Turkey bluffing over action to confront Syria: Commentator

Press TV has interviewed Joe Iosbaker, a political commentator in Chicago, to discuss the likelihood of Ankara taking action to counter the Syrian army and allied groups on choking up a supply link on which militants relied to get weapons and logistics. 

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Davutoglu has made these remarks on his way back from his visit to the Netherlands. Now that is, before the agreement on the truce that was hammered out by the US’s John Kerry, Russia’s Sergei Lavrov and the UN’s Staffan de Mistura, they persevered to hammer out that truce on Syria, it was announced late Thursday, but then given Turkey’s previous actions regarding Syria, how probable is it that Ankara is going to take some kind of action about Aleppo to offset what those three men persevered to put in place?

Iosbaker: The question is will Turkey try to rely upon the corridor to Aleppo in support of its mercenaries who are trapped there? They have sponsored these armies for five years now. The blood of over 200,000 Syrians is on their hands and certainly I believe that Erdogan and Davutoglu would be willing to kill many more but are they willing to lose?

Last week as you said the supply lines from Turkey to Aleppo were cut by Syrian troops backed by Russian air support and I think if Ankara was to go forward with this, I do not think they can count on anything from NATO much more than speeches. I think it is a pretty risky gamble.      

Press TV: Most of the media hype that is about the threat of the mass flow of refugees into Turkey and subsequently towards Europe, mostly began after the major advances by the Syrian army against terrorists in Aleppo. Now if it were not for Aleppo, do you think there would be any Turkish and/or Saudi threat of military action in Syria?

Iosbaker: I think that they are threatening a direct invasion because they are desperate but I think that it is really not just Turkey we have to consider. Turkey I think is trying to provoke a wider war. They need a victory. They cannot allow the Kurds and the Syrian government to militarily defeat them with the help of the Russians.

And I think that you have to go back to what is the puppet master, what is the United States government willing to do and I think that there are two things right now that the United States is not willing to do. I think it is not willing to back a loser because this is an election season and the one thing that the party in power, the Democrats in power, cannot do is lose a war. That is the lesson of George W. Bush and I think secondly still the other thing that Obama does not want, he does not want a wider war and that would promise a wider war. So I think that Turkey is bluffing.  

Press TV: Well I am glad you mentioned the US because they have themselves accused Turkey repeatedly of providing equipment, refuge and cross-border access for terrorists involved in turning Syria into ruins and yet we hear Ankara blaming the Russian airstrikes for contributing to the refugee crisis. Your thoughts on that.

Iosbaker: Well I just think that that is absurd when the foreign-backed mercenaries have fought for five years and there is a quarter of a million dead and there were already seven or eight million internal refugees and now the Turks have opened up the borders and allowed a million refugees to pass through, I think that they are manipulating the war that they have been one of the two major regional partners along with the Saudis, they are the ones responsible for those refugees first and foremost.

What the Russians did unlike any of the other governments that are intervening there, the Russians were invited in under the legal right of the Syrian government to seek aid when they were under attack.

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