Turkey’s Erdogan threatens EU: Oppose our attack on Kurds and “we will … send 3.6 million migrants to you”
“Hey EU, wake up. I say it again: if you try to frame our operation [against Kurds] as an invasion, our task is simple: we will open the doors and send 3.6 million migrants to you,”
The European Union has accused Turkey of ‘weaponizing’ migrants to intimidate the 27-member bloc. Brussels “will never accept that refugees are weaponized and used to blackmail us,” EU Council President Donald Tusk said on Friday.
The statement came after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to overrun Europe with “millions” of illegal immigrants if the EU dared to criticize his invasion of Kurdish-held northern Syria. “Hey EU, wake up. I say it again: if you try to frame our operation there as an invasion, our task is simple: we will open the doors and send 3.6 million migrants to you,” Erdogan threatened Thursday.
Following the U.S. troops withdrawal from northern Syria earlier this week, Turkey launched a military offensive against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the region. Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance made up of Kurds, Arabs and Assyrian Christians, played a key role in pushing back Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Some 100,000 civilians have reportedly been displaced since Turkey started shelling Kurdish strongholds and population centers on Wednesday afternoon.
German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported top EU officials remarks:
Outgoing European Council President Donald Tusk has sharply criticized Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s threat of “opening the gates” and “sending 3.6 million refugees your way” if the EU labels Turkey’s incursion into Syria as an “invasion.”
“Turkey must understand that our main concern is that their actions may lead to another humanitarian catastrophe,” Tusk said at a press conference in Nicosia and on Twitter.
“And we will never accept that refugees are weaponized and used to blackmail us,” he added, referring to an EU agreement with Ankara on refugees, struck in March 2016 as a result of a wave of migration to the bloc.
“President Erdogan’s threats of yesterday are totally out of place,” he added.
Erodan isn’t making empty threats. Europe is already seeing a massive rise in illegal immigrants along the Turkish coast. Greece is witnessing a huge surge in the number of migrants crossing over from Turkey in recent months. The Greek “islands right now are suffering from strangulation due to overcrowding at the facilities, and there is a need for more effective border guarding, and concern over possible increased flows in the coming period,” the government in Athens admitted in August.
The ongoing migrant surge is a breach of the 2016 EU-Turkey deal reached between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Erdogan. Under the agreement, EU pledged billions of euros in return for Ankara’s vague promises to stem unregulated flow of illegal immigrants. a part of the pact, Merkel also agreed to settle 150,000 to 200,000 migrants from Turkey annually into the EU, a move bitterly oppose by Austria, Hungry and other eastern European member states.
Many migrants also feel encouraged by Germany’s recent promise to take in a large portion of those landing illegal on Europe’s southern coasts.
While the EU, backed by France and Germany, pursues for an open border migrant policy, Erdogan has long seen uncontrolled Muslim immigration into Christian Europe as a form of demographic warfare. He has repeatedly called upon Turks living in Europe to increase their birth rates. “I am calling out to my citizens, by brothers and sisters in Europe,” he said in 2017. “Have not just three but five children.”
Turkish President’s latest threat exposes Europe’s voluntarily to uncontrolled influx of illegal immigrants. Four years since the migrant crisis began, Europe is unprepared, or rather unwilling, to repel the waves of migrants crossing over from Muslim-majority North Africa and the Middle East. Earlier this week, German Interior Minister warned that his country could face a migrant wave bigger than the one in 2015, when estimated one million asylum seekers entered Germany in the span of a couple of months, resulting in a string of deadly Islamist terror attacks and a migrant crime wave. Despite these warnings, country’s police remains short-staffed and ill-equipped to patrol country’s border, German police union chief said last week.
[Cover image via YouTube]
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Comments
Turkey hasnt been our friend since Erdogan got elected. Need to kick them out of NATO, and treat them as an enemy.
Also why does USA have to maintain solders in Syria, why cant EU or the UN blue helmets peace keep.
That’s the real problem. Capitol Hill doesn’t know how to respond now that Trump has taken “let’s just use U.S. soldiers as human shields / peace keepers / nation builders” off of the table for the first time since The “Kinder, Gentler” New World Order began under Bush I over 25 years ago.
Just start sending the Kurds anti-tanks missiles, explosives, and ammunition. If we do not, someone else will.
In a region where the only love is the love to hate, the Turks are pretty high on the receiving end of that love.
