Obama strikes again

Obama Humiliating Marines 

To Impress His Muslim Brother, Erdogan

Caroline Glick: In the wake of revelations that Turkey is giving hard support to the Islamic State, the US has changed its position from equal support of the Kurds and the Turks, to supporting the Turks exclusively.

While official Washington remain focused on the deal President Barack Obama just cut with the ayatollahs that gives them $150 billion and a guaranteed nuclear arsenal within a decade, Obama has already moved on – to Syria. 

Obama’s first hope was to reach a deal with his Iranian friends that would leave the Assad regime in place. But the Iranians blew him off. They know they don’t need a deal with Obama to secure their interests. 

Obama will continue to help them to maintain their power base in Syria though Hezbollah and the remains of the Assad regime without a deal. 

Iran’s cold shoulder didn’t stop Obama. He moved on to his Sunni friend Turkish President Recep Erdogan. Like the Iranians, since the war broke out, Erdogan has played a central role in transforming what started out as a local uprising into a regional conflict between Sunni and Shiite jihadists. 

With Obama’s full support, by late 2012 Erdogan had built an opposition dominated by his totalitarian allies in the Muslim Brotherhood. By mid-2013, Erdogan’s Muslim Brotherhood- led coalition was eclipsed by al-Qaida spinoffs. They also enjoyed Turkish support. And when last summer ISIS supplanted al-Qaida as the dominant Sunni jihadist force in Syria, it did so with Erdogan’s full backing. 

For the past 18 months, Turkey has been ISIS’s logistical, political and economic base. According to Brett McGurk, the State Department’s point man on ISIS, about 25,000 foreign fighters have joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq. All of them transited through Turkey. 

Most of the antiquities that ISIS plunders in Iraq and Syria make their way to the world market through Turkey. So, too, most of the oil that ISIS produces in Syria and Iraq is smuggled out through Turkey. 

According to the US Treasury, ISIS has made $1 million-$4m. a day from oil revenue. In May, US commandos in Syria assassinated Abu Sayyaf, ISIS’s chief money manager, and arrested his wife and seized numerous computers and flash drives from his home. 

According to a report in The Guardian published last week, the drives provided hard evidence of official Turkish economic collusion with ISIS. Due to Turkish support, ISIS has become a self-financing terrorist group. With its revenue stream it is able to maintain a welfare state regime, attracting recruits from abroad and securing the loyalty of local Sunni militias and former Ba’athist forces. 

Some Western officials believed that after finding hard evidence of Turkish regime support for ISIS, NATO would finally change its relationship with Turkey. To a degree they were correct. Last week, Obama cut a deal with Erdogan that changes the West’s relationship with Erdogan. Instead of maintaining its current practice of balancing its support for Turkey with its support for the Kurds, under the agreement, the West ditches its support for the Kurds and transfers its support to Turkey exclusively. 

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