Turkey holding off in confronting new Mongol horde

Instead of launching tanks to hit ISIS targets less than 10 miles away, Turkey President Recep Tayyap Erdogan has gotten into an argument with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on what role Ankara may have played in the rise of the new Mongol hordes.

Nothing more than statements have come from Turkey, even after its parliament gave strong support to Erdogan’s proposal to battle the IS terrorists.

Turkish soldiers clashed with Kurds near the border when protestors demanded that the army intervene to rescue the people of Kobani, within site of Turkish Leopard tanks.

More Western victims have been decapitated, and it was likely a former U.S. soldier would be the next. Kurds in the Syrian city of Kobani, which is in range of Turkish Leopard tanks on a hill above, also have been killed.

So far, only air raids by Western warplanes, and some jets from Arab nations, have hit IS as it appears to be on the verge of taking the city of Kobani, which once had a population of 400,000.

NATO has vowed to defend Turkey if it is attacked by IS.

At the same time, Islamic leaders who have condemned IS say Western nations should let Arab nations root out the apostate Muslims.

The conduct of the new Islamic caliphate can be compared to the worst excesses of the Mongol Empire, which included Turkey, and was the largest contiguous domain the world has ever seen, stretching from Central Europe to the Sea of Japan, south into Indochina and north to Siberia. It also reached Arabia and the Levant.

There is no doubt that IS recruited members from Turkey, just as it has from the West. For Erdogan to deny doing enough to stop the pandemic is disingenuous. Even now Turkey’s NATO tanks sit idle, while its Army, the second-largest in NATO, blocks Kurds from crossing the border to fight to save their ethnic brothers.

In an OP Ed piece in the New York Times, Turkish writer Asli  Aydubtasbas, said Turks need to drop their long-standing enmity for the Kurdish minority. “Turkey must embrace the Kurdish presence in Iraq and Syria, and help the Kurds in their fight against ISIS. We are much better off protected by a Kurdish buffer zone than facing ISIS alone along our 600-mile border with Syria.

“Doing so will require a huge paradigm shift for Turkey: It must abandon its nationalist legacy and reimagine itself as a joint Turkish-Kurdish entity. Turkish Kurds represent about 25 percent of the population, and the government has wisely been pursuing a peace process with the P.K.K. There are ups and downs in the talks between Turkish intelligence and the imprisoned P.K.K. leader, Abdullah Ocalan. But at the end of the day, both sides need each other.”

Some historians would say Turkey has other debts to pay, including for its alleged massacre of more than 1 million Armenians during World War I.