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JEAN-CHRISTOPHE LAGARDE Turkey: “Holland has veto ‘

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arton123391-480x359Paris, March 18, 2016 (AFP) – Jean-Christophe Lagarde, president of the UDI: “What is happening is scandalous. François Hollande fouls and even a crime against the European spirit. It must veto the opening of negotiations with Turkey. “

“Turkey is a state that clearly today disorders relations Daech (organization Islamic state, note), with traffic suspected. This is a state that wants to blackmail the European Union by using millions of poor people who want to escape death and Daech barbarians by dropping them on European roads.

Turkey is a state where, the same day he was discussing with the European Union of a possible future membership, the Erdogan government took control of the main opposition newspaper “.

“This is not a state that respects the democratic rules. And if the European Union will wallow with a state that behaves in this way, which is supposed to be our ally and that actually plays against us (…) whereas the EU suicide, it kills the European project and Mr. Holland carries a serious responsibility. “

Friday, March 18, 2016,
Ara © armenews.com

Russia demands inquiry into Ankara’s abuse of Kurds’ rights

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1b439ece-8eb5-4897-98d0-82194c78ddb7Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has called for an investigation into reports of the violation of Kurds’ rights by the Turkish government in the country’s southeastern region.

The Russian foreign minister made the remarks during a joint press conference with his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Shoukry in the Russian capital, Moscow, on Wednesday.

“Any reports, particularly those documented ones, about rude and large scale human rights abuse and violations of international humanitarian law must be investigated. There are special international procedures for that,” Lavrov said.

The top diplomat called on the international community to respond to the situation.

According to reports from Turkey’s Kurdish areas in the southeast, entire residential blocks have been destroyed in the cities of Cizre and Diyarbakir, a devastation resembling some neighborhoods in Syria after five years of foreign-backed militancy.

There have also been reports of a massacre of dozens or possibly hundreds of Kurdish civilians, including children, in Cizre at the hands of Turkish soldiers.

A report by a rights group also says more than 160 civilians, including 29 women, 32 children, and 24 elderly people, were killed from August to December last year in Turkey’s Kurdish areas.

Lavrov accused Ankara of targeting the Kurds immediately after a deadly attack in the capital city last year, which Turkey blamed on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants without launching an investigation or announcing official findings.

“The Turkish side began to use this as a pretext to justify the ongoing missile and artillery attacks of Syrian territory in the areas traditionally inhabited by Kurds,” Lavrov added.

He further warned that Turkey’s actions in the region were undermining the negotiated cessation of hostilities in Syria as a new round of indirect talks on the crisis is underway between the Damascus government and the foreign-backed opposition in Geneva, Switzerland.

Since last August, Turkey has imposed nearly 60 curfews in its Kurdish regions, disrupting the lives of some 1.4 million people living in those areas.

Kurds make up between 10 and 25 percent of Turkey’s population.

Tensions have been on the rise between the Turkish government and PKK militants since Ankara launched its operations against their positions in southeastern Turkey, northern Syria and Iraq.

PKK militants, who accuse the Turkish government of supporting the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group in Iraq and Syria, have also engaged in a series of attacks against Turkish police and security forces.

Syria peace talks muddied as Kurds declare federal region

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Agence France Presse

504830_img650x420_img650x420_cropGENEVA: Talks to end Syria’s brutal five-year conflict were rattled Thursday by uncertainty surrounding the arrival of a second opposition group and the declaration by Syria’s Kurds of an autonomous region.

U.N. mediator Staffan de Mistura met for the first time late Wednesday with an umbrella delegation including the so-called Moscow Group, which is demanding an equal seat at the negotiating table in Geneva.

But such a move would be hotly contested by the “official” opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) — a broad collection of political and armed opposition factions which joined forces in Riyadh last December.

The HNC is due to have a second official meeting with de Mistura Thursday, where it is expected to insist on its demand to remain the sole opposition representative in the talks.

