Memories of the 28th Century

The war in the Mid East has taken some strange turns. What has gone on in Syria is strange and largely inexplicable, but the confusion there has led to much greater chaos elsewhere. The elected government lost the support of a significant part of the military, and a civil war started or heated up anyway. There had been small revolts in various parts of the country, but that was too small to worry about, and most of the units disbanded at the end of a battle and they returned to their homes. But the large scale dissertations turned a minor civil war into a major civil war, a war that makes less sense every time it comes to mind.

Syria has been an odd place for a long time, but in modern times it became odd when the Baath Party took control in the 1960’s. The Baath was an Arabic Socialist movement that was important in Egypt for a time, in addition to being the ruling party in Iraq for some time and the ruling party in Syria since the 1960’s. Then there was Hafez al-Assad taking control of the country in 1970. He was nominally Baathist, but he was a dictator, rather than democratic. To add a lot to the pot, Syria is chock full of religious and national minorities. Although the majority is Sunni Muslim; there are significant numbers of Alawites, Ishmaelis, Druze, and other Shiites. The majority speaks Arabic, but there are significant minorities of Kurds, Assyrians (Aisors), Armenians, Turkmens, and Arameans. The Arabic speaking Sunnis make up about two thirds of the population, but the Al-Assads have championed the minorities like themselves, Alawites. There used to be many Christians, but most of them left when Lebanon was made a separate country in the 1930's; that was the Christian part of Syria, so there weren't many left in the rest of the country.

Culturally the country is more open than others in the region. The religious restrictions that are enforced in Saudi Arabia and encouraged in other countries have been largely ignored by the secular Baathist government. Remember this characteristic, because it became important after the desertion of a large part of the military, and a large proportion of the deserters were Sunnis, while the people of other religions were more likely to stay on with a regime that defended their people.

The absurd American invasion of Iraq had destabilized the region and left a large part of Iraq without effective government. With the departure of the U.S. troops that part of Iraq was up for grabs. Then there was the mass desertion in Syria, which further destabilized things, and Mr. the Baghdadi took advantage and started trying to carve out a country for himself. I can’t fault Mr. the Baghdadi for his timing or his desire to conquer a country, but he seems to be a fanatical Muslim of a new stripe. He seems to have missed most of the Koran in his reading; that has been his edge, and it probably will be his undoing. Initially, he went after some parts of Iraq that were being ignored, and he quickly grabbed the Northwest corner of that country, but the Kurds weren’t willing to let him take any more of their territory, and they have been the most avid to wrest his plunder back. Taking territory from the Kurds made him look like a nice guy to the Turks, who have been at war against the Kurds forever. During the same time Syria was becoming vacant, and the military that had controlled the Eastern part of the country had mostly deserted, so al-Baghdadi’s irregulars moved in.

So we had al-Baghdadi's pirates against the governments of Iraq and Syria and opposed by the Kurds. While al-Baghdadi's pirates did not have any overt allies, they have many goals in common with the Turkish government. Both are enemies of the Kurds, and al-Baghdadi's pirates controlled a fair amount of oil, and Turkey has no significant oil reserves of its own. Al-Baghdadi wasted no time to buy an ally. al-Baghdadi needed a source for weapons and money to pay for imports. Turkey has a long border with Syria and needed oil. The present government of Turkey is Sunni and religious, so it agrees with DAESH on religious matters, more or less. The recent revelations that Turkey is the primary market for oil from areas controlled by DAESH were not surprising.

The information that Turkey has been supporting DAESH makes a number of matters easier to understand. For example, Turkey required extensive persuation before it would allow the U.S. to use bases in Turkey for attacking DAESH. It also explains why Turkey shot down a Russian air plane; Russia is busy attacking Russia’s enemy. Turkey has impeded the war aginst DAESH as much as possible. It refused to allow Kurdish troops to attack through Turkey. Urkey has been at war against the Kurds for a long time, but at this point the Kurds were attacking DAESH. fs



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Syria
http://www.mintpressnews.com/211910-2/211910/
http://www.breitbart.com/national-se...ses-from-isis/
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-1...-nobody-asking