The Duran Podcast - Spheres of influence in Syria

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Spheres of influence in Syria

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the situation in Syria. We have Israel in Syria. We have the United States in Syria. We have Turkey in Syria. And we have the Kurds. And the Kurds are going to be a problem for these three countries, which have, for the moment, agreed amongst themselves to divide Syria up because the Kurds are...

are a part, a faction of Syria that Erdogan has been wanting to get rid of now for so many years. And this is his opportunity. The Kurds, though, are backed by the United States. And the United States so far signaling that they are going to continue to back the Kurds. I don't know. I'm not so sure how long that commitment's going to hold for. and it also looks like the relationship between Israel and Turkey is also starting to strain. So what is your thoughts on what is happening in Syria?

Meanwhile, Al Jalani is pretending to be the president, the leader of Syria. He's meeting people in a suit and tie now, and he actually hosted the Turkish foreign minister a couple of days ago, which I think tells you everything you. need to know about who's really running the show with Al Jolani? Absolutely. In fact, he's made announcements, or rather his government, the so-called government that he leads, has made all sorts of announcements about how the Turkey's being invited to set up military academies in Aleppo and Homs.

They're going to try and create a strategic partnership with Turkey. I mean, what we're basically seeing in Syria is a Turkish takeover. In fact, Erdogan even made an extraordinary speech. And it was so extraordinary that I even wondered for a time whether it could possibly be true. But it turns out it was in which he spoke to people from his own party in some provincial Turkish city. And he said all of these territories used to be part of our great Ottoman Empire, Aleppo, Damascus, Homs, Hammer, all of these places. And who knows, maybe if the war had, the first world war had ended differently, they would still be part of our country.

And now, you know, by inference, is the moment when we can return there. Anyway, he's made all of those extraordinary things. And Jolani, basically for the moment, is just doing whatever Erdogan tells him. I mean, I think it was in a previous program. We said the Turkish, the chief of military intelligence of Turkey. came to Damascus and Chalani acted as he showed. I mean, it seems astonishing, but apparently was true. Again, it was denied, it was confirmed,

but there doesn't seem to be any doubt about this. So Erdogan has taken over central Turkey. You're absolutely right for him. One of the major priorities is to crush the Kurdish forces in eastern Syria. And there is a personal political dimension to all of this, which I think people you'll fully understand, which is quite apart from the fact that like any Turkish leader, he's going to be very suspicious of a Kurdish protectorate south of Turkey, especially one led by political groups that are aligned with the PKK, which is the Kurdish militia force inside Turkey, that has resisted the Turkish authorities.

But apparently, Erdogan wants to find some mechanisms so that he can stand as president for another term. That will require constitutional amendments in order to achieve those. If he's going to do this properly and legally, he needs the backing of one of the major parties in Turkey. the party he's looking at is a predominantly Kurdish party, but in order to obtain influence over it, he apparently needs to crush the PKK because it continues to exert some sort of influence

over that particular party. So there is this internal dynamic as well. So he's coming after the Kurds, and he's coming after the Kurds in a big way. And we're hearing all kinds of reports, military clashes between the Kurds and Jolani's people. Nobody should be fooled about this. As we said in a recent program, HTS is, it's a fiction. It really doesn't exist. What is really happening is that there are clashes between the Kurds and agencies that are controlled directly by Turkey. that are in effect either Turkish proxies or actual elements of the Turkish military itself.

There's been a fight in Mambitch and all of these sort of things. And this conflict in Eastern Syria is developing and it is getting bigger. Now that in turn is bringing Erdogan into conflict with, the Kurds as two main allies. Now, one is the United States, or to be more precise, the Biden administration. They responded to recent events by saying that they continue to back the Kurds. They've doubled the number of American troops in Eastern Syria from nominally 900 to at least 2000. Perhaps there were 2,000 American troops in Eastern Syria all along. it's possible. But anyway, they're now talking about it. So they say they want to continue to

back the Kurds. Donald Trump may have different ideas. I mean, he said Syria is not our problem. We need to get out. Nobody there is really our friend. We don't want to be involved with the Kurds for very long. So I agree with you. I think there is a big question, Mark, over the long-term American commitment to the Kurds. But there is another party that is involved with the Kurds, and that's Israel. Now, the Kurds have been longtime Israeli partners. Of course, they both deny it, but this is very, very widely known in the region. And the Israelis do not want to see the Kurds defeated in Syria because they have been one of their major allies, not just in Syria, but in the whole region. And they're also another way in which Israel can exert influence

in other parts of Syria, particularly the eastern desert regions, which is the area through which Iran used to send its weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon. So the Israelis are very, very unhappy about Turkey's attack on the Kurds. And you're starting to see articles appear in the Turkish media and in Turkish-aligned media, increasingly critical of the Israelis, articles claiming that the Israelis were secretly backing Assad. and they were really trying to preserve Assad. And at the same time, you're getting articles starting to appear, including a really very extraordinary one,

both in the Israeli media, but also in the NIRCON media in the United States, where support for Israel and support for the Kurds is absolutely fundamental. You're starting to see articles there saying that Turkey is the aggressor in Syria, that it needs to be pushed out of Syria, that it's interfering with the orderly progress of the Syrian revolution. And there's even an article in the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, which is, of course, a NIRCON think tank. by Michael Rubin, who was one of Donald Rumsfeld's people back in the day, and who's still a very, very prominent neocom, who says that the United States should be prepared to bomb and kill Turks. That's exactly what the article says. The United States should be prepared to kill Turks, that Turkey is the aggressor in Syria,

