did not see Syria as strategically very important to justify employing the kind of military -economic resources to the region to match Russia. Instead, the US saw Russian partnership in international issues and a nuclear deal with Iran as more important than Syria. Therefore, the US, right from the beginning, wanted to avoid engaging in a military operation in Syria against Assad in order not to worsen relations with Russia, which she saw as a partner in dealing with the world issues. Washington also attached top priority to nuclear issue with Iran and wanted to keep Russia on board but avoid pressuring and/or overthrowing Assad to give ammunition to the hardliners in Iran against the liberal Rohani, who wanted a nuclear deal (Smith 2015).

    The US even went as far as assuring Russia publicly that she would not enter a proxy war with Russia in effect giving her a carte blanche on Syria (Hof 2015). This will probably go down in history as a “recipe for a guaranteed failure in diplomacy” book written by Obama to be studied by future generations of international relations students worldwide.

    Secondly, Russia and the US now see that they could impose a solution on the parties in Syria as they became more dependent on them. Assad forces were saved from collapse by the Russian intervention and supply of huge amounts of weapons. Assad knows that he cannot continue without Russian support and if he tries to go it alone he might lose Russian support and even if his regime survives, might end up being tried in international courts for war crimes (Glass 2016). This does not mean that he will follow the Moscow line entirely and will not take risks but the message from Moscow is there.

    On the side of the pro-western groups, there is a feeling that they are already outgunned and weakened substantially and has little room for maneuver and need the US support. They do not have the military power to continue fighting for long and fear the resumption of the Russian air attacks. The alternative, without US support, might be a defeat. Just before the cessation of hostilities Assad-Russian-Iranian push towards the critical Aleppo city made progress and almost encircled the city. US did not oppose these attacks strongly and left Assad gain a major advantage. Opposition fears that if the talks break down Russian-Assad forces could attempt to take the city and change the balance of power in the entire country.

    While the support of the regional powers for the two sides has been important, it has not been enough to bring victory. Despite Iranian support Assad came to the brink of collapse and was saved by the Russians. The moderate opposition, on the other hand, despite the support of regional allies came to the brink of collapse and could not get any final results and needs the US support. So both sides in the Syrian conflict are under heavy pressure to come to an agreement and need the big power ally.

    Thirdly, the proxy war between the two sides was getting out of control and giving signs of spilling over and creating bigger problems for Russia and the US. The refugee crises from the conflict is now threatening to derail the European project. European states could not agree on a common project on the refugee issue. Who will make decisions on the issue and how many refugees will Europe and the individual countries will take divided the members seriously. The US does not want this problem get out of control and threaten its European allies.

    On the other hand, Russian economy is in real trouble due to low oil prices, collapse of the rubble and the western sanctions. Putin does not want to risk a wider and a longer conflict and get into a quagmire like Afghanistan which would worsen the already fragile Russian economy further.

    Both powers also know that Syria is in ruins and after a peace agreement the country will need tens of billions of dollars to even stabilize and function and trillions for reconstruction over many decades. Some speculate that what appears to be the Russian military advantage might lead to a pro-Russian solution but when it comes to supporting reconstruction afterwards, the advantage will inevitably shift in favor of the Western countries.

    UN Security Council Resolution 2254 of 2015 and the Major Points of Disagreement between the Parties

    The UNSC Resolution 2254 (2015) calls on member states to fight ISIL/DAESH and Al-Qaeda terrorist groups and all other groups and individuals, terrorists associated with it. It further calls on the members to fight the other terrorists groups as may be agreed by the ISSG (international Syrian support group) and leave no safe heavens to the terrorists in Syria. Also it makes clear that ceasefire will exclude the fight against these terrorists groups which means that fighting will continue in many places. Finally, it calls for drafting of a constitution and support for the free and fair elections to be held within 18 months.

    The biggest point of disagreement is the future of Assad. This is not talked about in the UN Resolution 2254 and reflects a clear disagreement between the Western and the Russian sides. This can make or break the negotiations. All major Western powers including the USA, France, Britain, Turkey and also the Free Syrian Army, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar do not accept the continuation of Assad beyond the transition period. For them accepting Assad to continue during the transition is already a major concession that they could accept only with major difficulty. While Obama administration was strongly calling for his departure in the past, today Washington is ready to accept the continuation of Assad at least during the transition period.

    Russia insists that only Syrians can decide who will be the next president of the country, in effect trying to keep him in power as long as possible. Some argue that Russia will accept the departure of Assad only after a new government is formed and Russia secures the continuation of her old and newly established military bases in the country. By pulling back some of her forces from Syria immediately after the cessation of hostilities, Russia tried to gain diplomatic points but also force Assad to make concessions and accept departure after a certain time in the negotiations. If Assad does not make concessions and push for maximal demands, Russia may withdraw her support and Assad might face the prospect of a fall and international criminal court for war crimes.

    The other point is that the ceasefire does not include attacks on the terrorist groups and individuals who mean that during the 18 months Assad will remain in power, the USA led coalition, Russian and Assad-Hezbollah-Iranian forces will continue attacking El-Nusra and ISIS/DAESH and other groups considered as terrorist. But what happens if Assad refuses to go after these terrorist groups are weakened or eliminated in 18 months? Already Russian backed Assad forces got the strategic town of Palmira, from ISIL/DAESH which has an airport and the ruins of the 2000 year old city scoring a propaganda point. Assad already talked of taking over the whole of Syria.

    So far Assad shows no sign of accepting a proposed national unity government and rejected even a ‘transitional ruling body with full powers’ the main opposition demands. He added “The transition period must be under the current constitution, and we will move on to the new constitution after the Syrian people vote for it” Assad said 5(Karam, 2016).

    But major powers agreed on the transitional body with full powers at a Geneva Conference in June 2012 which remains the basis of UN-mediated talks which are scheduled to resume in April 2016. Whether Assad is defying international community rejecting the basis of talks with the full support of Russia or acting in defiance of Russian desires is a critical question. In the coming days this will be clear and will have a major impact on the negotiations 6 (Hof, 2016).

    The stress on non-sectarian administration in Syria is also important in the resolution. This is particularly so considering that the Assad administration is itself a sectarian administration where the small Alewite community has been ruling the majority Sunni population for decades. A non-sectarian administration would mean that the majority Sunni population would get a much stronger representation in the running of the country and Alewites will lose their former dominance that they have been enjoying until now. One question will be whether Assad and the dominant Alawite community around him will accept such a major change. Russia may also see the increasing weight of the Sunnis in the political system as something which could put the future of the Russian bases at risk. While a compromise might be possible, it will be difficult.