“That is one of the most important points,” a Western diplomat told AFP, requesting anonymity.

The entry into the talks of the Moscow Group, along with the so-called Cairo and Istana groups, followed Russia’s surprise decision this week to withdraw most of its forces from Syria, where they had been fighting in support of President Bashar Assad.

Western governments had voiced hopes the pullout, expected to be completed by the end of the week, could boost the talks by pressuring Assad.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday his country could ramp up its presence again if needed “literally within several hours”.

In Geneva, it was not immediately clear what impact the inclusion of the pro-Moscow group would have on the talks, or whether it was a gesture from de Mistura to Russia following the pullout.

– ‘Negotiating delegation’ –

The U.N. has not yet clarified what role the Moscow Group would play but its co-president Randa Kassis told reporters Wednesday her camp was in Geneva “as a negotiating delegation”.

Jihad Makdissi, a member of the Cairo group, told AFP Thursday: “We will sit at the table as two (opposition) delegations,” adding that de Mistura had agreed to meet again with the new delegation in the coming days.

The Moscow Group is tolerated by Damascus and has not insisted on Assad’s departure as a condition for creating a transitional government, which is an unequivocal HNC demand.

The HNC and the Western powers that support it meanwhile insist only one opposition delegation and one government delegation can actually negotiate.

The Moscow Group has no troops on the ground in Syria, and is being put forward to “support the idea that there is no united opposition and to cast doubt on HNC’s legitimacy,” the Western diplomat said, adding that adding a second opposition delegation was “a highly contentious issue.”

Adding another level of complexity to the difficult talks, Kurdish parties so far excluded from the negotiations in Geneva on Thursday declared a federal region in areas under their control in northern Syria, as they seek further autonomy.

A wide range of critics have warned this could threaten efforts to forge a united Syria.

Speaking ahead of the Kurdish declaration, de Mistura branded the federalism push as possibly “dangerous”, according to the Swiss news agency ATS.

The Moscow Group said it was working to “lift the embargo” against bringing in Kurdish delegates, while a member of the Syrian government delegation told AFP the Kurds would be “invited to the talks in the next stage”.

– ‘More serious stage’ –

Despite the intricate web of interests surrounding the talks, observers say the current round of dialogue is taking place in a far more constructive atmosphere than during multiple previous failed peace efforts.

The talks — currently indirect — follow a ceasefire between the government and some opposition groups introduced on Feb. 27 that remains broadly in place.

“The talks have entered a more serious stage,” the regime delegation source said.

De Mistura has voiced tentative optimism, backed by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry who heads to Moscow next week to discuss the peace drive.

“We may face the best opportunity that we’ve had in years to end (the war),” Kerry said Tuesday.

The conflict has killed more than 270,000 people and send millions fleeing, many seeking new lives in Europe where the influx of refugees and migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia has created a huge headache for the EU.

Kurd turns on Kurd as Turkey backs new faction in Syria

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A YPG fighter mans a mounted machine gun in the northeastern Syrian province of Hasakeh (AFP)

A YPG fighter mans a mounted machine gun in the northeastern Syrian province of Hasakeh (AFP)

‘Grandsons of Salahadin’ claims to be backed by Ankara and armed by US and ready to fight both IS and fellow Kurds for territory.

ERBIL, Iraq – Turkey is backing a new Kurdish faction within the Free Syrian Army to take back territory from the Islamic State (IS) group and stop the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) from seizing further ground along the Turkish border.

The group, known as the Grandsons of Salahadin after the famed 12th-century Muslim Kurdish leader, has already captured several villages in the IS-controlled border region between Jarabulus and Azaz following Turkish artillery attacks and missile strikes. In response, IS hit the Turkish town of Kilis earlier this month, killing two civilians.

But threats to attack the YPG unless it withdraws from territory seized from opposition rebels during an advance by pro-government forces in northern Syria last month have stoked concerns of a possible “Kurdish civil war”.

