THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING

"History tells me that when the Russians come to a country they don't go back."
~ Mohammed Daoud Khan.

When things were still hot on the ground in Georgia, some Turkish journalists ran into some Russian troops outside of Gori, while on their way to South Ossetia:

A Turkish television crew that ventured down the same road from Gori to Tskhinvali filmed the attack on themselves. It makes chilling viewing: bullets shatter the windscreen of the four-wheel drive vehicle. Blood splatters on the broken glass. One of the journalists is wounded in the head, another in the arm. The cameraman films his comrades getting out with their hands up, walking towards the gunmen. The Turks miraculously survived, and were sent back to Turkey four days later.

The Turkish TV crew was from NTV and KanalTürk and they figured early on that they were going to die. Here's the video, from NTV via YouTube, with English subtitles:

The NTV news broadcast can be viewed here.

It's no wonder that Abdullah Gül got the sudden urge to talk about a "New World Order" over the weekend, or that Katil Erdoğan ran off to Moscow, not with Russian special operations troops talking like this:

"Take whatever you want! It's all free!" said a Russian special services soldier in wraparound sunglasses, driving a looted BMW.

"Next time we should invade Turkey. It's nice down there," said the second soldier, who wore a ski mask and drank bottles of beer with Georgian lettering on them. He threw them out half-finished, smashing them on the road.

Comments like that ought to really increase the collective pucker factor of the Ankara regime.

In the meantime, the Turkish Red Crescent (Kızılay) arrived in Gori over the weekend, bringing "humanitarian" aid. But Kızılay has a very loose definition of what constitutes "humanitarian aid", as we saw in April 2003:

Ankara has been implicated in a series of events fomenting conflict between Iraqi Turkmens and Kurds. Last April, a Turkish Red Crescent convoy was stopped at a checkpoint, and weapons and explosives were found in bags identified as humanitarian supplies; Turkish Special Forces were accused by US military authorities of posing as aid workers and smuggling munitions to Iraqi Turkmen militias. In an even more serious incident on July 4, US troops detained 11 Turkish Special Forces for plotting to assassinate Kirkuk's Kurdish mayor.

There were also reports of Kızılay smuggling weapons into Lebanon during the 2006 Lebanese-Israeli war. If the Russians are smart, they'll check the Kızılay vehicles to make sure they're not bringing anything listed under that broader definition of "humanitarian aid".

Imagine this: NATO's second largest army going toe-to-toe with the SCO's second largest army. That would keep the paşas busy for a while.