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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: ​Balkanization comes to Syria

Vice President Joe Biden spoke on Turkish CNN and ordered Kurdish forces in northern Syria to stay east of the Euphrates River last week. I’ve never seen anything like it.

His message was clear — cross the Euphrates, and you will be blown to bits by the Turkish invading the country.

According to Biden, the Turkish army moved into Syria to fight the Islamic State, which no one in their right mind should believe. Turkey cares much more about raining hellfire on the Kurdish militias that have nearly consolidated the entirety of the Syria-Turkey border.

The United States, on the other hand, aims to use the Turkish military to trigger a showdown between Turkey and the Russian-Syrian government forces in the major city of Aleppo, Syria. This is where the Syrian government, aided by Russian airstrikes, has been laying siege to the rebel forces holed up in the once-prosperous city.

Furthermore, the Turkish invasion is the next step in the West’s plan to Balkanize Syria, dividing it into smaller, more manageable provinces.

Let’s rewind. History does indeed have links. Turkey has emerged as a major international player due to the Syrian Civil War, and in the process, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become a major dictator.

Erdogan’s consolidation of power experienced a turning point last month when a military coup, which many believe was staged, attempted to oust him from power. Since then, Erdogan has purged tens of thousands of people from Turkey’s education, judiciary, military and civil service systems.

The episode reminds me of the Reichstag Fire in 1933, which Adolf Hitler used to purge political opponents and terminate civil liberties.

With political dissent essentially impossible in Turkey, this was the perfect moment for Erdogan, at the permission of the U.S., to perform his own blitzkrieg into Syria.

Even if he doesn’t know it, Erdogan is merely a pawn in a larger geo-political game. Make no mistake, Turkey’s invasion marks a shift in this war. Two not mutually exclusive consequences are now at hand.

If my predictions are correct, Turkey will eventually make its way to Aleppo, where it will engage in total war with the Russian military, a conflict of which we have not yet seen an equivalent in this century.

Secondly, the invasion will offer the West a pretext to perform in Syria what it performed in the former Yugoslavia after the fall of the U.S.S.R.

Syria will be carved into numerous regions. In the north, we will see an area controlled by Turkey at the whim of the West, and Erdogan will try to cleanse the Kurdish population in that area. Russia will hold on to western Syria save a major military defeat.

The rest of the country will become a jihadist Wild West, which the U.S. can freely bomb and use to rack up profits for defense contractors.

Looking back, I think we’ll scratch our heads at how the U.S. could support a maniac like Erdogan.

That being said, what more can you expect from a country that supported Saddam Hussein, Augusto Pinochet, the shah of Iran and Osama bin Laden?

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