Originally appeared at ZeroHedge
Entirely to be expected, a new report in The Wall Street Journal has found that Turkish-backed Syrian forces currently fighting US-backed Kurdish groups as part of ‘Operation Peace Spring’ are guilty of war crimes, including summary executions of Kurdish civilians.
“U.S. military officials watched live drone feeds last month that appeared to show Turkish-backed Arab gunmen targeting civilians during their assault on Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria, attacks the Americans reported to their commanders as possible war crimes, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the incidents,” reports the WSJ.
What the report fails to mention, however, is the blatantly obvious and relevant recent history that the Islamist militants carrying out such atrocities are the very same militants which were a few short years ago funded, armed and trained by the CIA and Pentagon.
Air Force Global Hawk reconnaissance drone file image
Erdogan’s proxy ground invasion force known as the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (TFSA), more commonly called the Syrian National Army, has even recently been filmed deploying CIA-supplied TOW missiles against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as we previously detailed.
It’s also been well-documented that the Turkey invasion forces of Syrian National Army are stacked with former ISIS, Nusrah, and FSA jihadists… who clearly brought their CIA toys with them.
And oh the Pentagon now wants you to know that US officials have suddenly become aware of their war crimes, despite the very same groups having carried out similar crimes against Syrian civilians for years as they fought pro-Assad forces.
Meet the former US-supported FSA, now Turkish-backed FSA, who are committing the same war crimes in Syria they’ve been for years.
Washington “won’t stand for it” now that the FSA jihadists are no longer playing for ‘Team America’ per the WSJ report:
“The U.S. won’t stand for it, and we’ve made that position very clear to the Turks,” he said.
Some in the U.S. military who saw the American drone footage said the video, combined with initial, internal military reports, raised strong concerns about apparent war crimes, according to several U.S. military officials.
U.S. military officials reported the alleged war crimes up the chain of command, as they are required to do by Pentagon regulations, officials said. The reports were met with skepticism.
“They were flagged by operators for the chain of command of a possible war crime that were not determined to be definitive proof of war crimes and appeared inconclusive upon further review,” said one U.S. military official.
Among the drone footage includes a “clear-cut case of prisoners with tied hands being shot”, and another includes the assassination of a Kurdish politician on a highway.
The very groups currently committing war crimes have been seen with CIA-supplied anti-tank weapons in recent weeks:
TFSA hitting a YPG/SDF vehicle (Humvee?) with a likely originally US-supplied BGM-71 TOW ATGM.
Rather rare to get footage from this side. pic.twitter.com/nrywMgkTBR
— Cᴀʟɪʙʀᴇ Oʙsᴄᴜʀᴀ? (@CalibreObscura) November 2, 2019
Defense Secretary Mark Esper said he raised the issue with his Turkish counterparts. This after multiple social media videos starting weeks ago revealed clear cut war crimes and executions of Kurdish prisoners by Turkish-backed groups.
Of the new drone footage, the WSJ describes another incident as follows:
The video shows an SUV driving down the highway and pulling over near a van parked along the road, said military officials who have seen the video and described the footage. It also shows one person get out of the SUV and into the van. Some U.S. military officials said the drone footage showed Turkish-backed forces killing a Kurdish civilian.
“One day when the diplomatic history is written, people will wonder what happened here and why officials didn’t do more to stop it,” William Roebuck, the State Department’s top diplomat in Syria, stated in scathing internal memo which had been leaked to the press.
But the question of “what happened here” is easy to answer: for years the US worked closely with NATO ally Turkey and other regional powers like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE to topple the Syrian government. The anti-Assad allies used battle hardened jihadists to wage war on Syria, which committed countless civilian atrocities, and who have now simply changed stripes to work directly under Erdogan.
The Pentagon and mainstream media are only now belatedly “discovering” just how terrifying these jihadist proxies are, while conveniently forgetting the US role in creating these Frankenstein monsters in the first place.
