The Turkoman People’s Republic

The Russian speakers of Eastern Ukraine were not at risk of being killed by Ukrainian forces until Russia’s allies or puppets began the war in Donbass. The Turkomans of Syria have been at risk since the start of the civil war in Syria, that is at least from 2011. It’s understandable that Turkey – especially its army, the bastion of Turkish nationalism – should want to protect the Turkomans (expatriate Turks in their eyes) from the threat of ethnic cleansing.

The greatest similarity between Donbass and the northwest of Syria is in the insidious ways of helping allies across the border. Here’s what happened earlier this week in Turkey:

The editor-in-chief of the Cumhuriyet daily, Can Dündar, and the paper’s Ankara representative Erdem Gül have been arrested on charges of being members of a terror organization, espionage and revealing confidential documents…

The investigation was launched after Cumhuriyet published photos in May of weapons which it said were transferred to Syria in trucks operated by the National Intelligence Organization…

According to the report, the trucks were carrying six steel containers which contained a total of 1,000 artillery shells, 50,000 machine gun rounds, 30,000 heavy machine gun rounds and 1,000 mortar shells…

The photos, published on the daily’s front page in late May, show steel containers filled with mortar shells and ammunition underneath boxes of medicine.

A pro-government prosecutor who was appointed to the MİT trucks case inadvertently admitted in May that weapon-laden trucks made 2,000 trips to Syria…

The reaction from Erdogan’s team amounted to an admission of guilt:

Following the Cumhuriyet report, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said it is “none of anybody’s business” what the trucks contained… “This is a blatant act of espionage.”

…Erdoğan lashed out at Cumhuriyet and Dündar for publishing the evidence and publicly vowed that Dündar would “pay a heavy price” for his report.

The head of the National Intelligence Organization is Hakan Fidan:

In 2014, voice recordings, where he [Fidan], foreign minister Davutoğlu, Deputy Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Yasar Güler, and other military personnel discusses a potential false flag incursion into Syria, was leaked to YouTube and shared across Twitter… [H]e is heard saying, “… [i]f legitimacy [of a possible incursion into Syria] is an issue, I can simply send a few men there [across the Syria-Turkey border] and have them launch missiles over to us. Legitimacy is not a problem. Legitimacy can be manufactured.”

“Legitimacy can be manufactured,” but quality turns out variable, sometimes substandard, as Moscow found out after grabbing Crimea. “Aid convoy” is also a familiar meme from up north.

Erdogan panicked at the leak and blocked YouTube, Twitter, Google DNS and OpenDNS servers for a while. Putin would have cranked up propaganda: no need to block site or arrest journalists when only a tiny minority cares for the facts. Turkey is not beyond hope because, it seems, enough Turks still think that truth matters and exists – not that nothing is real and everything is possible.

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