    The question of who will participate in the elections does not have a clear answer. While the main terrorist groups, such as ISIL-DAESH as well as El Nusra will be excluded, other groups may also be kept out in the future. It is clear that the parties may disagree on the groups to be excluded from the process that may be put forward during the negotiations. Russian side wants to include some groups that are Assad allies within the opposition group attempting to dilute the opposition and weaken them in the negotiations. Russia has been arguing right from the beginning that there is no moderate opposition but merely anti Assad opposition that are terrorists. This is also likely to create major problems in the negotiations.

    Apart from all these the Syrian peace process, might still be derailed by regional rivalries. Rising Iranian-Saudi rivalry reignited by the execution of a Shia cleric by the Saudis and the burning of some Saudi diplomatic mission buildings in Iran recently, risks a wider conflict which could derail the Syrian peace process. Iran claims to represent the Shia world and Saudi Arabia, the Sunni Islam and they have been waging proxy wars in Lebanon, Yemen and more intensely in Syria. Saudi Arabia and Iran will be sitting at the table in the negotiations. Both leaderships also use the conflict in Syria and in other places to strengthen their popularity at home which makes the issue more complicated. Therefore, rising tension between Tehran and Riyadh which now has turned into a conflict between Tehran and the Arabs could derail the negotiations (Miller and Brodsky, 2016).

    Also the lack of military balance on the ground will have a major effect on the negotiations. If the opposition breaks the ceasefire, Assad forces backed up by the Russians could use propaganda to prove the world that the opposition could not be trusted and does not want peace and justify a full scale counterattack on the outgunned and weakened opposition. But if the opposite was the case and Assad forces or Russia breaks the ceasefire, it is not clear how they will be punished (Kanat, 2016). This is likely to be a major advantage for the Assad side. It will be tempting for Russians, if the opposition does not make the critical concessions, to try to raise tension and bring military pressure on the opposition to get what it wants at the table. Already reports are coming in that Russian- Assad forces are trying to take Aleppo the critical city which could change the balance of power entirely in Syria.

    It must be mentioned, however, that John Kerry warned Russia earlier that if these talks fail then Syria could be partitioned (Wintour 2016). How seriously this will be taken, given the past record of the Obama administration, is not clear.

    A recent development is also worrying for the talks. PYD and some allied groups approved a document that declares a federal system in the North of the country (Al Jazerra 2016). While the US, Turkey, the UN and Assad opposed it, some argue that in the plan B of the US, a federal solution would be on the cards. So PYD and its supporters, lobbying hard for it might try to obstruct the negotiations in order to get support for a federal solution in Syria.

    Finally, Russia and the US will need to deal not only with the parties in Syria but also with their own regional allies too. If the genuine interests and particularly the security interests of these regional actors are ignored, then a compromise agreement to be reached will still face serious problems.

    Conclusions

    Is there a light at the end of the tunnel or are we seeing a mirage in the desert? On the “light” side, there is a ceasefire, which already saved thousands of lives, and the huge cost of returning to the fighting again. Negotiating table has been set up and the UN is at work backed up by the two major world powers. On the side which could create a mirage, we can count the future of Assad, the regional rivalries, the establishment of a non-sectarian administration, push for a federal solution and above all the military imbalance on the ground. Continuing Russian- Assad push to take the critical city of Aleppo in particular is a very negative development. These factors can risk every positive step taken so far and turn them into a mirage.

    In conclusion it could be said that some light at the end of a long tunnel seems to be a better description of the situation than a mere mirage in the desert. I think the scales are slightly heavier on the ‘light’ side at present and the hope is that the negotiations, while being difficult will continue. US-Russian push still continues and the parties are under serious pressure to negotiate. Considering the complexity of the conflict, a more realistic expectation would be small steps forward, stops and resumptions going in the direction of partial solutions in various places over time which could be linked up to create a Syrian wide solution. This looks the most promising and realistic path forward.

    Şakir Alemdar, PhD Candidate, Near East University, Nicosia

    Please cite this publication as follows:

    Alemdar, Ş. (May, 2016), “Geneva Talks III: Light at The End Of The Tunnel or a Mirage in The Syrian Desert?”, Vol. V, Issue 5, pp.6 – 18, Centre for Policy and Research on Turkey (ResearchTurkey), London, Research Turkey. )

    References

    BBC news (2016 ) “Syria: The story of the conflict” 11 March

    Hof, F. C. (2016) “Assad: Total Defiance” Atlantic Council, 4 April.

    Hof, F. C. (2015), “Syria: Taking the Initiative, Acquiring some Leverage”. Real Clear Defense, 5 October.

    Glass, Charles. (2016), “Russia and the US now have the power to impose peace in Syria” The Guardian, 13 March.

    Kanat, K. B. (2016) “Cessation of hostilities in Syria” Daily Sabah, 29 February.

    Karam, Z. (2016) “Syria’s Assad rejects ‘transitional body’ demanded by rebels Associated Press, 30 March.

    Miller, A. D. and Brodsky, J. (2016) “Saudi Arabia and Iran’s Forever Fight”, foreign Affairs, 13 January.

    Smith, L.(2015) “Obama Avoided Syria Action to Help Iran Negotiations, The Weekly Standard, 8, September

    Wintour, P. (2016) “John Kerry says partition of Syria could be part of ‘plan B’if peace talks fail”, The Guardian, February 23, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/23/john-kerry-partition-syria-peace-talks.

    Al Jazeera (2016) ‘Syria civil war: Kurds declare federal region in north’, 17 March Stream

    Imran Awan

    2 months ago – Shared publicly

    The European Union was cracking under the refugee pressure from Syria and the conflict was giving signs of spreading to other countries in the region such as Iraq and the Gulf which risked a wider US Russian conflict.
    http://www.siyasat.pk/india-and-international-siyasat-f10.html

  • Turkish Embassy in London PRESS RELEASE

    Turkish Embassy in London PRESS RELEASE

    Disisleri Turkish Foregin Ministry

    PRESS RELEASE

    • Turkey has been facing threats and attacks emanating from Syria since the start of the conflict. So far, 158 Turkish citizens have lost their lives to the attacks originated from Syria.
    • The terrorist attack that took the lives of 32 Turkish citizens in Suruç on 20th July reaffirms that Turkey is under a clear and imminent threat of continuing attack from DEASH (Isis). Most recently, on 23rd July, DEASH attacked the border military post in Elbeyli and killed a Turkish soldier. It is apparent that the regime in Syria is neither capable of nor willing to prevent these threats.
    • Turkey has designated DEASH/ISIL as a terrorist organization since 2005, under its previous names and revised it by its new name the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ISIL on 10 October 2013.

