This, at least, is the result of an instructive poll carried out recently amongst Turks.
Here’s the three main takeaways:
- Erdogan’s popularity is at a relative low point.
- 49% of Turks don’t want their military in Idlib, vs. 31% who do.
- 60% don’t think refugees will return home after the war, 71% think that they damage the economy, and 77% don’t want to give them citizenship.
So, in combination, this explains pretty much everything about recent events in Idlib and on the Greek-Turkish border.
Erdogan’s popularity is going down, so he needs to do something.
However, the Turkish public doesn’t want to get too deeply drawn into Syria. Which is logical, considering that Turkey is an upper-middle income sort-of-democracy with a conscript army. Tolerance for casualties is limited.
They can demonstratively hammer the SAA with drones, but getting drawn into a serious ground conflict with Syria (let alone Russia) over Idlib is not something they want to do. Hence blaming Syria for the deaths of the 30 odd Turkish soldiers, even though it was almost certainly Russia that was responsible.
However, the SAA’s operation to retake Idlib is undoubtedly creating – and will continue to create – tons of refugees.
Recall that Idlib is by far Syria’s most “oppositionist” province: Only 9% have a positive opinion of Assad (at least as of 2015). Even the provinces that fell to Islamic State were around 30%.
Many of those people, such as foreign jihadists, are going to flee the SAA offensive regardless, e.g. the Uyghur terrorist families that have been colonizing ethnically cleansed Christian villages.
Second, the Syrians themselves have a cynical interest in bombing the hospitals and bakeries – for real, this time. To encourage all these people to leave.
But the Turks are extremely strained as it is – the refugee flows are already fundamentally reshaping their demographics, compressing into a decade a process that took several decades in Western Europe.
Some 395 Syrian babies are born each day in Turkey, said professor Murat Erdogan, head of the Migration and Integration Studies Center at the Turkish-German University in Istanbul, explaining how prominently refugees bear on the demographic equation. “In 10 years, Turkey’s demographics will be in the hands of the Syrians,” he told Al-Monitor.
“There are 3.5 million registered Syrian refugees but the real number is higher than that. There are also around 1,000 Afghan and Iraqi refugees [illegally] crossing to Turkey from the southeast daily,” Erdogan said, adding that border control is still not thorough.
Stressing that the number of Syrian refugees has shot up to nearly 4 million from 58,000 at the break of the war in 2011, Erdogan predicts Turkey will have some 6 million Syrians in the next decade, making up at least 7.5% of the country’s overall headcount.
So of course it’s reasonable for them to unload all this biomass onto the EU.
I’d be doing the same in their shoes.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Anatoly, you conveniently forget Turkey’s role in creating the situation in Idlib i.e. supporting the jihadists among the Syrian rebels. And this is who Russia is specifically targeting. Therefore, Turkey is not innocent at all; and therefore, they have a responsibility in housing the Syrians from Idlib.
By the way, over 90% of the so called refugees at the Greek-Turkish border are not Syrians from Idlib nor are they Syrians but Afghans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshi etc. Note, they are not from war zones and do not qualify as refugees.
Assad has played this well by emphasizing that his beef isn’t with the Turkish people.
Will add that the majority of the Syrians at the Greek border are those who arrived in Turkey before the recent upsurge of Idlib fighting.
The history of Turkish demographics is one of assimilating many ethnicities, so there’s nothing really new going on here.
Certainly not to Greece where the local populace is showing that it’s had enough with any new imports. Howzabout Poland, Hungary or even Ukraine? 🙂
Fortunately, Greece now has a government which is slightly more Helleno-centric than the extreme Leftists that were in power previously so they are resisting the invasion more effectively. If there were really Helleno-centric then they could screen for any Syrian Antiochian Christians (commonly known as Greek Orthodox) and even the uniate Melkites on the conditions they ditch the Pope. These communities are essentially Byzantines, they still call themselves Rum which essentially means Byzantine and are of very similar genetic stock. They could be relatively easily Hellenised over one generation by altering their last names and learning Greek again. Unfortunately, very few of them would be in the invasion wave as they are very loyal to Assad and live in areas of Syria which have been mostly peaceful throughout the war.
