International Syria Discussions, v2: Turkey and Syria Trade Deadly Strikes, As Russia Watches Uneasily.

Tax payer funded military protecting private company interest is corporate socialism. Difference is it costs us American lives in addition to tax dollars and we the public see zero benefit

Where my right wingers at
 
I don’t get it. The Russians won’t allow this. Trump will not approve of the plan.
 
But I thought we were their to fight ISIS. Just like Genie Energy, and the Golan (Trump city) Heights with the natural gas right?

Of course I'm sure it is OK to steal a countries wealth, when a animal dictator named Assad is running it. Of course you might want to question if perhaps propaganda is being used to convince you that he is a monster murderer worse than any other world leader, gassing his own people, making us all not sympathetic at all to this theft.
 
Syria’s Assad gets a prize with US withdrawal, Russia deal
By ZEINA KARAM

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BEIRUT (AP) — Once again, Syrian President Bashar Assad has snapped up a prize from world powers that have been maneuvering in his country’s multi-front wars. Without firing a shot, his forces are returning to towns and villages in northeastern Syria where they haven’t set foot for years.

Assad was handed one victory first by U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from northeastern Syria, analysts said. Then he got another from a deal struck between Turkey and Russia, Damascus’ ally.

Abandoned by U.S. forces and staring down the barrel of a Turkish invasion, Kurdish fighters had no option but to turn to Assad’s government and to Russia for protection from their No. 1 enemy.

For once, the interests of Damascus, Moscow and Ankara came into alignment. Turkey decided it was better having Assad’s forces along the border, being helped by Russia, than to have the frontier populated by Kurdish-led fighters, whom it considers to be terrorists.

On Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin that allows Syrian troops to move back into a large part of the territory and ensure Kurdish fighters stay out.

The Kurds once hoped an alliance with Washington would strengthen their ambitions for autonomy, but now they are left hoping they can extract concessions from Moscow and Damascus to keep at least some aspects of their self-rule.

Turkey, which had backed rebels trying to oust Assad, has now implicitly given the Syrian leader “de facto recognition,” said Lina Khatib, head of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House.

“Assad and Russia see this recognition as the beginning of international community normalization with the Assad regime, and as such an indication of their victory in the war,” she said.

It’s a method that Assad has used successfully before, positioning himself as the lesser of two evils in the eyes of those who might want him gone. Throughout Syria’s civil war, he has presented the conflict as a choice between him and jihadis. Fear of the extremists watered down enthusiasm in Washington and other Western governments for fully backing the rebels.

“Assad has been benefiting from two narratives: shaping the Syrian uprising as a regional war and reminding that there is no viable alternative to his rule,” said Joe Macaron, a resident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington D.C.

Trump’s “America First” policy, with its sometimes chaotic and impulsive shifts, has been a godsend for Assad.

Last year, Trump called Assad an “animal” following a suspected chemical weapons attack near Damascus, carrying out limited airstrikes as punishment.

But the U.S. president has repeatedly said he’s not interested in removing Assad from power or keeping American troops involved in “endless wars” in the region’s “blood-soaked sands.” He has welcomed having Russia and Assad’s government fill the void.

Backing from Russia and Iran also has enabled Assad to simply outlast his opponents. With the help of Russian airstrikes since 2015, the Syrian military has recaptured town after town from the rebels. Abandoned and exhausted, the insurgents have repeatedly submitted to deals with Assad that allowed them to leave their besieged enclaves with safe passage to the north.

But the Russian-Turkish agreement is not all good news for Assad.

It allows Turkey to keep control over a significant chunk of northeastern Syria, a belt of land 120 kilometers (75 miles) wide and 30 kilometers (19 miles) deep that it captured in its invasion. Turkey already holds a larger piece of the border in the northwest, captured in previous incursions.

Syrian forces will move into the rest of the border zone. But in a strip immediately at the border, Russian and Turkish forces will hold joint patrols, with only Syrian “border guards” in place, suggesting a presence in limited numbers.

Elsewhere, a large wedge of eastern Syria remains in the hands of the Kurdish-led fighters. That includes the bulk of Syria’s oil fields, depriving Damascus of control over a crucial resource and giving the Kurds a major bargaining chip. Trump has said some U.S. troops will remain there to help Kurds “secure” the oil fields.

“Given where the regime was a few months ago, the regime is expanding its control,” Macaron said, but it has to live with its opponents’ presence on its soil and with Russia preventing any confrontation with them.