    • Turkey is at the forefront of DEASH threat and our authorities exert every effort to counter it. It has to be born in mind that Turkey takes immediate action and precautions in all dimensions of countering terrorism, upon receiving concrete information and intelligence.

    • Individual and collective self defence is our inherent right under international law, as reflected in Article 51 of the UN Charter. On this basis, Turkey has initiated necessary and proportionate military actions against DEASH in Syria, including in coordination with individual members of the Global Coalition.
    • In the wake of increased security threats following the attacks against our security and law-enforcement forces in provinces of Diyarbakır, Şanlıurfa and Kilis, in particular the terrorist attack in Suruç on 20 July 2015, all necessary measures are being taken and in this context, operations are also being carried out by the Turkish Armed Forces.
    • In this framework, we have informed the UN Security Council, and continue to inform international organizations. Our initiatives before other international institutions of which Turkey is a member, are ongoing.
    • Upon these recent attacks and threats directed against our national security, North Atlantic Council has been called for a meeting by Turkey under Article 4 of the Washington Treaty with a view to informing our Allies about the measures we are taking and the operations we are conducting against terrorism, as well as to holding consultations with them. The meeting chaired by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg took place today (28th July).
    • Turkey strongly encourages its partners, to enhance efforts to counter DEASH’s terrorism financing by destroying and interrupting activities at their source, mainly in Syria and Iraq. International efforts should also be focusing on destruction of recruiting and facilitation networks that operate throughout the source countries and prevent dissemination of extremist propaganda.
  • How Israel wants to restart the war in the Levant

    How Israel wants to restart the war in the Levant

    How Israel wants to restart the war in the Levant

    by Thierry Meyssan

    Far from admitting defeat, Benjamin Netanyahu is planning to sabotage the agreement between Washington and Teheran which is to be signed the 30th June 2015. In order to do so, he could restart the war in Syria. His idea is to continue the work already accomplished by the Islamic Emirate in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, by applying the Wright plan and creating an independent pseudo-Kurdistan straddling Iraq and Syria.

    The Wright plan, published in September 2013, modifies the projects for the remodelling of an enlarged Middle East. As concerns Syria and Iraq, it plans for the creation of a ’Sunnistan’ and a ’Kurdistan’. The former sate was created in 2014 by the Isalmic Emirate (Daesh), while the latter still has to be realised. However, the Kurds are in the minority in Northern Syria. The Wright plan also mentions Libya, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. It seems to be in progress in the two former states, also thanks to the Islamic Emirate.
    The Wright plan, published in September 2013, modifies the projects for the remodelling of an enlarged Middle East. As concerns Syria and Iraq, it plans for the creation of a ’Sunnistan’ and a ’Kurdistan’. The former sate was created in 2014 by the Islamic Emirate (Daesh), while the latter still has to be realised. However, the Kurds are in the minority in Northern Syria. The Wright plan also mentions Libya, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. It seems to be in progress in the two former states, also thanks to the Islamic Emirate.
    In order to sabotage the agreement which should be signed by Washington and Teheran on the 30th June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has prepared a new episode of the war against Syria.After the tentatives by the United States, France and the United Kingdom to hand over power to the Muslim Brotherhood (from February 2011 to the first Geneva Conference in June 2012), the mercenary war (from the Paris Conference of the Friends of Syria in July 2012 to the second Geneva Conference in January 2014), and the attempt to create chaos by the Islamic Emirate (from June 2014 to today), Israël now proposes to launch a fourth installment of the war.

    The aim is to pursue the application of the plan elaborated by Robin Wright for the Pentagon – published in September 2013 by the New York Times – by creating an independent Kurdistan straddling Iraq and Syria [1].

    General David Petraeus (ex-head of CentCom and director of the CIA) participated in March 2015 at a seminar in Erbil. He declared that the crimes committed by the Islamic Emirate were no threat either to the United States or Israël, and called for a struggle by any means possible against Iranian influence and the proposed agreement between Washington and Teheran.
    General David Petraeus (ex-head of CentCom and director of the CIA) participated in March 2015 at a seminar in Erbil. He declared that the crimes committed by the Islamic Emirate were no threat either to the United States or Israël, and called for a struggle by any means possible against Iranian influence and the proposed agreement between Washington and Teheran.

    Who are the Kurds ?

    The Kurdish people are present in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, but no longer have a state since the failures of the Republic of Ararat (1927-30) and the Republic of Mahabad (1946-47). The Kurds are today spread out primarily across Turkey (13 to 20 million), Iran (5 to 6 million), Iraq (4 to 5 million) and finally Syria (3 million).

     After some of them participated in the genocide of the Christians and the Yezidis, the Turkish Kurds were persecuted in their turn for a century in the name of « pan-Turkism ». During the period 1984-2000, the repression of the insurrection by the PKK caused at leaast 40,000 deaths.
     The Iranian Kurds enjoy a certain autonomy, but are abandoned economically by Teheran.
     The Iraqi Kurds have been linked to NATO since the beginning of the Cold War, first of all by assisting Saddam Hussein and fighting the Khomeinist revolution, then by working against Saddam when NATO decided to get rid of him. Today they enjoy regional autonomy and maintain embassies abroad.
     The Kurds arrived in Syria when they fled the Turkish persecutions, first of all during the reign of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and then thirty years ago during the PKK insurrection. Those among them who had not yet been naturalised were awarded Syrian nationality by President Bachar el-Assad at the beginning of the war, and concluded an agreement with Damascus which provided them with weapons for the defence of their region.

    The Kurds are a diverse people with powerful internal tensions. They do not speak the same language, have different religions, even though they are principally sunnites, and ally themselves with opposing political movements. Since the Cold War, they are divided between pro-US factions (the Barzani family which today controls part of Iraq) and pro-Soviet factions (Öcallan, who was kidnapped by the Israelis in 1999 on behalf of Turkey and has been emprisoned since then).

    From left to right : Meir Amit (director of Mossad), Moshe Dayan (Israeli Minister of Defence) and their agent Molla Mustafa Barzani (father of the current President Masoud Barzani).
    From left to right : Meir Amit (director of Mossad), Moshe Dayan (Israeli Minister of Defence) and their agent Molla Mustafa Barzani (father of the current President Masoud Barzani).

    Iraqi Kurdistan : Mafia and the Mossad

    Taking into account the role of Israël in Anglo-Saxon imperialism, the Barzani family – which was originally socialist – joined Mossad in the 1960’s which set them against the Iraqi Baath party [2]. Very poorly considered by the Kurds of Turkey, Iran and Syria, the current President Massoud Barzani is probably also a member of Mossad. He has managed to establish a certain prosperity in Iraqi Kurdistan, thanks to Israeli investments, and also to install a clanish régime.

