‘Turken kunnen bloedbad voorkomen, maar kijken toe’
Aldus Amerikaanse functionarissen over de steeds nijpender wordende situatie in Koerdische stad Kobani.
En uiteraard is dat omdat Turkije de Koerden als een grotere bedreiging ziet dan IS.
De opmerkingen waarvoor de Amerikaanse vicepresident Joe Biden onlangs zijn excuses aan Turkije en de Golfstaten aanbood, waren weliswaar diplomatiek onhandig, maar ook heel erg waar:
“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” So said Polish defector and poet Czeslaw Milosz when accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. The conspiracy of silence around the Gulf States’ links to extremism in Syria hasn’t been unanimous. But there were still many ears ringing after Vice President Joe Biden fired off at Harvard last Thursday. Biden stated that “[his] constant cry was that our biggest problem is our allies—our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria.” This was because “they were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war…[that] they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad—except that the people who were being supplied were al Nusra and al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.” Biden even said that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan had admitted to him that Ankara “let too many [fighters]” enter Syria.
