Turkish Warplanes ‘Neutralize’ More Kurds in Iraq

Today’s Turkish press boastfully trumpets the fact that its nation’s jets have “neutralized” two more Kurds in northern Iraq. The Turkish Defense Ministry tweeted its triumph on July, not omitting a video of the killing of the “terrorists.” (Kurdish resistance fighters.)

The announcement came a few days after Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar celebrated the fact that his armed forces have “neutralized”over 18,000 Kurds in six years. Neutralize has an antiseptic quality about it. But at root it’s a sanguinary and gruesome term in the context in which the Turkish military uses it. It belongs in the same category as eliminate, liquidate, terminate and disappear (as a transitive verb).

It means to tear a body apart with bombs, missiles or bullets. To render other people, other “terrorists,” widows, widowers, orphans and grief-stricken and soul-dead parents of the sort the poet Yehuda Amichai described when he wrote, “A man whose son died in the war walks in the street like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.”

In peace sons bury their fathers, in war fathers bury their sons, Herodotus wrote. It takes a soul to be affected by that tragic solemnity. It takes a strong soul to fully absorb it.

To hunt down and kill fellow citizens in another people’s homeland is nothing a healthy person or a healthy nation would celebrate.

It seems rarely a day passes that NATO’s rogue military power doesn’t attack or threaten another nation. In the past year alone such nations have included Armenia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Iraq, Nagorno-Karabakh and Syria, and by implication Russia over Crimea, India over Kashmir and Israel over Gaza.

Syria has recently reported that Turkey and its mercenaries (of the sort it has deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh and Libya) have intensified armed attacks on towns and villages in Hasaka province. Several houses in the villages of Umm Harmala and Dad Abdel were shelled in the attacks.

It also reports that Turkish forces shelled residential neighborhoods north of Aleppo, targeting the village of Am Adasa for several hours.

The shelling occurred against the backdrop of Turkey diverting water from Syria, depriving its people of drinking water and water for irrigation, a practice the Syrian government has denounced as a war crime as defined by international law.

Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. He is the manager of Stop NATO. This originally appeared at Anti-Bellum.