    President Barzani is holding onto his power despite the fact that his mandate ended almost two years ago – a non-democratic situation which does not seem to trouble Washington any more than that of Mahmoud Abbas (Palestine) or Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi (Yemen). His government wallows in nepotism and corruption. His clan occupies the main posts of importance, beginning with that of Prime Minister, which is reserved for his nephew Nechervan Barzani, and comprises 15 billionaires (in dollars) and thousands of millionnaires, without being able to explain the origins of their fortunes. Lawyers were the first to be repressed, with the condemnation of Me Kamal Qadir to 30 years in prison for having criticised President Barzani. Freedom of the Press has been no more than theoretical since 2010, after the kidnapping and assassination of the Kurdish journalist Sardasht Osman, guilty of having caricatured the President. The regional government is bankrupt, and has not paid many of its officials for several months.

    Son of the current President Barzani, Masrour « Jomaa » Barzani continued his studies in Iran, the United Kingdom and the United States. He returned to Iraq in 1998, under Anglo-Saxon protection, settled in the « no-fly area », and took up responsibilities in the family party, the PDK. He quickly became the connection between his family and the CIA. In October 2010, he acquired the Château Noble, a few kilometres distant from the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, for 10 million dollars. He created and directed « Bas News », the main Iraqi Kurdish newspaper, and supervised all activities of the Iraqi Kurdish secret services. It is as such that he participated in the secret meetings in Amman (May 2014) and co-organised the joint offensive of the Islamic Emirate and the Peshmergas against Baghdad.
    Son of the current President Barzani, Masrour « Jomaa » Barzani continued his studies in Iran, the United Kingdom and the United States. He returned to Iraq in 1998, under Anglo-Saxon protection, settled in the « no-fly area », and took up responsibilities in the family party, the PDK. He quickly became the connection between his family and the CIA. In October 2010, he acquired the Château Noble, a few kilometres distant from the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, for 10 million dollars. He created and directed « Bas News », the main Iraqi Kurdish newspaper, and supervised all activities of the Iraqi Kurdish secret services. It is as such that he participated in the secret meetings in Amman (May 2014) and co-organised the joint offensive of the Islamic Emirate and the Peshmergas against Baghdad.

    Iraqi Kurdistan and the project for the annexation of Northern Syria

    In 2014, the Regional Government of Kurdistan participated in the conspiracy aiming to reconfigure Iraq and Syria, as described in the Wright plan. It participated in several meetings in Amman with the Jordanian secret services, the leaders of the Islamic Emirate, the leaders of armed groups in Syria and the Iraqi Naqchbandis [3]. It was agreed that, under the authority of Washington and Tel-Aviv, the Islamic Emirat and the Regional Government of Kurdistan would launch a coordinated attack to take control of a large part of Iraq. While the international Presse denounced the exactions of the Islamic Emirate in Iraq, Barzami’s Kurds would grab the oil fields of Kirkuk and expand their territory by 40 %.

    Following that, while many states, who were secretly supporting the operation, publicly denounced the crimes against humanity and the pillages committed by the Islamic Emirate, the Regional Government of Kurdistan offered the service of the pipe-line they had just stolen to the jihadists so that they could sell the petrol they had just pillaged to the Europeans.

    All condemnations of the alliance between the Regional Government of Kurdistan and the Islamic Emirate is severely repressed. So Hayder Shesho, the Yezidi leader who had spoken against it was arrested on the 7th April, although he has a double nationality with Germany.

    In the years after 2000, the Israeli Chief of Staff was planning to neutralise the missile capacities of Egypt and Syria by placing Israel’s own missiles in South Sudan and the Iraqi Kurdistan. While the former region has achieved independence, the latter still has not. The Wright plan offers both the occasion to realise this strategic objective and to spread bloody confusion. In order to sabotage the agreement that Washington and Teheran are scheduled to sign on the 30th June, Benjamin Netanyahu has plans to force the Peshmergas (in other words, Barzani’s soldiers) into an assault on Northern Syria. And yet the Syrian Kurds are hostile to the Barzani mafia and have always been in the minority in this region.

    For several months now, a campaign of Press lies has been blaming the Pershmergas for the actions of the Turkish Kurds of the PKK against the Islamic Emirate, for example during the battle of Kobane. The Western states, with France in the lead, have been sending arms directly to Erbil without going through Baghdad, in violation of Iraqi sovereignty. These weapons are not being used, but stored for the planned attack on Northern Syria.

    In the United States Congress, Edward Royce and Eliot Engel, two representatives who traditionally channel the interests of the Israeli Likud, presented a proposition for law in November 2014 [4] which would authorise the delivery of arms directly to the Regional Government of Iraqi Kurdistan. Since the text was not adopted, these dispositions were included in the law concerning the Defence budget by the President of the Armed Forces Commission, Mac Thornberry, along with others who aim to simultaneously reinforce military aid to groups fighting against the Syrian Arab Republic. If this text were to be adopted by both houses, the proposition would deprive Baghdad of any power outside the the shiite area of Iraq, and would open the way for both the dismatling of the country and a fourth war in Syria. Most Iraqi politicians who speak publicly have warned of the dangers of such a policy. As for the chiite leader Moqtada el-Sadr (ex-commander of the Mahdi Army) he has declared that if the law was to be adopted, he would once again consider the United States as enemies of the Nation, and would make war on the 3,000 military advisors in Iraq as well as US iuterests abroad.

    President Obama and Vice-President Biden strongly indicated to President Barzani, on the 5th May at the White House, that they would not allow Israel to pursue their plans, and demanded that the Iraqi Kurds stand down. However,in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Press is pretending on the contrary that President Obama warmly welcomed the delegation, and had promised to support an independent « Kurdistan ».

    The new Israeli government, formed on the 7th May by Benjamin Netanyahu, is attempting to unify the jihadists of Northern Syria – the aim is to coordinate their withdrawal to Damascus when the Iraqi Kurds enter Syria to massacre the Kurds of the PYG (the local branch locale of the Turkish PKK, which supports the Syrian Arab Republic) and annex their territory.

    President Erdoğan considers that the creation of an independent « Kurdistan » straddling Iraq and Syria would revive the Kurdish conflict in his country, and denounced the project as a step towards the destruction of Turkey. In the event of a Kurdo-Iraqi offensive in Syria, he could instantly take sides with Damascus.

    There is no doubt that the Israeli project will be debated (together with the creation of an Arab NATO under Israeli control) during the next session of the Gulf Cooperation Council that President Obama – who is not a member – has called at Camp David.

    Thierry Meyssan

    [Translation: Pete Kimberley]

    [1] “Imagining a Remapped Middle East”, Robin Wright, The New York Times Sunday Review, September 28, 2013.