Even when the Greeks were letting them through the migrants were not staying
Something close to half a million passed through the Balkans without settling, and honestly why would they, when Germany and Sweden are just a bit further up north
The smart thing to do would be for Syria, Turkey, and the EU to strike a deal on shipping the refugees to the Sahel via Libya where they could be used to settle the region and eventually form a ruling 80-85IQ caste over the 70IQ locals.
Anatoly, your over-reliance on Western sources tends to produce this flawed analysis. Where did you get this idea that Assad is waging a war on bakeries? What makes you think that “refugees” that Turks unleashed on Europe came from Syria?
Turkish soldiers are donning ISIS banners and fight alongside jihadists – this is how they got bombed. “Upper-middle income democracy” my ass!
The ‘refugees’ in Turkey are largely Syrian though, certainly in the 3/4 range.
I’ve been a great fan of Assad for years, and while I don’t believe he is intentionally bombing bakeries (I think Anatoly was being humorous), it does benefit President Asschad to expel the worst anti-government elements – largely Sunni, lower IQ than the Syrian average, etc.
Putin and Erdogan meeting in the Kremlin today (with English subtitles):
My take on this clip is that both parties were careful to put on a somber outward appearance but that the fundamentals of the Syrian conflict and Russo-Turkish relations were never truly in question. I don’t say this as some Candide; have a look at Erdogans statements from 4:14 and you’ll see what I mean.
The main thing to remember, I think, is that a few dozen, or even hundreds, of dead Syrian or Turkish servicemen only matter so far as their deaths change the public mood. This is less true of Russia and the United States, who are on the whole more sensitive to casualties, but still stands as a good guideline to geopolitics.
A mass-sterilization campaign for Idlib and East Ghouta, implemented during 1980s, would have prevented this war. But Hafez Assad obviously wasn’t bright enough. Somehow, I doubt his son understands that he needs to bomb bakeries as part of his military strategy…
What really happens here is that psychopathic American think-tankers project their own ideas about warfare onto America’s adversaries. This is where the stories of bombed bakeries came from. It’s common for US/Israeli airforce to attack civilian infrastructure, therefore Assad/Russia must be doing this too.
And since Karlin relies on Western sources, he eats this up.
Nice bioengineering there. Would the same stunt work on Catalans? 😉
I wonder whether the movement to ban landmines was financed and planned specifically to facilitate these migration waves.
Europe never should have banned landmines. It was sloppy, emotional thinking.
Landmines optimize the use of manpower, through signaling value. Nothing shows you mean business as much as a field of antipersonal mines, and they can be safely fenced in with razor-wire and clearly marked. It is only in these places that are at war, or where they can’t maintain fences, where they can cause accidents.
We do have to operate in the realms of realism if we’re being serious – there’s no way an underdeveloped 1980s Syria embroiled in the Lebanon conflict could have engaged in a mass sterilisation campaign, even if it would have been a great positive in the long run.
I don’t think it’s terribly unrealistic however that Assad has bombed ‘hospitals’, bakeries, or other civilian infrastructure at some point or another. It’s war after all, and Syria has seen lots of urban combat. Al-Nusra regularly used schools and hospitals as command centres doing the Aleppo battle.
But of course, the Western narrative of intentional evil and muh millionth last hospital in is total nonsense. I’m sure AK knows this.
How hard can it be? Pretty sure India was doing it.
For some reason China appears to be missing in all of this action despite vital national security interests at stake.
One of the 4 main armed groups in Idlib are Uighurs. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-45401474
There could be thousands of Uighur jihadists in Idlib. So the front line of the Syrian war has a lot of bearing on Chinese internal. If Uighur jihadists manage to sneak back into China, some would provide terrorist know for reigniting the insurgency that was largely crushed by 2015.
