Friday, April 30, 2021

Iraq snapshot

 Friday, April 30, 2021.  Turkish forces continue to terrorize villagers in northern Iraq, veterans suffering from exposure to burn pits gets some attention from US Congressional members, and much more.


In yesterday's snapshot, we were noting how outlets like ANADOLU AGENCY tip the scales when covering the conflict between the Turkish government and the PKK.  As if yesterday's example wasn't sufficient, this morning finds them offering "Turkey continues elimination of terror in N. Iraq."

There is no way to justify that headline.  It's not factual in any manner.  You could put "says" in the headline and you might be on stronger ground -- "Turkey says it continues to eliminate terror in N. Iraq."  Than you'd be presenting the government's claim as a claim.


Still wouldn't pass the common sense test -- the 'elimination' has been taking place since the 1980s and still isn't 'complete.'  Never will be because the actions Turkey has elected to take don't end terrorism, they breed terrorism.  What the government is doing is, in fact, terrorism.


A populated area of Iraq is bombed daily and has been for years.  Turkey has (over objections from the Iraqi government) sent ground troops into Iraq.  This is terrorism.  Villagers are killed in these attacks carried out b the Turkish government.  This breeds terrorism.  "Turkey continues breeding terrorism in N. Iraq" would be an accurate headline.  Khazan Jangiz (RUDAW) reports:


Turkish forces are now less than three kilometers from the center of a village in Duhok’s Amedi district, a mayor told Rudaw on Thursday, saying troops were dropped into the area during a bombardment on Wednesday. 

“An intense bombardment was carried out last night until early morning. Turkish forces were dropped into an area less than three kilometers away from the center of [Zinare Kesta] village,” Sarbast Sabri, the mayor of Kani Masi sub-district, told Rudaw’s Nasir Ali on Thursday.

The area is an important area for grazing livestock, he added, saying it has “complicated the situation for the people in the area.”
No one was killed in Wednesday’s bombardments but locals are scared, said the mayor.

Villagers elsewhere in the district have told Rudaw they are terrified to leave their homes, and are unable to take their livestock to the nearby mountains, following recent Turkish attacks.

On April 23, Ankara launched a new cross-border military offensive against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), dubbed Operation Claw-Lightning and Claw-Thunderbolt. Several villages in the border area of Metina were bombed by Turkish forces. 

The PKK, which has headquarters in the Kurdistan Region’s Qandil mountains, is a Kurdish armed group which has fought the Turkish state for the increased rights of Turkey’s Kurds for decades.


Steve Sweeny (MORNING STAR) reports:


ANTI-WAR protesters have told of being kidnapped at gunpoint by security services in Iraqi Kurdistan at the behest of Turkey and the region’s ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).

Giving an exclusive interview to the Morning Star just an hour after his release, 35-year-old teacher Aso Hiwa said that he and his fellow protesters refused to back down despite their three-day ordeal.

“The Asayish [security service officers] caught us on the way to the demonstration. We were walking in pairs carrying flags and leaflets,” Mr Hiwa said.

“But they surrounded us and held us at gunpoint. This wasn’t anything else but a kidnapping. We were held as political prisoners.”

He was part of a group from Tevgara Azadi, a legal political organisation linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

They had called a demonstration against what has been described as a genocidal attack by Turkey in the mountainous province of Duhok, which lies in the north of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region.

“If we don't do anything, it will be the end of the Kurds. [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan wants a demographic change, to eliminate us. This is a very serious operation and part of a genocide," Mr Hiwa said.


That is the goal of the Turkish government, eliminating the Kurds -- within Turkey and outside of Turkey.  Complete elimination?  Possibly but more likely just eliminating a significant number to destroy their opponents  That's what Kurds are.  They have no national homeland, they weren't at the table when various leaders were carving out the Middle East of today.  They have been targeted and that's what breeds terrorism.  Now they are feared because governments like Turkey are too ignorant to realize there is no way out of this battle with violence.  The only way out will be for Turkey to recognize the pain inflicted upon the Kurds and move towards an understanding that will end the conflict.  But ignorance and fear prevents this from happening.