    [2] “”Kurdistan” Israeli Style”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Al-Watan (Syria), Voltaire Network, 14 July 2014.

    [3] “PKK revelations on ISIL attack and creation of “Kurdistan””, Voltaire Network, 8 July 2014.

    [4] H. R. 5747, “Bill to authorize the direct provision of defense articles, defense services, and related training to the Kurdistan Regional Government, and for other purposes”, House of Representatives, November 20, 2014.

    Thierry Meyssan

    French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference. His columns specializing in international relations feature in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian. His last two books published in English : 9/11 the Big Lie and Pentagate.

    VOLTAIRE NETWORK | DAMASCUS (SYRIA) | 15 MAY 2015

  • To be or not to be – Western Questions about ISIS and Islam reveal the Collapse of Christianity

    To be or not to be – Western Questions about ISIS and Islam reveal the Collapse of Christianity

    By Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

     

    Refutation of Prof. Mark Juergensmeyer’s article ‘Is ISIS Islamic?’

     

    topkapi

    The true Caliphate – this is what the Freemasonic, Zionist gangsters of the West wanted to destroy.

    ISIS 1

    The fake Caliphate – this is what the Freemasonic, Zionist gangsters of the West wanted to bring forth in order to totally eliminate Islam in the process.

    In a previous article under title ‘Ottoman Empire, Fake ‘Middle East’, the Pseudo-Christians of the West, and the Forthcoming Tribulation’ , I analyzed why the Western Christians’ stance towards their governments’ policies against the Ottoman Empire and its detached provinces (the technical entities of the so-called ‘Middle East’) is very wrong, definitely immoral, and in total contradiction with the Christian principles, values and virtues. I concluded that a great number of nominal Christians, who approved of the evil policies and deeds of the Western governments, are in reality pseudo-Christians irrespective of what they may think they are.

     

    In a world engulfed in the worst crisis of identity of all times, it is only normal that doubts are raised as regards the identity of the ‘other.’ Only yesterday, Prof. Mark Juergensmeyer, who specializes in ‘global religion’ – a non-existent entity – questioned in an article the identity of ISIS (Is ISIS Islamic? / .

     

    Quite interestingly, under the title, a motto gives the summarizing idea of the article (“Every religion has its dark sides, but the conflict is about politics.”). This is absolutely irrelevant; dark sides in a religion are what you don’t know of that religion. They don’t exist by themselves. No religion has ever had any dark side whatsoever. And all conflicts about politics cannot be deprived of their own religious dimension, because everything in a human society hinges on the spiritual belief or disbelief. Atheists are religious too; they are slaves of Satan either they understand it or not. Their theory and their rejection of God is a form of Satanic faith.

     

    When one starts with so many preconceived ideas as the global religion theoretician Prof. Mark Juergensmeyer, his approach is doomed to fail, but this does not originate from the lack of knowledge of the ‘other side’. And Prof. Mark Juergensmeyer’s main problem is not his lack of insightful knowledge about both, the Islamic world and ISIS itself. The article reveals a serious problem of Christian identity and for this reason I intended to comment on it. I think that my comments will be useful to both, Christians and Muslims.

     

    The author of the article tries to implement the following simplistic logic: if we hold the Ku Klux Klan in the US and the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda as ‘Christian’, then we can consider ISIS as ‘Islamic’. This sort of approach does not clarify anything, and rather creates further confusion among both, Christians and Muslims. Generally speaking, I understand and accept the approach through analogy, but to implement this method in your text, you’ve got to select very firm examples. Yes, it is correct to say ‘if we hold the New and the Old Testament as holy books for the Christians, then we can consider the Quran as holy book for Muslims’. Beyond the limit of such comparisons, we can achieve minimal result through analogy and at times lose clarity.

     

    There is always a very serious mistake in every approach that avoids a proper, direct definition and attempts to define something through its opposite. If you want to define Christianity, you cannot possibly be as vague as you are when saying ‘Christianity is something other than / different from Ku Klux Klan’ (or the LRA). Ditto for the Islamic World.

     

    It is really gross to try to define Christianity as the antithesis of what the author calls the LRA ‘a terrible terrorist organization’! Who can expect a religion to possibly be ‘a terrible terrorist organization’? No one!

     

    In addition, there are in Uganda hundreds of thousands if not millions of simple people who, if not terrorized, will have the courage to state that the LRA is NOT a terrorist organization – or if you want not as terrorist as the execrable, racist Ugandan government. And who is authorized to speak about ‘terrorism’? The global mass media? Or the defenders of a non-existent ‘global religion’?

     

    But the term ‘terrorism’ (or ‘terrorist’) is an unhistorical fabrication that was composed only recently as a vicious tool of the world’s most evil, most villainous, and most dictatorial regimes, the likes of America, England and France. It has no credibility, and above all, it is used within political context. Why on Earth a scholar and an academic feels the need to confuse his readers so much as to mention a political term when he talks about religion?

     

    Whatever Christianity has been or has not been or may have been, it is certainly something unrelated to modern political terms; even more so if these terms are recently invented as result of scheming and propaganda and therefore fully rejected by vast populations worldwide.

     

    However, the use of brutal manners in order to achieve power that will later consolidate the survival and the propagation of a faith, a religion, a sect or a secret order-organization is widely attested in almost every religion, culture, nation and period.

     

    There are many historical examples in this regard. The Ismailiyah Order of the Shia Muslims, who were also called Hashashin (because their leader, the famous ‘Elder of the Mountain’ administered the proper dose of hashish to his disciples in order to duly instrumentalize and effectively utilize them for his purposes) and were known to Marco Polo (he called them Assassins and this is how this word was first used in European languages), used to send members (their secret knights) to cross incredibly long distances to arrive where their target (a ruler, an military leader, an imam or other) lived and, by treacherously approaching, assassinate them. Should we call them ‘terrorists’? This would be utterly ridiculous.

     

    It is actually always pathetic and ludicrous to project one period’s / civilization’s / culture’s measures, values and criteria onto other periods, civilizations and cultures. One cannot evaluate others through use of one’s own criteria; every civilization, culture, religion, and historical period is an independent entity that no scholar can transform as per his theoretical needs in any way. The reason for this maxim is simple; by slightly transforming (through improper evaluation involving external criteria) a civilization, culture, religion, and historical period, a scholar only modifies and misinterprets it. This scholar is therefore speaking of a false entity that practically speaking never existed (except in his misinterpretation and imagination); thus, he only confuses his unfortunate readers.

     

    Another example is offered by the Christian Catholic Holy Inquisition. It is undisputed that this Holy Office carried out very brutal policies for long. Should we call it ‘terrorism’? This would also be utterly ludicrous.