“What the report fails to mention, however, is the blatantly obvious and relevant recent history that the Islamist militants carrying out such atrocities are the very same militants which were a few short years ago funded, armed and trained by the CIA and Pentagon”. Do they really think that everyone else is stupid except them? Don’t they use their brain? This terrorist is a thousand-headed snake. The CIA, Zio America, Israel are some of the most venomous snake heads among other heads, these are the heads that need to be cut to make this snake really die! Whatever uniform they wore, they remained wolves in the shape of a wolf. No difference! Some people who can’t see this fact mean that if they are not trolls they are very stupid!
Hmm..i disagree on the wolf thing but ur right for the rest ?
“Do they really think that everyone else is stupid except them?”
Goebbels didn’t think Germans were stupid, and the Neocon faction of the Deep State doesn’t know/care if Americans are that stupid – they both knew what works on enough people. Create a scary enemy or two, then convince everyone that only the state can protect you from that evil. Exploiting them then becomes as easy as taking candy from a baby. It’s called psychopathy and has nothing to do with your target audience’s intelligence – why can’t you see this fact? Are you 1) troll or 2) stupid?
“The CIA, Zio America, Israel are some of the most venomous snake heads among other heads, these are the heads that need to be cut to make this snake really die!”
…usually at the cost of millions of little people lives. Only to be replaced almost immediately by other snake heads. Sounds like you’re willing to sacrifice a few million more of us to get rid of those, too. ‘The Snake’ is no different than some of the bacteria in nature. No anti-microbial jihad is going to save you. You figure out how recognize it and live with it so it doesn’t harm you. Psychopaths will always be here – they’re never going away.
I know, but it’s really tiring to see so many people who are easily brainwashed. They eat what they feed, they don’t even care if it’s harmful to them or not…
Good catch, if you didn’t watch “fly over a cuckoo’s nest” as a political satire, you may want to watch it again ;)
For our 70’s era high school art class, a few of us silk-screened black t-shirts labeled chronic and a serial number. It was mostly a dumb joke, but I think our teachers were honestly terrified of us after that (which delighted us even more). To our dismay, it also totally ruined the chick-magnet effect of our fashionable platform shoes, bell bottoms and blown-dry hair. Random example from Wiki: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1601bba4e188623ed549c71d250b5d582c069bfab5af3acb931e8f5de23e251c.jpg
Whose the girl?
No idea – the picture is from the 1970’s in Fashions page of Wiki. That kind of leather hot pants sluttery was not allowed at my high school. She does seem pretty happy about the $50 bill she’s holding. 70’s Wolverine must be a big tipper. Hey, wait… [ashamed] that’s my mom!
The Snake’ is no different than some of the bacteria in nature. No anti-microbial jihad is going to save you. You figure out how recognize it, contain it and live with it so it doesn’t harm you
the wisdom in this statement goes much deeper than what is gained at first glance. Should we abolish all nuclear weapons? No. We built them, so they can be built again, or even more terrible weapons. Instead, show that we can act responsibly with such weapons in our possession. Having free will is a remarkable gift, but with it comes great responsibility. To act responsibly, wisdom is required and this will guide our Choices – and the ability to make informed choices carries all sorts of other implications like open society. On a positive note, three generations have passed with the ability to blow ourselves up and we are still here. Impressive.
Two Minutes Hate, bring on the new enemy
shocking war crimes – there is just two war criminals on the court and that is the unhinged states of A and israel and all they need to do is to quit killing stealing whatever that comes their way and return to homebase. israel however is another matter since the israelis have murdered and stolen anything in sight since the very first day since a befuddled lloyd-george offered the jews to settle in palestine and thus they can’t really return to homebase since there is no homebase. just a 5000 year long diaspora replete with pogroms await them.
No no no! Everyone has totally misunderstood what the US concerns are about. Of course the US is concerned about war crimes committed by organizations that are no longer on team America. This is of great concern because the atrocity points being racked up are going to Erdogan’s corner and not the US! The US cannot tolerate any interference that could jeopardize the US winning for the third time the prestigious Nobel Prize for Atrocities.