Dilan Sirwan (RUDAW) notes:


Three days before the United States-led coalition launched its invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was in Tehran, worried about the consequences the forthcoming war would have on his country and Iran, but also plotting with the Iranians about how to prevent a Kurdish state emerging from the aftermath, Abdul Halim Khaddam, who served as foreign minister and vice president of Syria, has revealed in his memoir.

Khaddam, who also served as vice president to Assad’s father and predecessor, was present in the meeting between Assad and the Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and a subsequent meeting with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as they discussed possible outcomes of an American attack on the regime of Saddam Hussein and what position they should take if US troops invaded their mutual neighbour. 

How the Kurds would fare was a concern raised by both sides, Khaddam recounted in his memoirs published by Sharq al-Awsat.

“We must be wary of the establishment of a Kurdish state, and keep in mind the idea that the Kurds of Iran are Iranians, the Iraqi Kurds are Iraqi, and the Turkish Kurds are Turkish,” Khaddam recalled Khatami as saying. 

“In this regard, the Turks must be reassured and their fears dispelled. There has to be cooperation between us, you, and the Iraqi opposition on this matter,” he added.

Though Turkish representation was not present in the meeting, it appeared that both the Iranian and Syrian leaders wanted Ankara to join their efforts to establish spheres of influence on a post-Saddam Iraq. The common ground for all three sides was the Kurds.

“The main ground for cooperation between Syria and Turkey now is the issue of the Kurdish state, and this brings together all the different components in Turkey, the military and others, because this worries Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq, and we must coordinate on this issue,” Assad had said in the meeting, according to Khaddam.


Turning to the US, Adrienne Robbins (WCMH) reports:






After fighting for our country, some veterans in Ohio say they have come home only to fight for their lives. While serving overseas, many say they were exposed to toxic burn pits, which led to life-altering or even ending conditions.

Many veterans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq are familiar with burn pits, including Andrea Neutzling.

“They are constantly burning, always burning and when I say trash I mean like everything from our base,” said Neutzling.

Plastic, batteries, and human waste are some of the things Neutzling said were burned in these pits. Thousands of veterans are now claiming to be ill from breathing in the smoke, including Neutzling. These veterans also said it has been a fight to get the VA to help them.

“He served his country for 14 years and here he’s dying from serving his country and they are not taking care of him in a way that they should be,” said Danielle Robinson.

For more than a decade, Danielle’s husband Heath served in the Ohio National Guard, and at the age of 35, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He told Danielle he had been exposed to burn pits.

“The oncologist right away was shocked and gave him four to six weeks to live,” said Robinson.

Heath died at the age of 39. Danielle said, in the last year of his life, the family had to fight the VA for his benefits. In Congress, there are several bills working on making it easier for these veterans to get help. One of them, introduced by Ohio Senators Sherrod Brown and Senator Rob Portman, is named the Heath Robinson Burn Pit Transparency Act.

“The Department of Defense has to do better high up people in the department of defense we’re pretty certain knew about this,” said Senator Brown, (D) Ohio.


When the burn pits issue was first being raised, Bully Boy Bush was in the White House.  Since then, Barack Obama has served two terms as US President, Donald Trump has served one term and Joe Biden is currently serving a term.  But still the victims of burn pits suffer.  There's been much talk, much hand wringing but not any real and significant action on the part of the US government.  


Burn Pit 360 is an organization that has fought for over ten years now to force the government to deliver on the promises it made to those who served:


Burn Pits 360 is the only 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization to offer an independent burn pit exposure registry in which family members can record the names of warriors who served the nation but have passed away due to illnesses from toxic injury. We are entirely dedicated to improving post-deployment health outcomes for current and former military personnel.


Below is this week's SCHEER INTELLIGENCE where Robert Scheer speaks with journalist and anti-war activist David Harris.