     

    As the author is continuously avoiding a proper definition for what is ‘Islamic’ and what is not, the article is characterized by a personal, individualistic approach that is both, irrelevant and confusing. Prof. Mark Juergensmeyer implements again the analogy approach, but this time at the very personal level. He, as a Christian, dissociates himself from the Ugandan LRA and the American Ku Klux Klan, and he therefore postulates that, accordingly, ‘this is the same position most Muslims are in now with regard to ISIS’.

     

    This is very irrelevant because scholars are expected to include personal views and experience in their memoirs at the end of the their lives and not as supposedly convincing evidence in their articles and other publications. This style is very arrogant; in addition, it is very confusing because personal approaches do not constitute proper definitions. The sentence he makes is quiet evident: ‘As a Christian, I feel like they have nothing to do wit h me or with the Christianity that I know’. The last words reveal the extent of the problem; probably the globalist professor and specialist of the non existent ‘global’ religion ( !! ? !! )  does not know the Holy Inquisition, and consequently we can safely claim that he does not know Christianity well. And this is the problem for him and for all the misled and confused Christians of the West.

     

    Many people have been driven to the impasse of assuming a lot; one of their wrong assumptions is to take today’s fallen Christianity as the true Christianity. Similarly, in the Islamic world, there are many Muslims, who assume that today’s fallen Islam is the true Islam. Both groups fail to understand one another because they primarily fail to understand themselves and accurately specify how far they have gone from their respective religions, sailing adrift in the Sea of Relativism and Faithlessness.

     

    After the preliminary part of the article, its inconsistency turns it to a mere worthless piece. As the title obliges the author to give a definition of ISIS, the ‘global religion’ specialist or rather propagandist Mark Juergensmeyer enters into a series of mistakes while giving to his readers unexplained terms that are absolutely meaningless to the non-specialist.

     

    He says: ‘What makes things even more complicated is that ISIS bases its beliefs and actions on a form of Islamic interpretation called Salafism’.

     

    – Why on Earth is now the Salafist nature of ISIS (which is true and beyond any doubt) a problem?

     

    Let me make my position clear. In many articles, I denounced the Wahhabism (the correct term for Salafism) as a deformation of Islam. But Wahhabism (or if you want Salafism) is nothing new to the Western world’s academia and diplomats.

     

    To paraphrase Prof. Juergensmeyer, before any other institution on Earth, Saudi Arabia – the country that America catastrophically chose as its primary ally in the region before …. 70 years or, to put it otherwise, the country that England disastrously conspired with against the Ottoman Caliphate for more than 100 years before the fall of the Ottoman dynasty and continually ever since – ‘bases its beliefs and actions on a form of Islamic interpretation called Salafism’.

     

    What is Prof. Juergensmeyer talking about?

     

    If Saudi Arabia did not exist, there would never be an ISIS.

     

    What does Prof. Juergensmeyer want?

     

    Does he want ISIS to disappear and Saudi Arabia to survive?

     

    That’s silly.

     

    Because if Saudi Arabia continues existing, even if ISIS is mercilessly exterminated and all its members and fighters executed ( and this needs at least 50000 US soldiers in a large scale land attack and in coordination with the venerable president of Syria! ), there will be another ISIS, an ISIS bis if you want, or an ISES (Islamic State of Egypt and Sudan), an ISYA (Islamic State of Yemen and Arabia), or any combination of letters you may choose!

     

    As long as Saudi Arabia exists, Wahhabism will be its pseudo-Islamic state dogma, and through the filthy money of the inhuman gangsters who rule from Riyadh, Wahhabism will be diffused among the masses of Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia to the Muslim Diaspora worldwide.

     

    What is even worse is that Prof. Juergensmeyer fails again to either give a definition of Wahhabism (Salafism) or the historical perspective thereof; as a matter of fact, all the filthy and un-Islamic, dark and inhuman ideas that Muhammad Abdel Wahhab (the founder of Wahhabism) shaped and propagated during the 18th c. did not fall from the sky into his idiotic and ignorant mind. There has been an entire historical process within Islam (with heretic theologians preceding Muhammad Abdel Wahhab by 450 and 900 years) that led to this monstrous theological deformation of Islam. All this is unknown to the ‘global religion’ professor who writes about Islam without having a clue of all academic fields pertaining to the study of this historical – spiritual phenomenon.

     

    This is the historical reality, which is quite well known to specialists of Islamic History and Religion in the West, but it remains concealed, because it is politically disturbing and troublesome. If Wahhabism is not uprooted, if all the Wahhabi institutions across the world are not shut down, if a new class of Muslim intellectuals at the antipodes of Wahhabism is not formed, the explosive situation will only turn worse.

     

    First point of conclusion is therefore that Saudi Arabia and the Saudi family itself must be denounced as the only matrix of all evil across the Islamic world for the last 200 years, and an overwhelming attack against it must be undertaken in order to totally eliminate Riyadh and the villainous, heretic elite which from there managed to incessantly spread the evilness of Wahhabism worldwide.

     

    The confusing presentation of Prof. Juergensmeyer is due to the fact that he does not seek the historical, religious, cultural and theological truth, but only writes in order to serve political purposes and needs, preserve strategic alliances, and in the process, effectuate compromises. We saw these compromises in Mosul, in Sanjar and in Raqqah. These compromises are responsible for the evacuation of most of the Yazidis from their homelands; these compromises are the reason for the deracination of all the Aramaean Christians of Mosul; these compromises are the root cause of the hecatomb that the bloodthirsty vampires of ISIS want to deliver.

     

    For one more time, the ‘global religion’ specialist, Prof. Juergensmeyer, attempts a confusing definition through analogy! He writes: “The Salafi movement is similar to an extreme fundamentalism in Christianity”. This is an understatement; in addition, who can specify what ‘fundamentalism in Christianity’ means? This is not called ‘definition’ but ‘anyone’s guess’…

    It must however become crystal clear to Western readership that ISIS, Saudi Arabia, and Wahhabism, (Salafism) do not constitute any form of Islamic fundamentalism. They are heretic, so they cannot be held as Islamic in any sense. They are far and out of the foundations of Islam, so they cannot possibly be ‘fundamental’. Muhammad Abdel Wahhab in his days was considered as a heretic and a traitor by the Ottoman administration; the same evaluation concerned also the Ottoman Caliphate’s traitor and founder of the Satanic house of the Saudis.

     

    The two earlier Islamic theologians on whom Abdel Wahhab was based to produce his pseudo-Islamic trash, namely Ahmed ibn Taimiyah and Ahmed ibn Hanbal who lived in the 13th-14th c. and the 8th-9th c, respectively, were also considered as heretic in their times and duly imprisoned. They may be unknown to Prof. Juergensmeyer, but he should then abstain from writing purposelessly on issues he is not relevant of.