China has been active in boosting border security to prevent Uighur jihadists from returning. China has funded border security posts in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Chinese paramilitary even patrol the Tajikistan border on the Tajik side of the boundary. (Use of paramilitary rather than army units was done as a gesture of respect to Russian primacy in Central Asia.) This shows the issue of Uighur jihadists in Syria is very much on the mind of security officials, but for some reason action doesn’t extend to Syria. Why doesn’t Russia press China more to at least financially help out in the war?
The Russian nationalist sympathy and sometimes outward support for Turkdom is very strange. Russians are Europeans. There may be a few disagreements with Europeans from time and time, and Russians may straddle Europe and Asia but they are fundamentally Europeans. The flirtation with the Mongols is misguided.
First, you speak as if barrel bombing the last hospital and bakery in
AleppoIdlib is a bad thing. In reality it is great and makes for hilarious memes even if it is mostly fake.Your second problem is that you seem to have missed the “for real, this time”.
Greece needs all of its military aged males to defend Greece and Cyprus. However, a few Greeks did volunteer in various Syrian militias. There is a strong case to be made for Greek volunteers and military to support General Haftar in Libya.
This piece that aired on 60 minutes on 2/17 mentions 1,125,000 migrants over the last 5 years have entered Greece:
https://youtu.be/HQdBh9PVitA
Countries of origin of the 252 migrants and “refugees” detained in Greece so far, per Greek govt:
Afghanistan: 64%
Pakistan: 19%
Turkey: 5%
Syria: 4%
Somalia: 2.6%
Iraq, Iran, Ethiopia, Morocco, Bangladesh, Egypt: 5.4%
Erdogan might be having buyers remorse about those Uighurs and North African jihadis he invited to Syria.
To mitigate Pakistanification he might just try and get as many jihadis as possible killed in Idlib and offload the rest to Europe.
The memes never change.
They even had another Bana al-Abed in Idlib. Though this time they didn’t try and pretend 6yo Syrians tweet in fluent English.
Do I understand correctly, that they are still paying Erdogan? Just not giving him the “raise” he asked for? Seems pretty shameful.
On a very small scale, no?
Such wignat musings are rather silly. China has done more for Russians than any other European state in the last… Twenty years? Maybe thirty? Russians should look out for Russians, and using non Europeans as a tool against enemy Europeans is perfectly valid.
That said most of both normie Russiams and Russian state apparatus is still retarded enough to see “partners” or even “friends” in the EU. But what else you can you get from geriatrics and low information polulace.
Turkish soldier from Gaziantep who died yesterday in Idlib. One can only wonder to what extent faces can be deceptive
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESWOO6uXsAA6s_9?format=jpg&name=900×900
What’s wrong with Mongols?
https://blagovest-elista.ru/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/05EAEA08-BC7C-4B7B-93A5-44894105BB76.jpeg
https://egov-buryatia.ru/upload/iblock/9aa/9aae30e3cef58d539b8b656dd8858778.jpg
Genetically, they are much further from the Turks than any Europeans, including the Finns. And culturally (if we keep in mind the traditional culture), they are probably also much further from the Turks than any Europeans.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a5/b8/ce/a5b8ce70087c2a340b5b7fe8d1666951.jpg
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to say that the Turks are bad, it’s just very strange to mix Mongols and Ottoman Turks.
Of course by “Europeans” you really mean “Anglos and their assclown posse”, and Russians are not fundamentally Anglo. Russians would rather be Chinese than Anglo.
Interesting overview on Syria:
No this is an abomination, the idea of using non whites to kill whites to further your petty nationalism is one of the worst things there is.
No, I do not mean Anglos. If the Russians want to throw their lot in with Turks and Mongols whose only contribution to world civilisation is the yurt, then so be it. But they should stop speaking a European language and convert.