The Vietnam War is one of many heinous stains on American history that to this day often is told through a revisionist lens or outright ignored. Yet the truth remains beneath the layers of whitewashing that the U.S. government sent thousands of Americans to slaughter and be slaughtered over a conflict that had everything to do with Cold War ideologies and nothing to do with justice or freedom. The death tolls are still shocking to read: it is estimated that 2 million Vietnamese civilians were killed during the war, along with 1.1 million  North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters and 58,220 American soldiers.

The conflict also inspired an anti-war movement described as “one of the largest and most successful youth-led resistance movements in American history” in the 2020 film “The Boys Who Said NO!” Approximately 570,000 Americans, many of whom were conscientious objectors who refused to be drafted into the Vietnam War, a refusal that led to  up to five years in prison for  3,250 resisters.. One such anti-war activist and anti-draft organizer was David Harris, who became a prominent journalist  after two years in prison, during which he became estranged from his wife, Joan Baez.. In this week’s installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” Harris joins Robert Scheer to discuss the movement they were both a part of as well as “The Boys Who Said NO!,” which features Harris, and a recent collection of the journalist’s works, “My Country 'Tis of Thee: Reporting, Sallies, and Other Confessions” published by Heyday Books.

“[The Vietnam War] was not just a matter of mistaken policy,” says Harris. “This was going 10,000 miles from home and killing three  million people for no good reason. It's the textbook definition of evil. And that confronted everybody who came of age during that time, with the question of, ‘What are you going to do about it?’” 


And you can pair that with Tom Engelhardt's essay at COUNTERPUNCH:


War in Our Time

In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that, as the Vietnam War began winding down in 1973, the draft was ended and war itself became a “voluntary” activity for Americans. In other words, it became ever easier not only to not protest American war-making, but to pay no attention to it or to the changing military that went with it. And that military was indeed altering and growing in remarkable ways.

In the years that followed, for instance, the elite Green Berets of the Vietnam era would be incorporated into an ever more expansive set of Special Operations forces, up to 70,000 of them (larger, that is, than the armed forces of many countries). Those special operators would functionally become a second, more secretive American military embedded inside the larger force and largely freed from citizen oversight of any sort. In 2020, as Nick Turse reported, they would be stationed in a staggering 154 countries around the planet, often involved in semi-secret conflicts “in the shadows” that Americans would pay remarkably little attention to.

Since the Vietnam War, which roiled the politics of this nation and was protested in the streets of this country by an antiwar movement that came to include significant numbers of active-duty soldiers and veterans, war has played a remarkably recessive role in American life. Yes, there have been the endless thank-yous offered by citizens and corporations to “the troops.” But that’s where the attentiveness stops, while both political parties, year after endless year, remain remarkably supportive of a growing Pentagon budget and the industrial (that is, weapons-making) part of the military-industrial complex. War, American-style, may be forever, but — despite, for instance, the militarization of this country’s police and the way in which those wars came hometo the Capitol last January 6th — it remains a remarkably distant reality for most Americans.

One explanation: though the U.S. has, as I’ve said, been functionally at war since 1941, there were just two times when this country felt war directly — on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and on September 11, 2001, when 19 mostly Saudi hijackers in commercial jets struck New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

And yet, in another sense, war has been and remains us. Let’s just consider some of that war-making for a moment. If you’re of a certain age, you can certainly call to mind the big wars: Korea (1950-1953), Vietnam (1954-1975) — and don’t forget the brutal bloodlettings in neighboring Laos and Cambodia as well — that first Gulf War of 1991, and the disastrous second one, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then, of course, there was that Global War on Terror that began soon after September 11, 2001, with the invasion of Afghanistan, only to spread to much of the rest of the Greater Middle East, and to significant parts of Africa. In March, for instance, the first 12 American special-ops trainers arrived in embattled Mozambique, just one more small extension of an already widespread American anti-Islamist terror role (now failing) across much of that continent.