     

    The famous, 14th c. Moroccan traveler, explorer and scholar Ibn Battuta encountered in Damascus people who knew personally the evil, villainous and ignorant heretic Ibn Taimiyah who was then imprisoned. This is what the Islamic World’s most illustrious traveler wrote about the progenitor of Wahhabism:

     

    A controversial theologian  

     

    One of the principal Hanbalite doctors at Damascus was Taqi ad-Din Ibn Taymiya, a man of great ability and wide learning, but with some kink in his brain. The people of Damascus idolized him. He used to preach to them from the pulpit, and one day he made some statement that the other theologians disapproved; they carried the case to the sultan and in consequence Ibn Taymiya was imprisoned for some years. While he was in prison he wrote a commentary on the Koran, which he called ” The Ocean,” in about forty volumes. Later on his mother presented herself before the sultan and interceded for him, so he was set at liberty, until he did the same thing again. I was in Damascus at the time and attended the service which he was conducting one Friday, as he was addressing and admonishing the people from the pulpit. In the midst of his discourse he said “Verily God descends to the sky over our world [from Heaven] in the same bodily fashion that I make this descent,” and stepped down one step of the pulpit. A Malikite doctor present contradicted him and objected to his statement, but the common people rose up against this doctor and beat him with their hands and their shoes so severely that his turban fell off and disclosed a silken skull-cap on his head. Inveighing against him for wearing this, they haled him before the qadi of the Hanbalites, who ordered him to be imprisoned and afterwards had him beaten. The other doctors objected to this treatment and carried the matter before the principal amir, who wrote to the sultan about the matter and at the same time drew up a legal attestation against Ibn Taymiya for various heretical pronouncements. This deed was sent on to the sultan, who gave orders that Ibn Taymiya should be imprisoned in the citadel, and there he remained until his death.

     

    At a certain point in his article, Prof. Juergensmeyer makes a totally misleading statement (“So, yes, ISIS is ultimately Islamic – whether you like it or not”), which can have disastrous consequences on anyone who may happen to accept it. A heretic cannot be identified with the religion from which he was rejected. It is not a mere point of accuracy, but a critical issue of false target.

     

    Failing to understand this, he adds perjury to infamy, by completing his sentence with the following: “but it is certainly not the kind of Islam that most Muslims would accept or profess”.

     

    This is a pure lie. And more than a merely false point, it reflects the tendencies of the Western governments to totally conceal the truth from their peoples. First of all, no one has accurate estimates on the subject. Gallup polls in several Muslim countries are prohibited – particularly on a subject this critical -, whereas in the rest no Gallup polls have ever been conducted on issues as troublesome as that.

     

    However, there are many indicators that ISIS does truly reflect in a certain way the kind of false, heretic and decayed Islam that most Muslims accept and profess. If you make a list of what is correct as an act or practice of the Islamic way of both, personal life and social organization, including perhaps 500 detailed points accepted by the followers, the fighters and the leaders of ISIS, and then you submit this list to 1000 average Saudis (without adding that these points are all approved by ISIS members), their responses, homogeneous and ominous, will take you by surprise. Their agreement with the 500 points of the list will deliver a result far above 90-95%.  Similar results, always above 80%, you will collect from countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Egypt, Algeria, etc. And certainly the agreement will be lower in other countries, but even in Turkey, it will be as high as 40% due to the vicious Western policies in favor of the AKP party Islamists and against the nationalist military establishment of Ankara (a paranoid policy that allowed the ruling Islamists to widen their basis through a varied set of methods).

     

    How can one be sure of this?

    By simply walking in the streets of districts inhabited by middle and lower classes (that total more than 80-90% of the total population of the country in most of the aforementioned cases) and observing what goes around, talking to the people, asking about their ideas, and entertaining comprehensive discussions as to just how they see and how they want to see their lives and their social environment – something that Prof. Juergensmeyer did not do, ultimately preferring the calmness and the security of his office somewhere in the States.

     

    However, the situation is far worse than that. If you now present the same list (of what is correct as an act or practice of the Islamic way of personal life and social organization, including perhaps 500 detailed points accepted by the followers, the fighters and the leaders of ISIS) to a selected group of academics, engineers, businessmen, administrators and high profile functionaries, deputies of ‘parliament’ (this is a non-representative assembly for most of the cases), military, ministers and religious authorities across the Islamic world (without however saying that these points are all approved by ISIS members), you will collect even more surprising results. The outright majority of the elite of these countries (and I don’t mean here only Saudi Arabia but all the aforementioned countries) in majority supports the same points. This is for instance the reason one should view the latest president El Sisi of Egypt as theologically – ideologically – politically far closer to the former president Morsy than to the one time vice president El Baradei.

    It would take too long to narrate how this situation has been formed, but I would however like to briefly hint at what I said earlier about the theologians who served as source of inspiration for Muhammad Abdel Wahhab, the founder of the Wahhabism (Salafism), namely the heretics Ibn Taimiyah and Ibn Hanbal. In fact, if Muhammad Abdel Wahhab developed the theological system that constitutes today’s Wahhabists’ doctrine, this is due to the fact that Ibn Hanbal’s and Ibn Taimiyah’s successive and intertwined theological systems gradually prevailed among the Islamic world and eliminated or transformed/altered all the opposite systems.

     

    As a matter of fact, if one Muslim imam, qadi, mufti, minister, general, professor, president or businessman today rejects Wahhabism, he still accepts Ibn Taimiyah’s widespread and fully accepted theological system, which is – metaphorically speaking – the tree that produced the fruit of Wahhabism. There is, practically speaking, little difference or no difference at all between the two systems; simply every posterior system that emanates from an anterior is expected to feature and does actually feature some extra points.

    The real difference existed in the past, in Islam’s Golden Era, when totally opposite philosophical systems totally prevailed across the highly educated Islamic World. These are the philosophical systems of Ibn Sina, Qurtubi, Ibn Rushd, Ghazali, Mohyieldin Ibn Arabi, Ibn Hazm, to name but a few; to them is due the Islamic Enlightenment, whereas to the gross, villain, uneducated trash of Ibn Taimiyah is due the complete disfigurement of Islam’s quintessence. However, due to the gradual diffusion of Ibn Taimiyah’s theological nonsense and ignominious darkness, and following its prevalence among ignorant and uneducated masses that it created in a vicious circle mechanism, as it attacked Science, Knowledge, Philosophy, Art and Spirituality, gradually all the philosophical systems of the aforementioned Titans of the Islamic Thought disappeared until the end of the 16th c.

