RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/14/thousands-of-black-people-are-still-slaves-so-w

Every day across Africa, black men, women, and children are captured, bought, and sold into slavery with the Western world paying scant attention.

Every day across the African continent, black men, women, and children are captured, bought, and sold into slavery with the Western world paying scant attention. Human rights groups have marched and battled against abuses noticeably less cruel and evil than human bondage, yet no major organization has attempted to free today’s black slaves, much less taken meaningful steps to raise awareness about their plight.

For instance, in Mauritania, although slavery has been legally banned five times since 1961, it nevertheless persists with tens of thousands of blacks continuing to be held in bondage. While it is forbidden in the Qur’an for Muslims to enslave fellow Muslims, in Mauritania, racism trumps religious doctrine — as it did in the West — as Arab and Berber Muslims enslave African Muslims.

Twenty-five years ago, Mohamed Athié, a political refugee from Mauritania, and I brokethe story of a modern-day black slave trade in The New York Times. Our nascent American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) mobilized the public, and piqued media interest. In Sudan, tens of thousands of African women and children from mostly Christian villages were being enslaved during the jihad raids of the Second Sudanese Civil War.

Americans heard stories of abduction, rape, beatings, forced conversions, and genital mutilation. Between 1995 and 2011, Christian Solidarity International, a grassroots human rights group, liberated more than 100,000 of these slaves in European- and American-funded slave buy-backs.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15036/erdogan-plan-annihilation-kurds

As the Voice of America itself reported on January 23, Erdogan’s plan was to resettle three million or more refugees from other parts of Syria in this “security zone” extending twenty miles deep into Syria. Twenty miles may not sound much, but – the VOA omitted to mention – almost all the Kurdish towns of northeastern Syria lie within that area. So Erdogan’s intention to annihilate the Kurdish presence in that area and replace it with others has been manifest ever since the beginning of 2019.

A whole series of Trump’s Republican supporters in the Senate expressed outrage over his decision, starting with Lindsey Graham (“Pray for our Kurdish allies who have been shamelessly abandoned by the Trump Administration”) and continuing with Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, who remarked: “As we learned the hard way during the Obama Administration, American interests are best served by American leadership, not by retreat or withdrawal.”

It is now clear that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan intended the annihilation of the Syrian Kurds already two years ago. Moreover, his plans became evident to the US military by the beginning of 2019 and were conveyed to President Trump at that time.

In order to disguise his plans, Erdogan revealed them stage by stage, by making first lesser and then greater demands on the US military, to which Trump agreed — sometimes in the course of telephone conversations with Erdogan. So Erdogan was able to hoodwink the US military up to January 2019 and to hoodwink Trump up to the current invasion: Trump resolutely defied contrary advice from the military (and from everyone else).

At first, Erdogan demanded the removal of Kurdish militias only west of the Euphrates river. This was the proclaimed aim of his so-called Operations Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch (the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Kurds from the Afrin area). With that accomplished, he began demanding a Turkish-controlled “security zone” east of the river, to be 32 kilometers deep. The US responded by agreeing to joint US-Turkish patrols in the area. Erdogan demanded that the Kurdish towns in the area should dismantle the fortifications that they had raised to defend themselves from the Islamic State (ISIS). The Kurds agreed, reassured by the US military that this step would remove any excuse for a Turkish invasion.

Finally, in October 2019, Erdogan asked Trump in a further telephone call to remove US troops from the patrols and Trump agreed, believing that by threatening Turkey on Twitter, he could deter a Turkish invasion. The invasion started forthwith. It has been stalled, maybe, now that the Kurds have invited the army of the Assad regime to deploy throughout northeastern Syria up to the Iraqi frontier. If so, the beneficiaries will include Iran, America’s arch enemy, which can now see its yearned-for highway all the way from Tehran to Quneitra on Israel’s border.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15034/syria-kurds-turkey-russia-iran

The U.S. Congress is looking to push back against Erdogan’s brazen foray into northeastern Syria. For months, there has been a bi-partisan effort on Capitol Hill to convince the Trump administration to implement sanctions on Turkey in the wake of its purchase of the Russian S-400 missile system. The events of this past week will likely only escalate pressure by Congress against the Erdogan regime.

“We defeated ISIS,” a Peshmerga general said, “only to see Iran and its Shia militias become stronger. They are filling the vacuum.”

Islamist-led Turkey has now joined those same Iranian-led forces in filling that vacuum — with the full acquiescence of the United States.

On the Iran-Iraq border a few weeks ago, I found myself just a few hundred meters from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), standard bearers of a regime that has practically copyrighted the phrases, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

At the Kurdish Peshmerga military base stood a series of small, white structures spread out across the mountaintops on the Iranian side of the border.

“IRGC observation posts,” said one of my Kurdish hosts, eying the mountains warily.

The Pershmerga generals interviewed in Iraqi Kurdistan seemed eager to talk about the threat posed by the IRGC and the Iranian regime—not only to the Kurds, Israel and the broader Middle East, but also to the United States.