Mahmoud Abu Hamza, a Grandsons of Salahadin commander based in Turkey, told Middle East Eye that the group was backed by both the US and Turkey and considered itself part of the international coalition fighting IS.

“Turkey doesn’t support us with arms. Our arms are American,” he said.

Hamza said the group had about 600 fighters who were mostly from the town of Afrin and the Kurdish-majority villages of Syria’s Aleppo province.

A group with the same name previously fought there in 2013, but it was disbanded and its fighters joined other rebel groups.

But Hamza said the group had reformed to confront the YPG, which he accused of siding with the Syrian government and stoking tensions between Kurds and Arabs.

“Kurds in Afrin are our people and we won’t allow anyone to use them to defend the regime. It is not because they are Kurds, but because they are agents of the regime and the Russians,” he said.

“They [the YPG] are against the Kurds. These groups are trying to ignite a sectarian war between Arabs and Kurds and this won’t happen because we won’t allow it. If the YPG does not retreat from Tal Rafat and the Mennagh air base, we will fight them in the area between Jarabulus and Azaz [an area currently controlled by IS].

“This will be the beginning of the liberation of the rest of the Kurdish areas. Daesh will be expelled from this area very soon and will be expelled from all of Syria,” he added, referring to IS by an Arabic acronym.

YPG forces and Arab Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which are both backed by the US, took advantage of Russian air strikes and a pro-government advance to seize territory including the air base at Mennagh from rival rebel groups last month, allowing the Kurds to expand their enclave around Afrin.

Federalism the ‘central demand’

The YPG also controls an enclave around Kobane further east along the Turkish border and has ambitions of capturing the Azaz-Jarabulus border strip from IS to create an extended Kurdish federal region.

On Wednesday, Syrian Kurds met in the city of Ramalan to discuss the creation of a new federal region, while federalism is one of the topics on the table for discussion at peace talks currently taking place in Geneva.

“Federalism is the central demand of Kurds in Syria. Every step has been towards it and now it’s time to declare it,” local Kurdish official Idris Nassan told MEE.

But Turkey fiercely opposes the creation of a federal Kurdish region in Syria and has been shelling the YPG, as well as backing opposition rebel groups in northern Aleppo to halt its advance.

It accuses the YPG of links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and on Tuesday alleged that the YPG had provided training to the perpetrator of Monday’s bombing in Ankara that killed at least 37 people. The YPG has previously denied any links to bombings in Turkey.

“Regarding the explosions in Turkey, we have no idea who is behind those explosions, and we condemn terror attacks that target civilians,” said Salih Muslim, the leader of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), the political affiliate of the YPG, at conference on Wednesday at the American University of Sulaimani (AUIS) in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region.

“Some Turkish parties say Rojava [the YPG] carried out these explosions, but we deny this speculation.

Analysts told MEE that the reformation of the Grandsons of Salahadin appeared to suggest that the US and Turkey were prepared to support groups other than the YPG in the fight against IS.

“The recent attention given to this organisation is clearly meant to demonstrate that a non-SDF Kurdish force that is acceptable to Turkey can be part of the anti-IS campaign,” said Nicholas A Heras, a Washington-based Middle East researcher at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

“This organisation is best understood as Turkey’s attempt to activate a Kurdish proxy in Syria. Turkey is willing to consider a Kurdish force that is part of that equation, but it has to be anti-PKK,” he added.

Galip Dalay, a senior associate fellow on Turkey and Kurdish Affairs at Al Jazeera Center for Studies, also told MEE that Ankara was ready to support a Kurdish force in the fight against IS provided it also opposed the YPG’s military and political ambitions.

Civil war a ‘red line’

But questions remain over the extent of US support for the Grandsons of Salahadin, with US officials denying that the group has been the recipient of US weapons.