There’s some confusion here. The Mongols are much further from the Ottoman Turks than the Turks are from the Germans. If we keep in mind the cultural affinity – this table gives an idea
https://d.radikal.ru/d36/2003/d6/05535dfe7636.png
(the Azerbaijans are the same Turks)
but political alliances are a very different case from time immemorial
That proves nothing. However, it is encouraging to see endogamy among Greeks is one of the highest of the Christian groups with only Armenians scoring higher. In an ideal world mixed marriages would be punishable with a hefty fine, tax penalties and a custodial sentence.
The messy civil war in Syria has gotten a lot of press coverage the last few years, but virtually nothing has been reported about what really happened there. The Syrian government engineered a massive population explosion – to the point of outlawing the sale and possession of contraceptives. When food ran out, the government was no longer able to keep control and the centralized state collapsed. It’s an old story that has been almost totally suppressed from the news media.
We hear that the problem is that the ruler of Syria – Bashar al-Assad (to my knowledge the only evil dictator whose initial training was in Ophthalmology) – was so evil that his brutal oppression created the civil war. Assad was no saint, but he was no Stalin either. While he was nasty in suppressing dissent, for the average Syrian if you didn’t oppose the government Assad would pretty much leave you alone. A lot of governments around the world can’t say that much.
We hear that the United States armed nutjob Wahhabist extremists to take out Assad (for reasons that, as usual, make zero sense) and it backfired as the United States (inevitably) lost control of their lunatic proxies. Well yes, a lot of truth there, but still not the main story.
We hear some reference to the problem being ‘global warming’ or the more catch-all (and thus less falsifiable) phrase ‘climate change’ was the issue: there was a drought, the crops failed, and hunger and poverty created the instability. Closer, but still not the core issue.
The explanation is that the Syrian government deliberately engineered a massive population explosion. Seriously, they made the sale and possession of contraceptives a crime! (See “Demographic Developments and Population: Policies in Ba’thist Syria (Demographic Developments and Socioeconomics)”, by Onn Winkler).
The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical care, warfare, and people fleeing the country. Oh, and people fleeing the country doesn’t work when the entire world ends up like this…).
A doubling time of 18 years. Think about that.
2010: 22 million people (actual)
2028: 44 million people (projected)
2046: 88 million people
2064: 176 million people
2082: 352 million people
2100: 754 million people
Syria is mostly arid plateau, it’s about 2% of the land area of the United States – about the size of the state of Washington (whose population is 7 million, with abundant fresh water and arable soil, and that has had generations of steady development). Could a poorly-capitalized Syria with limited resources accommodate such a massive population growth over so comparatively short a time? No it can’t – and it didn’t. No matter what Assad or the United States did or did not do, Syrian demographics guaranteed that something bad would happen, one way or the other.
And don’t forget: a stable or slowly growing population is ONLY a good thing if it occurs because people are careful not too have more children than they can reasonably support. A population that is stable or falling because it is has hit the ceiling is very different – when looking at population growth rates, if they start to fall it is of fundamental importance to understand WHY they are falling.
Now as far as weather goes, there were a couple of dry years before the collapse, but weather is always like that. Last year in Syria there were record rainfalls. If Syria’s population had been stable at 5 or even 10 million, they could have coasted on water stored in the aquifers until the rains came back. But when the population increases so much that you drain the aquifers even when there is plenty of rain, then when a temporary drought hits you have no reserve and it all falls apart (does this sound like California?)
Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria’s aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria’s rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless.
If the rains had been good every single year – which is impossible – it would only have pushed the point of collapse back a few years, at most.
