MULLING THE INVASION

"Truly there are no huge differences between the AKP's and the military's stragetic politics. The military's aim is to destroy the Kurdish people and their movement physically. They believe they can achieve this exclusively by using violence. The AKP uses not just military means, they are also doing it in a political way. Their political aim is to destroy the Kurds politically, militarily and culturally."
~ Murat Karayılan.

Most of the news today had to do with Turkey planning the invasion of South Kurdistan. You can check some of the major news agencies on this at Reuters or the Guardian. These are basically phony reports that push the Ankara regime's propaganda on Beytüşşebap and fail to mention that the dead TSKers were, in fact, Bolu Commandos. No mention of Bolus is significant because the Bolu Commando Brigade is notorious for its war crimes and commission of atrocities, and the Ankara regime knows that no one is going to get worked up over the whacking of a bunch of Bolus.

Meanwhile, HPG has raised the body count of dead Bolus to twenty-one and has raised some gerîlas from the dead, namely Heval Nuda Karker and her comrades.

The US continues to remain irrelevant to the situation.

The BBC has an interesting quote from a columnist at Zaman:

Sahin Alpay, a columnist on Zaman newspaper, says the attacks are "definitely creating an atmosphere where there are calls for severe repressive measures, possibly a push for military intervention".

"But that would be really crazy," he adds.

"Everyone knows most of the PKK is based inside Turkey. It's a distortion to pretend this problem is imported from abroad."

Which, of course, is true if you take the time to examine the geography of Kurdistan. Considering that the average height of the mountains in the Zagros are almost 10,000 feet (3,000 m) in elevation, and that the highest peak is almost 15,000 feet (4,500 m), it becomes obvious that it is difficult, if not impossible, to leave Qendil after breakfast, knock off a few Bolus and regular troops at Mt. Kato, Beytüşşebap in the afternoon, and then be back at Qendil for bedtime. So there's no massing of guerrilla forces at one location deep inside South Kurdistan and then sending those forces off to North Kurdistan with any regularity. The nature of guerrilla warfare would not permit such operations, nor are they consistent with HPG/YJA-Star's structure and methods.

Anyone who claims othewise has not been to The Region or is lying.

The only report today that brings up the subject of geography is, amazingly enough, TIME:

But even if Erdogan gave Turkey's military the green light, going across the border has its problems. The PKK bases in northern Iraq are deep in the mountains, a long way from the Turkish border. The PKK forces are in the remote Qandil Valley near Iran, and the Turkish army would have to penetrate deep into Iraq and travel through several Iraqi cities before reaching it. By that time the PKK's mobile guerrilla units would have most likely have snuck away to fight another day. And even if the Turkish air force got U.S. permission to cross into Iraq, air strikes have a limited effect on a guerrilla insurgency. Additionally, the attacks against Turkish military and civilians were apparently perpetrated by PKK operators within Turkey.

Of course we know that the "attacks against [ ] civilians"--a reference to the Beytüşşebap massacre--was a TSK operation.

More amazing comments come from Ilnur Cevik, of all people:

We have lost 13 soldiers in a PKK attack in the southeastern province of Sirnak. The nation is stunned. This time it was not a roadside bomb. It seems to have been an ambush where the PKK militants managed to kill our soldiers designed to wipe out the PKK inside Turkey. in the midst of a "major military operation"For days we have been reporting that the military has launched a major fall operation to inflict as much harm to the PKK as possible before winter sets in. The operation was also designed to prevent PKK militants from escaping back into Iraq. The military even increased its security zones to make life more difficult for the PKK.

After all this you would think the PKK would find it difficult to move inside Turkey. Yet, we see that the PKK militants can roam around the region and inflict serious harm on our soldiers.

[ . . . ]

We call these people terrorists and we are frowned upon if we do not do so. However, it is time we all realized the facts and lived with realities instead of nationalist cliches.

[ . . . ]

. . . [W]hat we see in eastern and southeastern Turkey is not terrorism. It is clearly some form of warfare which should be taken seriously and which should not be regarded as an act of terrorism.

Soldiers are legitimate targets in war, and that's what we've had in North Kurdistan since the foundation of the Ankara regime. Those who cry for dead Turkish soldiers should get a grip on reality and go after those who perpetuate the seemingly endless conflict. Obvious people like Gül, Büyükanıt, and Erdoğan, for starters, but also all those dirty Deep Staters who should have been prosecuted in the 1990s. Who was prosecuted for Susurluk? No one, so go ahead and start with them. Add to the prosecutor's list old terrorist TSKers like Altay Tokat and Erdal Sarızeybek, who openly admit they terrorized the population of The Southeast.

Then there are people like Joseph Ralston, Edip Başer, and all their friends at Lockheed Martin who, one year ago this month rejected both a ceasefire and the offer of a democratic solution as well as any suggestion that there might be an opportunity in looking at the IRA's model for a resolution--and for what? A few billion greenbacks, that's what. Behold the Pimps of War. It's the likes of them that were planning the scenarios at the Hudson Institute, as Hevallo reminds us today.

Good. Let them come. Let them climb those peaks of Kurdistan and find their graves as they have done many times before. Let them remember, as they cross the border, that there are 20 million Kurds at their back, 4 million in front of them, 5 million to their left, and almost 2 million at their right.

To paraphrase: An invasion of South Kurdistan will be an invasion of Amed.