Erdogan Set to Flood Europe With Millions of Migrants as EU Refugee Deal Falters

© AP Photo/ Tolga Bozoglu

 

The European Commission is set to release a report finding that Turkey’s human rights practices failed to comply with the terms of the deal – a finding that would end all hope of Turkish citizens receiving visa-free travel and likely forcing Erdogan to open the floodgates.

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The Erdogan government became enraged after a senior European official claimed that Turkey is not committed to doing what is necessary to join the 28-nation bloc and that its residents should be denied visa-free travel within the EU as was initially agreed upon by the two parties. The spat between Turkish officials and the European Union comes at a time when Europe desperately needs to preserve the migrant deal.

U.S. military ‘outraged’ by Turkey’s attacks on Kurdish forces after anti-ISIL deal

ISIS was never their target in the first place and Washington has turned a blind eye after reaching a deal to have additional base access. ISIS is a welcomed guest free to roam around Turkey and even receive medical care if needed thanks to the Obama administration turning its back on the Kurds.

The U.S. military outrage may indeed be genuine, but the catalyst was surely engineered in Washington.

 

Leaders within the United States military were said to be “outraged” when Turkey launched air strikes against Kurdish forces in northern Iraq only hours after Ankara reached a deal with the U.S. to allow use of a key air base in the fight against Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL).

A U.S. military source said American special forces stationed in northern Iraq who were training Kurdish Peshmerga troops had almost no warning before Turkey launched air strikes on Kurdish PKK forces.

Turkey’s Wrong Bet on Syria

• Today, instead of the free movement of labor and capital, there is, around the border area, the free movement of bombs and bullets.
• Ankara considers the real security threat from Syria as not the jihadists, but the secular Kurds who fight the jihadists.
• Turkey has worked so hard to create a “Peshawar” (Afghanistan) across its border with Syria — hoping instead to create a Muslim Brotherhood zone.

It was supposed to be Turkish gambit: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s days in power were numbered; the Nusayri (Alawite) man would be toppled by Syria’s Sunni majority in a popular revolt. The Sunni majority would set up in Damascus a Muslim Brotherhood type of regime that would be subservient to Ankara, and Turkey’s southern border with Syria would be now be a borderless Sunni “Schengen” zone; cross border trade would flourish with the free movement of labor and capital. Peace would prevail along the 900-km border, and Turkish and Syrian Sunni supremacists would advance their agenda in the not-always-so-Sunni lands of the Middle East.

Iran Guards wield electoral power behind scenes

The Revolutionary Guards, a military force over 100,000 strong which also controls swathes of Iran’s economy, is widely assumed to have fixed the vote last time around, silenced those who protested and to be preparing to anoint a favoured candidate this year, having already narrowed down the field.

The successor to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who steps down after a second term, will remain subordinate to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And many see the hand of the Guards, the muscle of the Islamic Republic’s clerical rulers, in steering victory toward one of several conservative loyalists -while stifling the kind of protests that followed the 2009 vote.