Dangerous misunderstandings
venerdì 3 ottobre 2014 English 0 commenti
Il Giornale, October 3, 2014 Call it misunderstanding, call it error of assessment, but there are really too many of those around, and this is something that may put you in mortal danger: the White House’s secret services are worthless, and the US President is risking his life. Obama himself admitted that the intelligence information on Isis were not good; the analyst Michael Wilner writes that Israel is misled by wrong American information. Now an irreparable paradox is giving us the idea of how much one can get confused about the strategy against ISIS, of how much the West is proving unable to understand its dangerousness, and how it is actually lacking of analysis and foresight. At least four hundred people have left Germany in order to fight side by side with the militants of the Islamic State and of other Jihadist organizations, not only following their foolish passion, but on the wave of an imprudent attitude shown by the police forces.
While the German Minister of the Interior, Thomas de Maiziere, was giving yesterday those alarming figures and announcing measures aimed to “prevent them to come back and launch attacks here”, the head of the Bavarian counter-terrorism department, Ludwig Schierghofer, revealed that the police had encouraged Islamic extremists to leave the country and go in Afghanistan and Syria to fight the Jihad. “We did it to protect our people”, he explained. That is to say he was trying to blithely get rid of them using a secret regulation established in 2009. It was just one year ago that the German authorities came to understand that they were not only strengthening the ranks of those beheaders, by that time already organized in an outright army, but they were also inviting them to come back, well trained and ready to attack the German citizens. Perhaps, this outburst of candor will be followed by other similar admissions, since there are a lot of European terrorists around, coming especially from Belgium (four hundred of them), France, the UK, Denmark, Holland, and from Italy too. As it seems, foreign people that joined terrorists’ ranks are by now around twelve thousand. The feeling is that, even without those German-style encouragements, there has been an abysmal ignorance anyway. Now Holland has already implemented a law allowing to seize the passports of those who joined the Jihad, and the UK is about to do the same.
Yet, the biggest confusion is on the field: Obama particularly cared about Turkey joining the coalition, but at the beginning it had refused. Nonetheless, now the Parliament, according to Erdogan’s wishes, voted for a participation so active that, in the end, Turkey will be the only country having those famous “boots on the ground”, while all the others will graciously keeping themselves in the “heavenly kingdom”. We are starting to glimpse that Turkey is doing that not only out of hate for Sunni terrorism (after all, Erdogan is a great militant of the Muslim Brotherhood), but also for its own national interest. In fact Turkey, which aims at a new regional order, is particularly bothered by the chaos on its border caused by the clash between Isis and tens of thousands of Ankara’s ancient enemies, the Kurds.
The danger for Turkey does not come from ISIS, it is all about the confusion on the border, about its sworn enemy Assad to be defeated, and it is about the Kurds, the aforementioned ancient enemies. Yesterday, by the way, a Kurdish organization staged a rally in front of the Italian Parliament, protesting both against ISIS and Turkey. The pretext on which Turkey finally decided to come to loggerheads was the endangerment of the tomb of Suleiman Shah, the grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, in the city of Kobane, near Aleppo, where Kurds and ISIS’ militants are harshly fighting. The Turkish army is strong, as it is strong Erdogan’s interest in Syria as well.