Partial transcript of Moderate Rebels PR

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They’re all now talking about Turkey as the lead aggressor against Syria. It’s the base of everything.
Max: All the psyops, every journalist who wants to take a little toe tap jaunt over the Syrian border, I’m not going to name any names,
Rania guffaws.
Max:…or any Ralph Stedman impersonators.
BEN laughs like a robot.
Max; But you know that’s what, Turkey plays the role in many ways that Pakistan played in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Ben; There are so many parallel’s to the CIA’s [sic] covert war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and we need to keep in mind that it wasn’t just Pakistan but also Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia spent billions of dollars helping the CIA arm and train the mujahideen [apparently the US doesn’t fund or run the CIA, the Orientals do] who again were far right Islamist extremists who became eventually al Qaeda and the Taliban. [sic sic sic!] Just like the so-called moderate rebels supported by the CIA and the Gulf States and Turkey in Syria metastasized [sic] into ISIS.
Rania: Also Turkey’s border, Turkey allowed like tens of thousands of foreign fighters to come join the jihad in Syria.
Max: So that’s ISIS, I mean ISIS is a byproduct.
Ben: Of course. And the Turkish border, the southern border with Syria, is known as the jihadi highway. And even Joe Biden, as we mentioned in a previous episode, acknowledged that Turkey, and of course Saudi Arabia, were supporting, openly, many of these Salafi jihadist groups including ISIS. This is pretty well documented at this point. And actually I interviewed at the Real News a former Turkish Counterterrorism official, Ahmet Yalla, the former head of couter Terrorism for the Turkish National police, and he was basically disciplined and kind of pushed out, he later left the country because he was pushing back against the Turkish government’s policy of supporting ISIS. You know, states are complex entities of course, we talk about the Deep State, and Ahmet was in charge of counterterrorism for the police, and the police, cause they’re responsible for domestic security, ostensibly, but also crushing protests, et cetera, but he was actually concerned about the threat that ISIS terrorism presented inside Turkey. So of course as the head of counterterrorism for the Turkish national police, he was concerned about ISIS influence, but then he had members of the federal government that were coming to him and pressuring him saying no you need to let these ISIS fighters take refuge in Turkey and go and fight in Syria because of our foreign policy prerogatives. So you had this contradiction between the national and the international policies of the Turkish State. And then he is eventually kind of pushed out. He now lives in the US. Ahmet Yaila. And he’s openly talked about how Erdogan had a policy of supporting ISIS! This should not be controversial. In fact he wrote an article in Foreign Policy about this recently, but this narrative has been constructed that the war in Syria is just about a bloodthirsty dictator who likes to kill people for fun, and the foreign states around him, NONE of which are democracies, wanting to bring Democracy to Syria somehow Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars to bring Democracy to a country when they’ve never had democracy in it’s entire history!
Max laughs.
Max: SO where does Turkey stand now. They’ve taken Afrin, you know Erdogan has met with Putin, they’ve talked about purchasing the S400 system from Russia which is, over the f35 from the US, uhm, the situation is fluid, uhm, Turkey as I mentioned before is a part of the peace process, with Iran and Russia and Syria, where is the situation now and also I think we should mention Qatar. Which is another real major player here, along with al Jazeera, I mean where do they, where do they fit in.
Ben: Yeah I mean I don’t want to take the entire episode but of course just explaining some of the nuances for listeners, I mean we could spend an entire episode, multiple episodes talking about Turkey’s policy in Syria, in fact we should do some coverage of that in the future. So I don’t have time to go into that in great detail here but what I can say is that it looks very clear that Turkey’s policy is trying to carve up Northern Syria and turn these areas into spheres of influence. So you mentioned the city of Afrin, which was traditionally a Kurdish majority city, that was controlled by forces that actually were somewhat sympathetic to the Syrian government, and in fact asked for support, the YPG in Afrin in fact asked for support from the Syrian army to help fight the Turkish army and the salafi-jihadist so-called moderate rebel proxies that were embedded within the Turkish army, ethnically cleansing civilians from the town of Afrin. About two thirds, 200,000, of the Kurdish inhabitants of that town were ethnically cleansed and it was taken over, one of the first things they did was put up a Turkish flag, not a Syrian flag, and you can see videos from the Turkish state media in which children in school in Afrin, this is inside Syria, are being brainwashed and told to chant slogans thanking Erdogan, thanking Turkey, there are photos of Erdogan on the wall, all the little kids are waving Turkish flags. There’s something similar going on in Aleppo and Drablus AlBab, a lot of these other Northern Syrian cities that are near the Turkish border. Turkey is clearly trying to carve this territory up. And it looks like – we’ll see what happens – the Syrian government of course wants to regain all its territory but it looks like that might not be what happens. It looks like foreign powers may come to an agreement and allow Turkey to essentially annex this territory or at least turn it into a kind of sphere of influence. So it’s hard to say exactly what’ll happen there. Iran hasn’t taken as much of a pro-Turkish line as Russia has in the past year and a half as Russia and Turkey have grown closer together, so who knows. Russia may agree that in order to end the war in Syria and bring about peace, that Turkey can take over parts of Northern Syria, against the will of the Syrian government. That’s a possibility. As for Qatar. Qatar is this strongest supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood in the region, along with Turkey, and what’s interesting about this split in the Gulf is that this blockade of Qatar by Saudia Arabia and UAE has pushed not only Qatar a little closer to Iran, although that’s a little exaggerated, but it’s also pushed Qatar even closer to Turkey. And if you look at TRT world, Turkish state media and al Jazeera, both of them in the past several months since this blockade began have been extremely supportive of eachother. So al Jazeera is going a bunch of pro Erdogan coverage and TRT world is doing a bunch of pro Qatar coverage. And there are a variety of reasons for that. Of course they’re close trade partners.
Max; That’s called like a “reach around” or something?
Giggles.
Ben: But Turkey again is governed by the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar, since the beginning of the so-called Arab Spring, in late 2010 and 2011, and the Muslim Brotherhood has played a key role in some of these uprisings particularly in Egypt, and if you look at al Jazeera’s coverage, al Jazeera was basically the voice of the Muslim Brotherhood in the region. Since then there have been some other media outlets that have emerged, specifically Middle East Monitor, which is extremely pro Muslim Brotherhood and is funded by Muslim Brotherhood operatives
Max: Middle East Eye. Al Araby
Ben: Yeah. Al Araby Al jaded which is not the same thing as Al Arabiya which is Saudi regime media…

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