And there’s something else to remember: we keep hearing that nations need to grow their populations to become more militarily powerful. People must have six children each or those evil people in Tyrannia and Fanatistan will outbreed us and conquer us! How powerful do you think that the Syrian government is now? Not very. Syria would be much stronger with ten or even five million people who were unified and well fed, than it is today with 20 million who are fighting each other in a civil war and splintering into the chaos of ethnic and religious strife. Sure, all other things being equal God is on the side of the bigger battalions, but massively producing children that you can’t provide for is not usually the best strategy.
It is astonishing that something so obvious, so blatant, has been effectively censored from public discussion. But of course, if it became possible to speak of how the rich forcing population growth upwards creates profits for a few and misery for the rest, why, there might be some opposition to such polices. Perhaps even worse, the rich could not coast along on their wealth claiming that mass poverty is somehow an inevitable consequence of free markets, or automation, or climate change, or socialized medicine, or rock music – instead of something that they deliberately created with malice aforethought.
I do not blame the Syrian people for this debacle. I blame the Syrian government for treating their people as if they were cattle. Yes, Bashar al-Assad has blood on his hands, but not so much because he shot a few protestors. It was because he, and his predecessors, engineered a population explosion that turned Syria into a screaming hell of misery and chaos.
I also blame those academics and journalists that went along to get along, that have suppressed nearly all mention of the economic and environmental effects of demographics, and who have allowed the rich to escape having to answer for their actions. For shame.
Today Syria. Tomorrow the World.
Could have fooled me. Quick, name one difference between a so-called “European” and an Anglo.
As far as I can tell, “European” is just off-brand Anglo.
Last night I was reading about urban planning in Algeria – as one does – and noticed that despite some attempts to move the population to new cities away from the coastal plain they are still building cities – usually with Chinese and Vietnamese labour – on the country’s most arable land. (A recent example being Sidi Abdellah in the Mitidja plain south of Algiers). Under French rule there was a time when Algeria was the world leader in wine production as well producing citrus fruits and a lot of other food, now it is increasingly dependent on imports for its food supply. The population is expected to hit 50 million in the next 10-15 years so they are going to have problems.
My concern though is where are they going to go if the country can’t support them. A lot of them have close family members who are citizens of France, and in recent years many have also settled in Spain, England, Germany, and Belgium. I can see Algerians using these family connections to get into Europe and that’s not mentioning the potential for refugees after a collapse.
Strange, the Vietnamese wage a 2-front-war against Khmer Rouge & China, while being under US sanctions and ruining themselves with socialist planned economy, still managed to massively ramp up their literacy-rates and brought down their TFR rapidly.
Anatoly’s smart-fraction theory doesn’t seem to hold up.
There is no discussion about it,
because it validates the ruthless E-/SE-Asian nations’ approach and abortion-numbers. Neither the Western loonberals and Cuckservatives want this.
Keep in mind that despite their agressive family-planning those countries still depend partially on emigration & labour-export to take the pressure off.
It all boils down that mankind has no need for a significant portion of Arabs, SS-Africans, Latinos, Pakistanis and even many Westerners.
Dead weight.
I’ve decided that my favorite apologia is Mongolian apologia. The other day, I heard a Mongolian say that:
The Chinese were racists who built the Great Wall to keep Mongols out, and that Mongolia really should begin at the Great Wall. And the Mongols were full of modern values like tolerance and democracy.
I can laugh about it because Mongolians aren’t a demographic threat, and the Chinese are Sinicizing the majority of their population. But imagine if they were the explosive line on the World’s Most Important Graph and seeking to regain their greatest historical extent, and we didn’t have nukes.
The welfare may be better in Germany and Sweden, but the weather isn’t. No matter how bad living in Greece is, compared to Germany and Sweden, it’s still better than their s*#t hole countries of origin.
For transparently fake home-front propaganda, though, nothing tops the A Gay Girl in Damascus op:
If this MacMaster guy isn’t a spook, I’ll eat my hat.
I’m all for adapting some of Israel’s policies to our benefit. It’s not all that long ago that some mixed marriages were illegal.
You sure all those are Mongols? Some look very Russian to me.
