Searching for casus belli: The Turkey’s assault on Kassab?

Searching for casus belli: The Turkey’s assault on Kassab?(RT).

There appear to be clear indications that this border town in the Latakia province of Syria, just south of Turkey's Hatay province, was attacked by "NATO-backed mercenary forces" and members of the "Turkish Armed Forces" on March 21, as worded by the independent researcher and peace activist, Cem Ertür. 

This military action took place a mere nine days before Turkey's local elections, which reaffirmed Tayyip Erdogan's position as the nation's unquestioned leader. And just days before election day, a leak revealed that Turkey had been planning a false flag attack that would have allowed Turkish troops to intervene directly in Syria's not-so civil war.

Legal justification aside, Turkey has been involved in the armed effort to unseat Bashar Assad since the very beginning, supplying, arming and supporting opposition forces overtly as well as covertly – and one should not lose sight of the fact that this armed effort, now in its fourth year, has so far claimed the lives of more than 146,000 people.

At the same time, Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) has also been active in providing "weapons and ammunition, bulletproof jackets and electronic devices" to opposition forces described as "Al-Qaeda" by the politician Abdullatif Sener, an erstwhile friend of Erdogan's and now one of his most vocal critics.

Arguably, Turkey thus appears to support the Free Syrian Army (FSA) as well as the Islamist opposition to the Damascus regime, the Al-Nusra front as well as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (better known by the acronym ISIS or ISIL), both popularly known as "Al-Qaeda affiliates." And now, the claim is that the Turkish army was part of the opposition assault on the Syrian city of Kassab, where ethnic Armenians make up two-thirds of the population.

Local villagers indicate that over 1,500 mercenaries conducted an outright assault, under the cover of heavy artillery fire from Turkey's armed forces. The Turkish army apparently used mortar, artillery and rocket shelling by armored vehicles, placed just across the border, and coordinated heavy machine-gun fire by helicopters making surgical sorties.

According to the Tehran-based Al Alam International News Channel's exclusive report of March 25, "Al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra front have raised their flags over several Turkish military tanks near Kassab, as a sign of having the area under their control.”

The report argues that the town is of strategic importance, as holding it allows "militant factions ... to smuggle in arms for themselves, [and] to demand a cut when other factions use those crossings.” The fact that "Kasab and its surrounding villages are Armenian Christian-dominated areas" seems irrelevant.

In New York, Syria's Permanent Representative to the UN, Dr. Bashar al-Jaafari asserted that the "UN Secretary-General and the president and members of the Security Council (UNSC) have been alerted by sending seven official letters to the UNSC on the dangerous violations committed by Turkey in the north of Syria,” or the province of Latakia, regarded as the heartland of Assad’s Alawite sect.

But Turkey's alleged covert action south of the province of Hatay did not bring about any lasting changes on the ground in Syria, as Assad's forces, backed by Lebanese Hezbollah, seem to be gaining more and more ground. Just a few days ago the UK's Defense Secretary Philip Hammond, while visiting Qatar, affirmed that "it is now clear, partly because of fragmentation within the opposition, [that] the Assad regime has been able to regroup and consolidate its position.”

On March 26, Syria's President Assad even had a meeting with an Armenian parliamentary delegation headed by the MP Samvel Farmanyan. The latter conveyed a message from Armenia's President Serzh Sargsyan, condemning the Turkish-backed terrorist attack on the town of Kassab. 

Even though Syrian government forces claimed to have retaken Kassab on April 1, the president of the Syria National Coalition, Ahmad Jarba, toured Latakia province, including the town of Kassab, as reported by the Lebanese paper Daily Star. The above-mentioned Turkish activist (or terrorist, if you will), Mihrac Ural, recently spoke to the Turkish opposition press, making no bones about his convictions: "This peace town of Kassab is whimpering under the sounds of bombs and gun fire. It is being bombarded by soldiers and jihadist gangs under the command of Erdogan. Jihadists are leisurely crossing the border and attacking the town.”

The fact that the province of Latakia is an Alawite stronghold and Kassab an "Armenian" town appears particularly poignant in view of Erdogan's domestic policy of Sunnification, and the approaching date of April 24 when the victims of the Ottoman policy of ethnic cleansing in the period between 1915 and 1923 are commemorated. 

President Sargsyan's message to Assad reveals a certain unease that could make this year's commemoration of the deportation of numerous Armenian intellectuals in 1915, as a preamble to the enactment of the so-called Tehcir Law on May 29, particularly painful for Turkey. Still, it would appear that officially Turkey's government is not all that much concerned about the events in Kassab.

In contrast, the search for a legally-binding casus belli that would transform Tayyip Erdogan into a war hero and "Conqueror of Syria" appears to continue, particularly now that Bashar Assad is re-gaining the upper-hand in the conflict.Hmmmm.......Erdogan ' a Muslim couldn't do such things. A Muslim could not commit genocide'....yup the Armenian genocide never happened...neighter did this.  Read the full story here.