And then, of course, there were the smaller conflicts (though not necessarily so to the people in the countries involved) that we’ve now generally forgotten about, the ones that I had to search my fading brain to recall. I mean, who today thinks much about President John F. Kennedy’s April 1961 CIA disaster at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba; or President Lyndon Johnson’s sending of 22,000 U.S. troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to “restore order”; or President Ronald Reagan’s version of “aggressive self-defense” by U.S. Marines sent to Lebanon who, in October 1983, were attacked in their barracks by a suicide bomber, killing 241 of them; or the anti-Cuban invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada that same month in which 19 Americans were killed and 116 wounded?

And then, define and categorize them as you will, there were the CIA’s endless militarized attempts (sometimes with the help of the U.S. military) to intervene in the affairs of other countries, ranging from taking the nationalist side against Mao Zedong’s communist forces in China from 1945 to 1949 to stoking a small ongoing conflict in Tibet in the 1950s and early 1960s, and overthrowing the governments of Guatemala and Iran, among other places. There were an estimated 72 such interventions from 1947 to 1989, many warlike in nature. There were, for instance, the proxy conflicts in Central America, first in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas and then in El Salvador, bloody events even if few U.S. soldiers or CIA agents died in them. No, these were hardly “wars,” as traditionally defined, not all of them, though they did sometimes involve military coups and the like, but they were generally carnage-producing in the countries they were in. And that only begins to suggest the range of this country’s militarized interventions in the post-1945 era, as journalist William Blum’s “A Brief History of Interventions” makes all too clear.

Whenever you look for the equivalent of a warless American moment, some reality trips you up. For instance, perhaps you had in mind the brief period between when the Red Army limped home in defeat from Afghanistan in 1989 and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, that moment when Washington politicians, initially shocked that the Cold War had ended so unexpectedly, declared themselves triumphant on Planet Earth. That brief period might almost have passed for “peace,” American-style, if the U.S. military under President George H. W. Bush hadn’t, in fact, invaded Panama (“Operation Just Cause”) as 1989 ended to get rid of its autocratic leader Manuel Noriega (a former CIA asset, by the way). Up to 3,000 Panamanians (including many civilians) died along with 23 American troops in that episode.

And then, of course, in January 1991 the First Gulf War began. It would result in perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 Iraqi deaths and “only” a few hundred deaths among the U.S.-led coalition of forces. Air strikes against Iraq would follow in the years to come. And let’s not forget that even Europe wasn’t exempt since, in 1999, during the presidency of Bill Clinton, the U.S. Air Force launched a destructive 10-week bombing campaign against the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.

And all of this remains a distinctly incomplete list, especially in this century when something like 200,000 U.S. troops have regularly been stationed abroad and U.S. Special Operations forces have deployed to staggering numbers of countries, while American drones regularly attacked “terrorists” in nation after nation and American presidents quite literally became assassins-in-chief. To this day, what scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson called an American “empire of bases” — a historically unprecedented 800 or more of them — across much of the planet remains untouched and, at any moment, there could be more to come from the country whose military budget at least equals those of the next 10 (yes, that’s 10!) countries combined, including China and Russia.

A Timeline of Carnage

The last three-quarters of this somewhat truncated post-World War II American Century have, in effect, been a timeline of carnage, though few in this country would notice or acknowledge that. After all, since 1945, Americans have only once been “at war” at home, when almost 3,000 civilians died in an attack meant to provoke — well, something like the war on terror that also become a war of terror and a spreader of terror movements in our world.

As journalist William Arkin recently argued, the U.S. has created a permanent war state meant to facilitate “endless war.” As he writes, at this very moment, our nation “is killing or bombing in perhaps 10 different countries,” possibly more, and there’s nothing remarkably out of the ordinary about that in our recent past.

The question that Americans seldom even think to ask is this: What if the U.S. were to begin to dismantle its empire of bases, repurpose so many of those militarized taxpayer dollars to our domestic needs, abandon this country’s focus on permanent war, and forsake the Pentagon as our holy church? What if, even briefly, the wars, conflicts, plots, killings, drone assassinations, all of it stopped?

What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and came home?


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