     

    Of course, there is one more difference between the political elites of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, etc. and the ISIS extremists; the former, although accepting most of Abdel Wahhab’s theories and all of Ibn Tamiyah’s ideas, differ politically and make the necessary compromises to ensure the survival of their regime. Contrarily, the latter reject the compromise of the former, viewing it as a treason of Islam. Political difference is therefore due to mere survival tactics of elites that are theological quasi-identical to ISIS; these elites believe that by making compromises upon compromises with the West, they can prolong their tenure and the ensuing material benefits. But their existence only spearheads new waves of uncompromising Wahhabists. Certainly, there is also an attitudinal difference (but no behavioral difference) between the followers of a guy like al Bashir of Sudan or Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and the fighters of ISIS; the former want to pocket more money and store it in their banks, whereas the latter are ready to die. But none of them would accept his wife to be uncovered (without hejab, the Islamic veil) or his daughter to travel alone on motorbike across Europe.

     

    The best corroboration of the aforementioned is the following tragicomical contrast between Egypt’s last and current presidents; Muhammad Morsy is viewed by some as extremist  whereas the incumbent is considered as a moderate and pragmatist person.

     

    Former Egyptian president Muhammad Morsy’s wife wears hejab (Islamic veil that allows the face to be seen).

     

    Current Egyptian president El Sisi’s wife used to wear a niqab (Islamic veil that covers the face entirely leaving only two small holes for the eyes) and only recently “swapped the niqab for a trendy hijab, hushing up claims that she was dyed-in-the-wool” !!

     

    Prof. Juergensmeyer goes on saying that the reason for which “world leaders are trying to make in saying that ISIS is ‘not Islamic’.” is that ISIS “is certainly not the kind of Islam that most Muslims would accept or profess”. In the light of the aforementioned this appears to be a very unfortunate consideration and an erroneous evaluation of what is going on in the Islamic world.

     

    Reaching the end of the brief yet mistaken article, Prof. Juergensmeyer says that Islam’s name means “peace” which is very wrong (in reality, it means ‘submission to God’ although it originates from the word ‘peace’).

     

    In the article’s last three paragraphs, Prof. Juergensmeyer makes one more futile effort to dissociate ISIS from today’s prevalent Islamic theological systems and to associate it with politics. This is quite pointless and misplaced. In fact, there is no, and there cannot be any, difference between religion and politics in Islam. So, everything that is religious is also political, and vice versa.

     

    Contrarily to the wrong Western assumption that Islam is the only system whereby religion and politics constitute an indivisible entity of faith and action, it is historically proven that all the major religions were systems in which faith and government were perfectly well interwoven. The same occurred particularly in Christianity either Orthodox or Catholic; one may even ponder that in some cases the phenomenon occurred more emphatically in Christianity than in Islam; extensively discussed terms, such as Papocaesarism and Caesaropapism are quite telling in this regard.

     

    So, Prof. Juergensmeyer’s sentence “Besides religion, it is critical to recognize that all the forms of terrorism that we have seen are about politics. Any act of violence in the public sphere is aimed at trying to claim political space – at taking over power to assume control over regions or peoples. This is certainly true in the case of ISIS” is absolutely irrelevant and completely wrong.

     

    The way one family lives is defined by religion; the way one society is organized is specified by religion; the way the art of rule is exercised is decreed by religion. The aforementioned does not only apply to the Islamic world; it does also to Ancient Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Iran, etc. It is also valid in Confucian China, Biblical Israel, and Christian Rome or Constantinople. One can enter into details that can fill volumes: the way one fights in battle is determined by religious orders; the way one sleeps is elucidated by religious advice; the way one eats is clarified by religious guidance; the way one has sex is stipulated by religious prescriptions, and so on.

     

    Piety is one of the religious traits and virtues that must be reflected in a person’s life, either this person is Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Confucian. I fully agree with Prof. Juergensmeyer that “most people directly involved in ISIS are not pious Muslims”; this is right. But does it really matter?

     

    And what about Prof. Juergensmeyer? Will he agree with me saying that “most people directly involved in Assets Management are not pious Christians”?

     

    When we see vulture-funds in Latin America terrorizing nations like Argentina (which involves populations far larger than Iraq or Syria) and endangering the lives and the well-being of dozens of millions of people, do we still need to focus exclusively on a minor terrorist group and forget worse gangsters and terrorists who are far more perilous than the idiotic fighters of ISIS?

     

    And this concludes the case of this type of confusing presentations and futile approaches that leave the Western readership in mysteries; identifying the true reasons of an explosive situation may help greatly solve and diffuse the crisis. But it entails a real inquiry about the original and the altered, the genuine and the transfigured, the authentic and the corrupt. Instead of searching pretexts and excuses, one should seek the truth.

     

    It is not only greatly comical but also highly perilous for the Western leaders to continue on the same track. Why should they bother whether most of today’s Muslims accept or don’t accept the doctrine and the practices of ISIS? The Western leaders themselves constantly disregard the majority of the population back in their countries, and particularly when the majority is ostensibly opposite to calamitous choices that they make (such as the case of the erroneously conceived and catastrophically carried out attack against, and occupation of, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq). Their disregard for the wishes and the opinions of the majority of their countries’ populations is monumental; they cannot be sensitive for other nations when they are insensitive for their own.

     

    The search for the reasons that brought about the present situation cannot be undertaken by Western academia, intellectuals and diplomats without a deep investigation of the developments that took place in their own countries in the first place. Before bothering to know whether ISIS is Islamic or not, they should care to find out whether the so-called Christian nations of the West are really Christian. Drunken of their colonial successes for many centuries, the Western peoples lived with myths and lies that totally disfigured the true dimensions of their own deeds, choices and policies. Modernity is not Christian but Anti-Christian. Globalism is not Divine but Satanic. And the Homosexual Marriages are not the ‘right of the free’ but the evilness of the slaves – of Satan.

     

    Atheist, materialistic, and despiritualized, the Western world turned out to be the Cemetery of the Christian Faith. That’s why the leaders of the Western countries did not give a damn about the persecution, expulsion and extermination of the Aramaean Christians in Mosul. They face now a nominalist and legalist theological system of despiritualized Muslims, who are partly westernized and deeply materialistic, which means filled with extremely contradictory elements able to explode with uncontainable consequences.

     

    The fallacy, inhumanity and monstrosity of either systems is such that one could simply consider them as the two faces of same coin. So corrupt and eroded this coin is that nothing can save it; it will soon be thrown in the Hell that it deserves. And its two faces, in full discord to one another, are triggering now by themselves the downgrading spiral that will bring their end. To survive one has to dissociate him/herself from the onerous coin as much as possible, as soon as possible, and as irreversibly as possible.