“After checking with our forces that provide the ‘Advise and Assist’ mission to the vetted Syrian opposition on the Marea Line, they are not familiar with the Sons of Salahadin,” US anti-IS coalition spokesman Colonel Christopher Garver told MEE, referring to the border area of northern Syria where the US has been supporting the YPG in the fight against IS with air strikes.

“There is no group by that name receiving munitions from the US,” he added.

Complicating the situation further, the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq has also trained about 3,000 Syrian Kurdish Peshmerga fighters to join the battle against IS in Syria, only for their return to the country to be blocked by the YPG amid fears of in-fighting between rival Kurdish groups.

The Syrian Kurdish National Council (KNC), part of the Syrian opposition bloc, has tried to convince the YPG and its Democratic Union Party (PYD) political affiliate to let the fighters enter Syria based on agreements to prevent fighting between rival Kurdish groups.

But Bahjat Bashir, a KNC member and a participant in the Geneva talks as part of the Syrian opposition, admitted that it had no influence over the Grandsons of Salahadin.

“Our red line is a Kurdish civil war,” Bashir said. “But we don’t have any relation to the Salahadin brigade, only to the Rojava Peshmerga.”

Meanwhile, the YPG-backed Hawar News Agency has accused the KNC of supporting attacks by Turkish-backed groups against the YPG and Kurdish civilians in Aleppo.

But the KNC denied those allegations.

“We never support the shelling of civilian people by any force in general. No one could say that the KNC supports the shelling of its own people,” said Bashir.

Source: middleeasteye.net

TURKEY Fighting between the army and the PKK will be “everywhere”

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arton123259-480x320London, March 15, 2016 (AFP) – Fighting between the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish army will now take place “anywhere,” warned one of the leaders of the PKK, Cemil Bayik, a Times interview conducted before Sunday’s suicide bombing in Ankara.

“Until recently the war with the Turkish army had only location in the mountains. Then she moved into the cities. Now there will be fights everywhere, “assured Cemil Bayik British newspaper four days before the bomb car Sunday night. “At this stage of the struggle, all our fighters order to be legitimate,” said the 65 year old man in this interview in the Kandil Mountains PKK rear bases in northern ‘Iraq.

“The Turks looted and burned everything they could in the Kurdish cities where curfews were imposed,” he he said. “So now, our people thirst for revenge (…). This is a new era of struggle of the people. “

The suicide attack Sunday that caused the death of at least 35 people in central Ankara has not yet been claimed but is attributed to the PKK by the Turkish Islamic-conservative government.

“Our struggle now is existential: to be or not to be” assured Cemil Bayik the Times. “Our main objective is the fall (of Turkish President Recep Tayyip) Erdogan and his party AKP. Without their fall, Turkey can never be democratic. “

The Kurdish conflict resumed last summer and has shattered the peace talks with the government with the PKK end of 2012.

Tuesday, March 15, 2016,
Ara © armenews.com

Turkey baked by US Smart bombs and German Billions of Euro intensify Killing Kurd around the clock.

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207992Turkey is Killing non stop Kurds in Iraq, Syria and in Turkey,

army said on Saturday, March 12 it killed 67 Kurdish militants in air strikes on camps and ammunition storage sites in neighboring northern Iraq on Wednesday, Reuters reports.

Jets targeted sites at Qandil, Metina, Avasin, Haftanin and Basyan used by Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants, the armed forces said.

Separately, a bomb blast blamed on PKK militants hit an armored police vehicle near Turkey’s border with Iraq on Friday, Turkish officials said. Two special force police officers were injured in the explosion on a road in Hakkari province’s Yuksekova district, they added.

A ceasefire between the PKK and the state collapsed in July and attacks on Turkey’s security forces have increased amid a surge in violence in the predominantly Kurdish southeast, killing hundreds of people.

