Crossfire War – Ankara – Tehran – Damascus Watch – West Asia Theatre: Ankara – Damascus – Tehran/Kirkuk – Baghdad – Washington; Turkey Warns U.S. of Repeated Violations of Airspace BY F-16s – “What We Will Do is Obvious” – U.S. Ambassador Considers The “Matter to Be Closed”
Night Watch: ANKARA – The U.S. is now headed for war with its NATO ally Turkey as the Bush Administration continues to burn bridges in the region.
Relations between Washington and West Asia (Middle East) had been deteriorating for years as Washington invested in an enormously corrupt and self-defeating policy of not only arming the region so heavily, as have Europe and Russia, but also in supporting the scheme of having the Ayatollah Khomeini replace the Shah of Iran in 1979.
Tehran’s government and this war, World War III is the result, and now Ankara’s opposition to Washington is becoming more obvious as is Turkey’s military cooperation with Iran. Both Ankara – Tehran are opposed to the Kurdish communities in their own countries and also to the Kurds in northern Iraq so for months now the Pentagon has conducted surveillance flights of F-16s over Turkey’s airspace along Iraq’s northern border. [TURKISHPRESS]
The most recent denial that it was intentional has come from Washington’s Ambassador to Ankara, Ross Wilson, who stated, prior to a dinner with the Inter-Parliamentary Friendship Group that the violation by the F-16s was an “accident” and “they consider the matter closed.”
However, the matter is not closed to Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan who, in an interview with NTV channel responded, “We warned them not to repeat this… If this happens again… if this takes a different dimension, what we will do is obvious.” That obviously means open fire.
An official protest was made by Ankara on Tuesday. Turkey’s General Staff says the two F-16s on May 24, the most recent violation, remained in Turkey’s Hakkari province for four minutes. The province borders northern Iraq and is where Ankara has been massing troops for its invasion of Iraq’s Kurdish region to prevent Kurdish groups there from supporting separatist Kurdish militants in southeast Turkey, which have been active since 1984. Thirty seven thousand people have been killed in southeast Turkey since then due to either Kurdish attacks or military responses from Ankara.
www.crossfirewar.com
Judyth Piazza chats with Henry M. Holden, Aviation Historian