I predict the Turks will regret this, no matter what we do in response.
FYI for everyone……
Be Careful Of News About Syria: It May Not Be What You See…
Here’s a viral video which folks on the left are using to bash Trump’s decision on Syria.
https://www.weaselzippers.us/435167-be-careful-of-news-about-syria-it-may-not-be-what-you-see/
“why cant EU or the UN blue helmets peace keep.” The key word is in your sentence “can’t.” No one can. They have been fighting each other for centuries. Let them.
I’m thinking the EU sees another migrant tidal wave as a
good feature for their political ends, and don’t see this as a defect at all.
“Germany’s Horst Seehofer warns of ‘refugee wave’ bigger than in 2015”
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-horst-seehofer-warns-of-refugee-wave-bigger-than-in-2015/a-50713279
This threat should be good enough for the rest of Europe to kick Turkey out of NATO.
But I don’t think Europe has the stones to do it.
Stones? Real stones are all the EU has left. They have no way to deal with this at borders of militarily. Turkey could invade Europe….with millions of “shock troops” flooding the borders and already in Europe. Game,set, match…Alluha Akbar. Dim witted dhimmis.
Plus, remember all those EU home-grown ISIS fighters from the EU that went to the middle east to fight?
Their NATO “ally”.
On the one hand, this IS an Act of War against EU.
On the other hand, France has already offered to surrender.
“Send a single migrant, and we will cut off all EU trade with you and send back one million illegal alien Turks residing in the EU”
The EU is too cucked to send any back. Migrants when they form rape mobs, poop in pools “just need to learn”
The EU also promised visa-free travel from Turkey throughout the EU. That promise hasn’t been kept.
https://www.frontlinesnews.com/2019/06/10/gangs-of-all-male-muslim-refugees-take-over-stockholm-train-station-steal-grope-beat-women.html
Look how tetchy they got when Italy stopped the NGO migrant dumping boats.
I’m trying to remember if critical pipelines go through Turkey, and they are all globalist and have enough trouble with Brexit to sanction Turkey – they don’t even want to sanction Iran even though the USA is threatening them.
And how are they going to send back the one million (not illegal in the EU) Turks without having their cities burned to the ground?
There are lots of oil and natural gas that goes through Turkey and Syria to the EU.
https://maps.southfront.org/gas-oil-pipelines-and-territorial-control-in-syria-iraq-infographics/
As CUCHA alluded to. Why are they in NATO? Seems ISIS would be as good a friend. Think maybe thats why Trump called them out?
Pretty sure when Turkey joined they were a pretty “moderate” entity in the region. Recently moved to a republic, original member of the U.N. and other signs they would be a cooperating partner for peace.
My, how times have changed….
They are in NATO because of the old cold war where we wanted as many allies in Europe to oppose the others who were part of the USSR or Warsaw Pact.
The better question is why 30 years after the Berlin wall came down is the USA still in NATO?
What is fantastic about this all is that Trunp is forcing the EU to have to wake up and deal with reality.
And ti think, all it took was Trump moving 50 personal out of Northern Syria.
But the Kurds were our allies and now we are letting them be murdered
How is that ok?
Russia was our ally in the past.
German “was” an ally in NATO in the past…..
I understand there are ISIS supporting Kurds, and other Kurds who are armed and supported by Russia. I may have that wrong but think I read that this past week.
“But the Kurds were our allies…”
Says who?
Gullible.
No, not all the Kurds were our allies. The Kurds aren’t a single unified, group. Hell, we even recognize some Kurds as terrorists just like Turkey does. Most Kurds don’t even live in northeastern Syria.
France and Germany are a bunch of Sitzpinklers.
really need to consider us leaving nato at this point.
turkey there due to bosperus area and naval containment on straits. it has never really served us well. and storing our warheads there was just plain foolish.
as far as the kurdish issue, way too many on all sides are treating them as one entity when they are not. many of the “tribes” or “clans” are not useful allies to us.
this turkey-kurd issue over 40+ years old at this point.
at what point to we let the children grow up and stop mommying them.
Time to appropriately treat Erdogan as the goose-stepping, jackbooted, Jew-hating, genocide-asspiring, worthless Muslim dictator that he is.
Kick Turkey out of NATO and deal with it as a belligerent actor staunchly opposed to U.S. and allied interests.