Politically, Tuesday’s images of the leaders of Turkey and Russia poring over maps and drawing up the future of northern Syria illustrated just how irrelevant Damascus is when it comes to negotiations.

Perhaps intentionally, Assad for the first time visited areas captured from rebels in Idlib province, the last enclave they held in Syria. State TV showed Assad greeting military commanders and watching troops fire artillery. He talked of rallying “popular resistance” against Turkey “to expel the invader sooner or later.”

But the new agreement almost certainly made Syrian military action against Turkish forces impossible.

More likely, Assad will wait them out and maneuver for an opportunity to regain the rest of the land.

A political bargain that achieves that somewhere down the line is not completely far-fetched. Assad and Erdogan once had a close working relationship. In 2004, Assad became the first Syrian president to visit Ankara, helping overcome decades of animosity over territorial disputes, water resources and Damascus’ support at the time for Kurdish separatists in Turkey.

Erdogan then switched sides and backed the rebels in Syria’s civil war. In recent years, however, he has been more concerned with recruiting rebel factions to fight the Kurds. Last year, Ankara signaled it would consider working with Assad once again if he won free and fair elections.

Now Turkey is entrusting the border in part to Assad.

Other countries similarly have concluded they have no other choice.

Calls have increased from Arab countries to readmit Syria to the Arab League. The United Arab Emirates reopened an embassy in Damascus, the most significant Arab overture yet toward the Assad government, almost certainly coordinated with Saudi Arabia. Bahrain followed suit the next day,

The Sunni Muslim Gulf countries hope to curb their Shiite-led foe, Iran, which saw its influence expand rapidly in Syria’s war.

“Assad will use the developments in northeast Syria to continue to pursue his strategy of presenting himself as the winning de facto authority in Syria who the international community has no choice but to cooperate with against extremist groups,” Khatib said.

https://www.apnews.com/6cc43d8a0e754c5d96eb72df28e88371
 
Damn, Murika why go Evil Empire way!!
China all the way!!
China will save us!
 
Let's say we knew that not protecting these oil fields would cause them to fall into the hands of the remnants of ISIS. It wouldn't be wrong to help secure them for the Kurds, would it? It's not a situation where we're stealing something.
 
Let's say we knew that not protecting these oil fields would cause them to fall into the hands of the remnants of ISIS. It wouldn't be wrong to help secure them for the Kurds, would it? It's not a situation where we're stealing something.
I’d rather make unsubstantiated claims about stealing resources which never materializes and then countries like China will actually be the beneficiaries, like they are doing in Afghanistan
 
This still isn’t about the oil. We could give a fuck less. It’s more about making sure Syrians don’t get their oil revenue back. And mist importantly, we are still watching the Iraq/Syrian birder for isreal.

we are in Syria upon isreali demand, and we have too many John Bolton’s in the deep state that are isreali firsters.
 
I’d rather make unsubstantiated claims about stealing resources which never materializes and then countries like China will actually be the beneficiaries, like they are doing in Afghanistan
I wasn't aware that China was messing around in Afghan resources. Reading a couple articles now.
 
I was told that the troops were pulled away from our Kurdish allies so that they would come home...

President Trump wouldn't lie to ME, would he??!!?

th
 
I was told that the troops were pulled away from our Kurdish allies so that they would come home...

President Trump wouldn't lie to ME, would he??!!?

th

its the warmongering establishment. Not trump. They are trying to find every way to force him to stay.

trump was elected to fight our evil evil evil evil evil evil establishment, they bathed in the blood of millions of innocent lives since 1990. Their thirst for blood to appease the isreali state will never be satisfied.
 
Trump may not care about the people and having troops in the region for that reason but he is unabashed about ceasing oil.





and a WSJ interview (which I don't think we can embed??) saying the same... LINK



Shocking - It's almost like Trump has no comprehension of what the reason was that Osama and Al Qaeda used to foment rage in their attacks against America. Like he is completely ignorant of the history and somehow thinks the best way to keep America safe and not a target is to take all the oil.
<TheWire1>
 
This will be the test for trump.

We are either in or out.
 
its the warmongering establishment. Not trump. They are trying to find every way to force him to stay.

trump was elected to fight our evil evil evil evil evil evil establishment, they bathed in the blood of millions of innocent lives since 1990. Their thirst for blood to appease the isreali state will never be satisfied.

President Trump has said time and time again that we should just "take the oil". But, we'll see...
 
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