Burned to death, beheaded’: Cizre Kurds accuse Erdogan’s forces of civilian massacre

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56e26625c36188f53e8b4581Harrowing accounts of an alleged massacre of dozens of Kurdish civilians in the southeastern Turkish town of Cizre have been collected by RT’s William Whiteman, who traveled to the area following reports of a brutal military crackdown on the population.

Reports of Turkish troops slaughtering hundreds of civilians trapped in the basements of Cizre, which is located in Turkey’s Sirnak province, first surfaced in February. Some 150 people were allegedly burned to death in one of them

That particular claim was made by Turkish MP Feleknas Uca from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, who spoke to Sputnik agency. These and other trapped people were reportedly denied access to food and medical supplies. However, until now, the alleged atrocities committed by the Turkish forces could not be substantiated on the ground.

Whiteman found witnesses who survived the offensive and were able to show the exact place of the mass killing, while providing terrifying details on what had happened.

I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. Erdogan has destroyed our world. He has burned us,” said a female witness, while showing blood stains on the debris of the deadly building.

Three, four – maybe five hundred people. There were old people, women and children – some as young as 10 years old. They killed a heavily pregnant woman,” added the woman, blaming Erdogan for indiscriminately killing innocent people during the so-called counter-terrorism operation against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) separatists.

“Women and children lived here. Erdogan killed all of them with heavy artillery, he destroyed this home,” added the woman.

Turkey president’s businessman friend wants Kurdish party leader beheaded

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Turkey beheadingTurkish businessman Ayhan Babuşçu, who is a close associate of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, issued a statement saying that he wants the beheading of Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chair of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish “Peoples’ Democratic Party” (HDP).

Babuşçu, who is the CEO of Osmanoğulları Holding, posted a picture on Twitter, and which depicts an ISIS executioner holding the head of Demirtaş, according to Evrensel daily newspaper of Turkey.

And the caption above the picture reads, “Wait, these days are near, selo [addressing Selahattin Demirtaş].”

This picture caused quite a stir on the social networking websites, whereupon Ayhan Babuşçu closed his Twitter account.

US: Pentagon approves “Kurd killing smart bombs” contract to sell around $700 mln to Turkey

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png.thumbThe Pentagon has approved a deal to sell $682.9 million worth of an unspecified quantity of smart bombs to Turkey through a Foreign Military Sales (FMS) scheme, defensenews.com has reported.

The Pentagon awarded the contract to Ellwood National Forge and General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems for the sale of BLU-109 bunker-busting bombs and components.

Clashes between the Turkish military and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) resumed in July 2015 after a two-year-long cease-fire, which had come following intense clashes since the mid-1980s between the two parties. Turkish fighter jets have routinely bombed the strongholds of the PKK in northern Iraq, also known as Kandil.

This is the first reported sale of BLU-109 bombs to Turkey. Turkish officials expect deliveries to be completed by 2020.

“The deal was timely as we are deeply engaged in asymmetrical warfare and need smart bombs,” one Turkish military official was quoted as saying by the website.

BLU-109s have been in the Pentagon’s inventory since 1985 and are reported to have been used on fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was mated to a laser-guided system during operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991.

The bomb contains 550 pounds of high explosive Tritonal, a combination of 80 percent TNT and 20 percent aluminum powder. The BLU-109’s tail fuse delays the bomb’s detonation until the bomb has penetrated the targeted bunker, ensuring complete destruction of the location.

Terrorist State of Turkey PM Davutoglu affronts Armenians

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Davutoglu the godfather ISISTurkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu the godfather of Islamic State has made a statement that incites enmity towards Armenians.

Davutoğlu, in an attempt to criticize the pro-Kurdish “Peoples’ Democratic Party” (HDP) of Turkey, said, “They’re collaborating with Russia, just like the Armenian gangs. They’re going and opening a representation in Moscow,” according to T24.com website of Turkey.

Those who wanted defend themselves during the Armenian Genocide are considered “gangs” by Turkey, since these Armenians had taken up arms to defend themselves against the massacres.