In a nuclear age, who would believe a fence and tear gas is the most important weapon against invaders?
The proper EU response would be:
Fine, we’ll send them back to help you rebuild Istanbul as soon as it cools off and the radioactivity levels dip.
Only France and Britain have nukes… France is too compromised from within and Britain is … well… too compromised from within also. The IRA was at least not a suicide cult… never heard of an IRA attack starting with “Hail Mary”…
Coming soon all around southern and eastern Europe: “Build the Wall! Build the Wall!”
Until borders are secure they’ll just have to shoot everyone who tries to enter illegally. Erdogan is outright declaring his intent to send 3.6 million invaders. That’s a declaration of war and it is de facto an Islamic jihadist invasion, same as the previous illegal millions.
They are coming to kill and Europe had better start fighting back soon. It has LESS than 12 years, and unlike the phony climate alarm this annihilation is really coming.
Kick turkey out of nato. Shut down the border. Then, use whatever force is necessary to enforce the border. If the invasion materializes, take out turkey.
Turkey isn’t threatening to kill the Kurds but to relocate them to Europe. That is how intellectual obtuseness cripples. It becomes a weapon for your enemies. Will Europe drop the “one-world without borders” pretense to fight the true enemy or go down like the dodo bird?
This will be a good education for those who believe borders are immoral. Plus now Pope Frankie won’t have to travel to tend to the poor and disenfranchised. They will be right outside of his own immoral walls. Those trips cost a fortune. Security doesn’t come cheap.
I need to point out a few facts, some supportive of Trump, others not. This is to recognize that Trump has no good options in Syria. So while I’m not really convinced that pulling troops back from the Turkish border I also can’t say it’s the wrong decision.
Obama made some incredibly stupid and short-sighted decisions concerning the Syrian civil war. First, he made a lot of empty threats which the idiot thought were going to be cost free because the feckless Obama was only looking at these empty threats in terms of empty political calculation. When the civil war broke out he called for the overthrow of the Assad regime but then sat around with his thumb up his @$$ because empty talk aside, he didn’t want Assad overthrown. Assad is Iran’s client, and Obama was doing everything up to and including fellating the Ayatollah’s to get his disastrous nuclear “deal.”
I won’t go through the whole laundry list of empty threats he made, or how his desire to give the Mullah’s in Tehran a tongue bath that he couldn’t even object when Putin reasserted Russia as a major player in the M.E. We all witnessed these things.
As an aside, it’s the Dems who are Putin’s defacto allies, not Trump, and Putin would much rather have another Dem patsy in the WH like Clinton who won’t make a peep but instead try to change the subject when he decides to seize more territory from his neighbors.
Events finally forced Obama to intervene he did it in the most moronic and ham-handed way possible. His main concern was still cozying up to Tehran, so he decided to arm, train and equip the People’s Protection Units (acronym YPG in Kurdish) since they had friendly relations with Assad and Iran.
They also have undeniably close ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). In fact these ties are so close one can make a reasonable if not entirely conclusive case that the YPG are PKK; simply the Syrian wing of the organization.
Our own DoS has designated the PKK as a Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997, so this is a bipartisan conclusion. Turks of all political stripes despise the PKK. And it isn’t as if the PKK tries to endear themselves to the people of Turkey. In December 2016 Kurdish militants detonated two bombs outside an Istanbul soccer stadium, killing 38 and injuring 155. In their decades old guerrilla war they’ve killed tens of thousands of Turks.
Sultan Erdogan, who fancies himself the new Ottoman Emperor, no doubt intends to fry bigger fish in Syria and has larger territorial goals than he is letting on. But the fact remains that when Obama decided to throw his support to the YPG, all Turks and not just Erdogan and his radical Islamic supporters saw this as an anti-Turkish intervention. And they had a legitimate point.
So now Erdogan can paint his incursion as a campaign against terrorists event though he is targeting elements of the Kurdish forces fighting IS. And again I suspect he’s not going to stop at the YPG but as long as Erdogan casts this campaign in this light almost all Turks will support this.
The Dems have their knee-jerk narrative already mapped out. And it’s a simple one; “Orangeman bad, therefore everything Orangeman does is evil even if we wanted it five minutes before he did it.”
