Turkey invades Syria and attacks the Kurds
There are few people in Britain who have better reason to know than I do that Kurdish terrorism does exist.
In November 1993 I was having a discussion over coffee with a colleague on the tenth floor staff restaurant of a BT office building in central London when the fire alarm went and we had to evacuate.
It turned out that a group of Kurdish separatists had thrown an improvised firebomb - some kind of Molotov cocktail - through what they thought was the window of the Turkish bank to which part of the ground floor of the building was leased. Actually it was the window of the facilities office of that BT building, and it landed on a female BT employee who suffered severe burns and might have been killed but for the prompt action of a colleague.
There were about eight hundred people working in that building and it is not at all difficult to envisage circumstances in which a significant proportion of those people, including myself, might have been killed as a result of a conflict for which they bore no responsibility and which Britain had absolutely nothing to do with.
This was part of a series of terrorist attacks in several parts of Europe by Kurdish extremists, apparently organised by the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK.
So you will understand that I fully support the designation of the PKK as a terrorist group, since that is exactly what the organisation is. And when Turkey says it is acting against Kurdish terrorists I do not automatically assume that there is no substance to their claims without checking out the facts.
But those who claim to be acting against terrorists must make every effort to ensure that the action they is proportionate to the threat they face and that they are acting against real terrorists, not attacking innocent women and children, or indeed organisations who have never done more than try to defend themselves.
Unfortunately successive Turkish governments - and frankly the Erdoğan regime is particularly culpable in this respect - have appeared completely incapable of distinguishing between terrorist groups like the PKK and very different groups like the Syrian Kurdish "Democratic Union party" (PYD) which does not appear to have any such track record of terrorist activities. Turkey claims to consider the PYD to be a branch of the PKK when there does not appear to be any substantial evidence to justify that assertion. Yes, they fought together against DA'ESH. So did we!
The DA'ESH Caliphate in Iraq and Syria was probably the most evil and destructive regime which the planet has seen since the fall of the Nazis. The Peshmerga Kurdish forces who took up arms against DA'ESH were not trying to organise terrorist attacks in Turkey: they were trying to defend themselves against a group of vile and murderous barbarians. Far from being terrorists, they fought against terrorists.
A senior US military source, speaking anonymously, told CNN that Turkey's invasion of Syria has jeopardised the progress made against DA'ESH and that "we are just watching the second largest army in NATO attack one of our best counter-terrorism partners."
In November 1993 I was having a discussion over coffee with a colleague on the tenth floor staff restaurant of a BT office building in central London when the fire alarm went and we had to evacuate.
It turned out that a group of Kurdish separatists had thrown an improvised firebomb - some kind of Molotov cocktail - through what they thought was the window of the Turkish bank to which part of the ground floor of the building was leased. Actually it was the window of the facilities office of that BT building, and it landed on a female BT employee who suffered severe burns and might have been killed but for the prompt action of a colleague.
There were about eight hundred people working in that building and it is not at all difficult to envisage circumstances in which a significant proportion of those people, including myself, might have been killed as a result of a conflict for which they bore no responsibility and which Britain had absolutely nothing to do with.
This was part of a series of terrorist attacks in several parts of Europe by Kurdish extremists, apparently organised by the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK.
So you will understand that I fully support the designation of the PKK as a terrorist group, since that is exactly what the organisation is. And when Turkey says it is acting against Kurdish terrorists I do not automatically assume that there is no substance to their claims without checking out the facts.
But those who claim to be acting against terrorists must make every effort to ensure that the action they is proportionate to the threat they face and that they are acting against real terrorists, not attacking innocent women and children, or indeed organisations who have never done more than try to defend themselves.
The fact that there have been (and are) Kurdish terrorist groups no more means that all Kurds are terrorists than the fact that the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel means that all Jews are terrorists or the history of the IRA means that all Irish people are terrorists. You only have to formulate any of those thoughts as words to see that any such idea is utterly ridiculous.
Are Kurdish children terrorists, such as the two children who were among eight civilians killed in the first day of Turkish attacks against Kurdish targets in Syria? Of course not.
Unfortunately successive Turkish governments - and frankly the Erdoğan regime is particularly culpable in this respect - have appeared completely incapable of distinguishing between terrorist groups like the PKK and very different groups like the Syrian Kurdish "Democratic Union party" (PYD) which does not appear to have any such track record of terrorist activities. Turkey claims to consider the PYD to be a branch of the PKK when there does not appear to be any substantial evidence to justify that assertion. Yes, they fought together against DA'ESH. So did we!
The DA'ESH Caliphate in Iraq and Syria was probably the most evil and destructive regime which the planet has seen since the fall of the Nazis. The Peshmerga Kurdish forces who took up arms against DA'ESH were not trying to organise terrorist attacks in Turkey: they were trying to defend themselves against a group of vile and murderous barbarians. Far from being terrorists, they fought against terrorists.
A senior US military source, speaking anonymously, told CNN that Turkey's invasion of Syria has jeopardised the progress made against DA'ESH and that "we are just watching the second largest army in NATO attack one of our best counter-terrorism partners."
The governments of Britain, Germany, France, Poland and other European powers have issued a joint statement calling on Turkey to cease unilateral military action in North East Syria.
I think that the Western powers need to think very carefully about our attitude to Turkey. The tragic consequences which are developing yet again in Syria - and the understandable impression being created that the West has thrown an ally to the wolves - also shows that acting precipitately to pull troops out of a region can be as destabilising as acting precipitately to deploy them.
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