{"id":37692,"date":"2021-07-13T08:21:56","date_gmt":"2021-07-13T16:21:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=37692"},"modified":"2021-07-13T08:21:56","modified_gmt":"2021-07-13T16:21:56","slug":"turkish-warplanes-neutralize-more-kurds-in-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/13\/turkish-warplanes-neutralize-more-kurds-in-iraq\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkish Warplanes ‘Neutralize’ More Kurds in Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s Turkish press boastfully trumpets the fact that its nation’s jets have “neutralized” two more Kurds<\/a> 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.)<\/p>\n

The announcement came a few days after Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar celebrated the fact that his armed forces have \u201cneutralized\u201dover 18,000 Kurds in six years<\/a>. 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).<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

To hunt down and kill fellow citizens in another people’s homeland is nothing a healthy person or a healthy nation would celebrate.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Several houses in the villages of Umm Harmala and Dad Abdel were shelled in the attacks.<\/p>\n

It also reports that Turkish forces shelled residential neighborhoods north of Aleppo<\/a>, targeting the village of Am Adasa for several hours.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> as defined by international law.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. This originally appeared at Anti-Bellum<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":496,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-37692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/496"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37692"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37694,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37692\/revisions\/37694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37692"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=37692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}