Further complicating the situation is that we never had an open ended commitment to protect the Kurds from the Turks, especially in light of the fact the Turks have a point about the YPG. One of the reasons Bolton is out is that he wanted to widen the mission assigned to U.S. forces from how the Obama administration tightly defined it. Only fight IS; Bolton wanted to expand this to also operate against Iran. This has much to recommend it strategically, but Trump rejected as expanding the mission beyond what the public would support. It was certainly beyond what Trump himself would support, which no doubt is why Bolton was s***canned (forced out, resigned, no difference).
Trump may now be getting a lot of bad advice. For instance, I agree with people who are saying Turkey under Erdogan is no ally at all, but has become an adversary. His threats against the EU are proof positive of that. But Trump is being advised by people who let the importance of Incirlik airbase in Turkey override all other considerations. We still have nukes there, and the airbase is vital to U.S. air operations in Central Asia. True, but then what’s so vital about U.S. air operations in Central Asia?
Given these considerations, particularly the fact that we still have nukes in Turkey, it’s obvious we have no compelling interest to confronting Turkey to keep a commitment we never had to the Kurds. But on the other side of the ledger if the U.S. is going to use foreign troops as proxy forces then we do have a compelling interest in showing loyalty to those foreign troop in visible ways. So I would still arm and equip the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and if necessary provide them air support. I wouldn’t lift a finger to help the YPG, and I’d make it clear to the Turks what is within bounds and what is out of bounds.
So while I can’t conclude Trump was right to pull the troops back, I also can’t say he was wrong to do so. But he is wrong when he defends his action with statements that are demonstrably false.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-marine-one-departure-69/
“Q Which of the three choices on Syria that you just articulated in a tweet do you think you will follow?
THE PRESIDENT: Perhaps the last one, I hope. I hope the last one. Of the three, I hope it’s going to be the last one.
Look, we have no soldiers in Syria. We’ve won. We’ve beat ISIS. And we’ve beat them badly and decisively. We have no soldiers.
The last thing I want to do is bring thousands and thousands of soldiers in and defeat everybody again. We’ve already done that.”
We do have troops in Syria. Just as many as before they were pulled back from the border. Pentagon spokesmen constantly (and clearly not deliberately) contradict DJT’s statemen that, “[w]e have no soldiers.” The Turks just landed a few artillery shells near a SOF base in northern Syria. If the Pentagon is confirming none of those troops were injured then obviously exist. They’ve simply been redeployed within Syria. They’re still deployed along border crossings with Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon primarily to prevent Iran from sending arms and personnel into Syria and then on to Hezbollah. They’re still deployed at other strategic sites within Syria.
Then there are Trump’s statements about how decisively we’ve beaten IS. It’s true they no longer control any territory. But until the Turks invaded U.S. and the SDF were conducting raids against IS sleeper cells, financiers, and recruiters. But not anymore because the SDF has to now defend itself against the Turks. So like a forest fire that can restart if the firefighters don’t do a thorough job, IS could reconstitute itself. A fact DJT obliquely admits when he says that he doesn’t want to “defeat everybody again.” If they were so thoroughly wiped out there’d be no one left to defeat “again.”
I still remain supportive of this President. But sometimes he says things that make that job harder.
Another factor is that Obama put such tight restrictions on force levels and rules of engagement that it’s simply a fact that we don’t have enough U.S. forces in Syria to significantly influence events anyway. Trump hasn’t increased force levels in any significant way as far as I can tell. So even if we wanted to, without a larger force in Syria we couldn’t prevent what’s happening now, Turkish forces from coming across the border and attacking Kurdish armed forces, even if we wanted to.
The DoD doesn’t want to. Trump doesn’t want to. And I believe Trump is right that the American people don’t want to. And as I said in my previous comment, there are many good reasons for not wanting to.
Still, I expect to get down voted a lot for laying out what can only be said to be undisputable facts. There is no decision Trump could have made that doesn’t carry with it significant risks. After thinking about it, on balance this may turn out to be the best choice.
But it’s also a fact that Trump doesn’t help himself when he engages mouth without engaging brain. Maybe he meant to say something entirely reasonable, such as we have “no soldiers IN THE TURKISH DECLARED AREA OF OPERATIONS.” But that isn’t what he actually said.
I would bomb Turkey off the face of the earth.
But you see, that was the PLAN all along. All of these skirmishes in the Middle East are just EXCUSES for sending millions of Muslims into Europe to promote the Islamification and ultimate financial ruin of European nations