and that it's time for the United States to have this open conversation. And crazily, I mean, I think this is, you know, weird stuff. He says that if we kill Turks in Syria, it really doesn't matter because even though Turkey is a NATO ally, As Syria isn't NATO territory, Article 5 doesn't apply. I mean, you have to read this article to just realize how weird in some ways and fantastical. It is. But, you know, Michael Rubin is, you know, very prominent. neocon, he's been around for a long time. He knows all the other neocons that we've often talked

about. He's part of that world. So you could see such the divisions are starting to develop and build up that. Why doesn't the United States and Israel just allow Turkey to take the territory of the Kurds? What's the reasoning there? Well, I think ultimately the Americans probably will. I didn't see that the Americans have a long-term government. I agree. I agree. For Israel, they don't want to get leverage or they don't get too much control? What's the reasoning there?

Well, the Israelis. Because they partnered up. They all partnered up to- Of course they did. Absolutely. To overthrow Assad and capture and carve up Syria. Exactly. But of course that was yesterday.

Now they're faced with the situation where they have spheres of influence that they're pushing for, they're each trying to divide the Syrian plight to the greatest advantage to themselves. I think that the Israelis have very, very longstanding and deep ties to the Kurds. There's probably quite a significant constituency within the Israeli intelligence and military agencies that wants to preserve that alliance because it has been valuable, to Israel in the past. There's large Kurdish population in Iran, for example, and there's a large Kurdish population in Iraq. And through the Kurds, the Israelis extend, project influence into both of these countries, or so they believe. The Kurds offer Israel advanced potential bases close to Iran,

which Israel could use if there was ever a conflict with Iran, you can come up with all kinds of reasons. I'm not saying they're particularly good reasons, at least not if you take a hard-headed and tough-minded view of this sort of thing. But generally speaking, the issue with the Israelis is that when they expand their influence somewhere, they don't like to pull back. This has been a consistent story.

that a consistent pattern in Israeli policies for many, many decades now. So it's going to require a lot of rethinking in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem before they do decide if they're going to cut the Kurds off if they eventually decide to do that. And I think their instinct will be to push against it because though I am every bit of cynical about Erdogan's anti-Israel rhetoric, as you are and anybody who's followed Erdogan closely, ought to be, nonetheless, he does engage in that rhetoric. There is clearly an anti-Israeli constituency in Turkey itself. And I think that the Israelis probably so to themselves, well, the Kurds have been consistently

reliable allies. We can't be sure that the Turks, over the long term, will be consistently reliable allies in the same way. What happens if Erdogan does not move on the Kurds and just lets them be? Well, then that defeats one of the main objectives that he set out to achieve in In Syria, one of the reasons that he's persuaded people in Syria, in Turkey itself, that this whole enterprise makes sense is precisely in order to put the Kurds in their place. And there are doubts about the commitment to Syria in Turkey. I saw an opinion poll, which after Assad's fall, only a bare majority of Turks, 51%, thought it was good news. So, you know, it's not as if it's a very popular thing in Turkey, about a third of people in Turkey thought it might be bad news.

So it's going to be very difficult for Erdogan to call the whole thing off. And then he still has the problems about getting this Kurdish party in Turkey to support him in his attempt to get another term as president when the current one ends. And he's also got to worry about the fact that the PKK might indeed establish a base in eastern Syria and that the Israelis through the Kurds might get leverage over him. And he might find that he's denied access to the oil wells in eastern Syria, which probably he's keen on getting his hands on. So it's, again, it would be uncharacteristic of Erdogan to simply give up on all of this. No, it seems to be that there's two possible ways, either the Israelis and the Turks, and it really is those two countries now, that are the only major players in Syria, and which will continue

to be the only two major players in Syria. Either the Israelis and the Turks fall out and quarrel over the spoils, which is quite possible, or eventually, after all the various scraps and bitter arguments and all of these things, Some kind of a deal will be agreed. The Israelis agreed that they will do what they can to keep the Kurds quiet in return for their bases. The Kurds are made to make commitments to Erdogan that Erdogan can tap the oil wells in eastern Syria and that they went back the PKK. And in return, Erdogan agrees that the Kurds perhaps agreed to become involved in some way in Al Jalanis you set up in Damascus,

but are allowed to retain effective control of quite a lot of Eastern Syria. I mean, there might be a deal eventually done like that, but it won't be straightforward. In the meantime, by the way, just to say on the other big player, I read and reread and read again Putin's latest comments about Syria. And thinking about what he said very hard, I get the clear sense that he's made a decision to pull completely out of Syria. He talked about the bases, the Russian bases in Syria being converted to some kind of humanitarian purpose. A military base, if it's only going to be used for humanitarian purposes, ceases to be a military base. It is no longer in that case a strategic asset. That looks to me like an elegant way of saying, well, we're going to simply call time on the whole thing.

He spoke at length both about Turkey and Israel and what they're doing in Syria. He made it very clear that the Russians are not going to say. sacrifice, their relationship with Erdogan and with Turkey. Because of what has happened in Syria, despite their own feelings about this, he criticized the Israelis, but in very moderate and measured terms, he's basically saying, look, you broke it, you fix it, we're walking away, we did what we could, now it's your problem. Smart move to walk away. Absolutely.

I thought it was extremely clever. Smart move, yeah. Yeah, don't get bogged down. It's a smart move. Off to Libya, right? Off to Libya, exactly, where they're building all their alternative bases then. Okay. We will end the video there.

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