Former State Department Adviser And American YPG Fighter Debunk Obama’s Support Of Turkish Invasion

A former State Department adviser who served under Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama says that the American support for the Turkish invasion in Syria was a “serious mistake” and made the United States “a protagonist in Syria’s civil war.”

Writing for the Huffington Post, David L. Phillips, who is now Director of the Program on Peace-Building and Rights at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, said that the Turkish invasion of Syria was indeed a false-flag operation as Western Journalism has pointed outrepeatedly.

Phillips wrote that the Turkish army and its allies never engaged ISIS during the operation that was officially meant to liberate the town of Jarablus in the north of Syria.

He also said the Erdogan government made a deal with the Islamic State prior to the invasion whereby ISIS forces would change uniforms and flee to Turkey disguised as fighters of the Free Syrian Army.

Phillips account of the Turkish invasion matches the stories of Kurdish officials and fighters who were in the Jarablus area during the Turkish invasion at the end of August.

Phillips explained that it was not surprising that Turkey made a deal with the Islamic State because the Erdogan regime and ISIS are both affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and share the same ideology.

The former State Department adviser wrote that there is “a mountain of evidence” that beginning in 2014, Turkey has provided weapons, money and logistical support to the Islamist rebel groups that tried to topple the el-Assad regime in Syria.

Phillips also charged that the Obama Administration was fully aware of the real goal of the Turkish invasion in Syria, which was to prevent the establishment of a contiguous independent Kurdish region all along the border with Turkey.

The Kurds call this area, which consists of three cantons, “Rojava.”

Phillips quoted a senior Pentagon official who told CNN that the Turks “never cared about Jarablus,” that was controlled by ISIS for more than two years, until the Kurdish dominated Syrian Democratic Forces made clear that they wanted to end ISIS’ rule over the border town.

He also wrote that Brett McGurk, the U.S. envoy for the war against ISIS, originally had said that the Turkish attacks on the U.S.-backed Kurdish YPG militia were unacceptable.

But that didn’t prevent Vice-President Joe Biden and later Obama from siding with the Erdogan regime.

Biden even ordered the Kurds to stop their advances in the direction of the Turkish border after the liberation of the strategically important town Manbij when he visited Ankara more than a week ago.

A couple of days later, he was taken to task about this “order” by a protester, who was later identified as an American volunteer who fought with the YPG in Syria.

During an election event in support of Hillary Clinton in Cleveland, Ohio, the YPG volunteer heckled Biden repeatedly and reminded the VP that Americans died during the battle against ISIS in Manbij.

Biden silenced the protester, who claimed his friend died during the liberation of the Syrian town, by invoking the death of his own son who died of brain cancer last year.

The American YPG volunteer was promised a meeting with Biden, but in the end he was told the VP didn’t have time to meet him.

Rudaw, a Kurdish news agency, however, decided to track the man down and identified him as Robert Amos, an American citizen who recently returned from Syria where he fought against ISIS with the Kurdish YPG militia.

Amos told Rudaw that the rebel groups who assist Turkey in Syria are “terrorist organizations” and suggested that Biden was talking nonsense when he addressed the situation in Syria and said that the American betrayal of the Kurds could drive them into the arms of Russia.

The YPG volunteer said that many Kurds are outraged and feel betrayed by the Obama Administration after the sudden U-turn in U.S. policy toward Turkey and the Syrian Kurds.

He stressed that he now has the feeling that his American friends who were killed during the battle against the Islamic State in Manbij died for no reason.

Amos furthermore said that the Obama Administration has no unified Syria strategy.

He also said he believes that some officials in the Pentagon didn’t agree with Biden’s statements in Ankara and Obama’s policy in Syria and that this explains why some of the recent criticism of the Syrian Kurds has been walked back by the administration.

In an effort to control the damage done, Obama dispatched McGurk to Rejova this weekend. However, at the same time he also met with Turkey’s autocratic leader Erdogan at the sidelines of the G-20 summit andreassured him of U.S. support for his regime after the botched coup in July.