How? Its not like one group of whites owes another group of whites something. People only owe a duty to their own kinsmen.
These are photos from Kalmykia and Buryatia. The ones who look like Russians. of course are Russians. But the rest are Mongols (Kalmyks and Buryats are direct descendants of Mongol tribes who fought under the leadership of Genghis Khan).
Here’s another photo of Russia Patriotic Mongols
https://www.baikal-media.ru/upload/2019/04/BR1Y9821.jpg
But aside from jokes, what’s wrong with Mongols? These are quite peaceful people, they have the largest (among all the peoples of the world) brain, and quite a high IQ
Aha, that’s what I thought.
Nothing much. I’m just interested in appearances.
Not that there would be absolutely anything wrong or bad about that.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Ungern-Sternberg-1920.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gay_Girl_In_Damascus
Yes, I remember it too. One of the best trolls of history.
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/scaled/2011/06/12/article-2002854-0C87EE4D00000578-828_308x185.jpg
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2002854/A-Gay-Girl-Damascus-Tom-MacMaster-40-blogger-Amina-Arraf.html
Ugly middle aged white American learns language, history, culture, customs and mentality of Middle East and impersonates young beautiful Arabic girl so perfectly that the whole world is fooled.
White man could be anything he wishes to be.
Another proof of absolute superiority of white race 😉
Nope, it was legit one-man operation purely for fun and giggles.
He was caught because of IP, and because he picked random woman’s pic from the internet.
Spook would know what is IP and what is reverse image search.
Spook would use proxy server, and pick some photo that is not online, and whole Western world would have no choice than to go for regime change in Syria to save Amina as early as 2011.
Amina was at the front pages, it was really big deal at the time.
If one person can do this, what can few people working together, or sizable organization do? If anything, this episode should be waking call for everyone who still trusted anything that is on the internet 😉
BTW, you may know that S.M.Stirling is one of A. Karlin’s favorite science fiction authors (despite being ultra hard core Zionist and Russophobe).
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/review-game-of-thrones-7
Amina was regular poster on his mailing list and fooled here everyone, including the old SM master 😉
https://groups.io/g/stirling
And the beat goes on in Syria…
https://twitter.com/barbarastarrcnn/status/1236061601029111809
Russia is not a European nation, neither is Turkey. Russia shares the same traditional family model with China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, together with much of Eurasia.
Look at these three leaders:
https://media.voltron.voanews.com/Drupal/01live-166/styles/817×459/s3/2019-04/03BA9731-5894-4A3E-8966-38478E02E12D.jpg
Yes, these three leaders have different ethnicities, different religions, different languages, their countries have different geographies, different economies, different lifestyles, yet they have one thing in common, that is their traditional family model, namely the ‘exogamous community family’. Hence they are aligned within many supranational bodies such as the SCO.
The ‘exogamous community family’ has, of course, largely ceased to exist in the second part of the 20th century, but it has shaped the outlook, worldview and organisational style of those nations, and further, it has transcended into the state structure and mode of operation of public and private organisations running these societies.
Family models are the single most important factor of (sub-conscious) affinity between nations, forming the basis of long-term alliances more so than any other factor. Russia is not a European nation, neither is Turkey, they never were. Both are closer to China or to Central Asia than they are to Western Europe, or Africa, or Southeast Asia, all of which lack the organisational discipline and the suppression of the individual that is inherent to the community family, which has certain advantages as well as shortcomings, depending on time and context.
The reason why, then, Turkey and Russia are not easy allies is the dilution of exogamy in the case of Turkey within the second part of the last millennia by Arab-Islamic endogamy. Which is the same reason why Russia has problems in partially endogamous Caucasus, but not, for example, in -equally Moslem- Tatarstan which is exogamous to the bone.
Cuba confirmed for Asiatic
Amena Shaladi was a pretty funny troll too:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170423082722/https:/twitter.com/AmenaShaladi