The US has assigned great importance to winning this prize and it is rumored that it is at the top of the list of current US strategic objectives. But I think US concerns are unwarranted considering that although Turkey’s record on atrocities is impressive, it pales in comparison to the star power of the US in this domain. It is tough to be the best though as the US is still struggling to outdo their crowning achievement that totally won them the Nobel for Atrocities for the second time. I am of course referring to the US led ‘liberation’ of Raqqa! But being the best, the US will find a way to outdo Raqqa, afterall, the worry was how to outdo what won the US their first Nobel for Atrocities – Saving the Libya people from Gadaffi. People have faith the US will do better than Raqqa just as Raqqa outdid Libya.
In the meantime, the US will just have to accept that their children have left home to become Erdogan’s head choppers giving Turkey all the rights to claim credit for their headchopping atrocity points. Well US, who needs them anyway, just create some more and so time to move past the anger phase of the process of coming to terms with loss. Hopefully you will also come to terms eventually with the loss of your hegemony.
Everyone have the right to regret it and to apologize. We regret it. We changed as we said we need change, and we changed. We made an investigation about it and we apologized. There we are now on the right side of history, and Turkey not……………….LOL. We won again!
Notice how the Pentagon was never able to capture images of the Syrian army or the IRGC committing atrocities but persisted in calling them war criminals.
No wait, the U.S. state dept. got a photo of a building in Syria with snow on a roof that melted and screamed out ‘a CREMATORIUM for murdering civilians!’ because that is the only reason that snow would ever melt.
Hah i remember that story, calling a heating plant a crematorium, stirring up old holocaust memories, as if it was planned.
Nothing new, we all know that very well for some very long time. Americans are seeing that they’re loosing, and try to distant them selves from this, after all is revealed. They monitoring those crimes for some very long time now.
war crime – when the turkish backed forces engage with kurds it is a war crime although the kurds are an existential threat to turkey while the entire operation the great unhinged states of A is conducting in syria is a war crime of proportions hardly seen since the iraqi war by that very same criminal enterprise (the unhinged states of A) that is running washington dc. time to call a spade a spade and stamp washington dc’s cabal as war criminals and bring them before the ICC. and allow turkey and syria and iraq and iran to deal with the kurds they find appropriate. so footage by an UAV operated by the worst war criminals since pol pot is evidence of war crimes by turkish funded troops, is entirely absurd – the worst war criminal accusing others of war crimes and not even one mention of Israel, together with the washington dc war criminals by far the worst war criminals in the world.
Give a madman enough rope and he’ll hang himself. Has Erdogan been setup, he was allowed to invade Syria unmolested but obviously not unobserved, and since the US had so many drones covering the event as it unfolded, gleefully exposing all Erdogan’s dirty little secrets for all the whole world to see, I can only assume the drones were there for that very reason, to expose Erdogan.
Obama did create the FSA terrorists but Trump sacked them all in June last year, and he, Assad and Putin, shipped a fair few of them to Aleppo and Idlib straight afterwards, where they happily took up Erdogan’s employment offer, and after that the Russians and the SAA wiped out what was left of them in Darra and Quneitra. Did anyone expect that the same terrorists who terrorized Latakia, Idlib, Hama, and Aleppo, were going to do anything different here, just because Erdogan told the Russians and the US they weren’t going to, just like they’ve told the Russians 13 other times that they wouldn’t, LOL, if that was the case we’d still be in the first Astana agreement, not looking at the 14th installment next, and we wouldn’t be hearing about even more war crimes Erdogan and his proxies will have to face eventually.
Look Richard, the US has got actual video proof of some of the things people have been claiming the Turkish proxies do while they’re engaged in Erdogan’s dirty work, will you trust the Kurds and Amnesty International now, or is it just more doctored footage the US has digitally altered to suit the narrative, no it’s not Richard, the US don’t have to fake the footage this time, it’s all real Turkey is lying, LOL.
come on, rant and rave, huff and puff and not a clue of anything. just shut the feck up and watch how things will unfold and do not, do not, allow your more imbecill and reflexiv thought-processes take hold of the more analytical part of the brain!
And what do you know, only what Putin tells you, but Putin’s lying about everything, and you suck it it all up like a simpleton, as Syria burns due to Putin’s deplorable inaction and collusion with Erdogan.
Putin is doing the same in donbass , Ukraine .