The entire border to Turkey was controlled by ISIS
Brett McGurk Former US Envoy to the International Coalition to fight ISIS speaking at a political seminar attended by “Riyadh Today“, about Obama’s mistake. So Yousuf Al-Qardawi used Al-Jazeera to call for fight in Syria, terrorists infiltrated from Turkey.
Erdogan exploited the chaos, attacked the Kurds and occupied northern Syria.
Following is the excerpt of McGurk’s speech:
“You had people like Yousuf Qardawi speaking to sixty million Muslims from on al Jazeera once a week saying you have religious duty to pour into Syria.
And I think where Bill and I would agree is the United States needs to be very careful presidents need to be very careful before they set national security objectives.
And when you say in 2011 Assad must go that changes everyone’s calculation and it created like a fever in the region and the amount of foreign jihadis and fighters pouring into Syria and the amount of weapons the amount of money and everything else led to a lot of this.
The way we met the Syrian Kurds was in the Battle of Kobani, the entire border to Turkey was controlled by ISIS if you look at a map in those days it’s all black a little teeny dot in Kobani and Kobani is surrounded by—like thousands of ISIS fighters are about to take the town.
I’ll remember this in the fall of 2014, it was our relationships with the Iraqi Kurds who called us up and one of them called me up and called some of our military people up and said—‘hey we know some of the fighters who are holding out in Kobani there’s not many of them left they’re surrounded they’re about to get overrun but we’re in touch with them would you like to be in touch with them.’ So yeah you’re damn right we want to try to defeat ISIS.
The fighters in Kobani told us they need an airdrop of some weapons and I needed some air support and I still didn’t think they could hold out but we organized this through northern Iraq. We did the airdrop of weapons which had to go all the way to President Obama and that was most interesting about this is—General Allen and I kind of organized the Kobani effort in Turkey.
Because at that time the broader PKK Turkey conflict was in a what the Turks call the solution process, it was in a process of talks and the Turks kind of knew the YPG leaders and the leaders of Political umbrella the PYD were in Accra.”
Transcript taken from Riyadh Today’s video.
