Report: Putin Threatens Turkey with Nukes

Robert Parry is an Investigative Journalist at Consortiumnews who is best known for his role in covering the Iran-Contra affair,  including breaking the Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, and becoming a winner of the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984, according to his Wiki.

Parry recently reported on the risks involving the multi-sided Syrian war that would occur if Turkey, Saudi Arabia and U.S. neocons followed through with plans to invade the city of Allepo. These plans could come with great consequence, because killing Russian troops reeks of World War III.

If Turkey (with hundreds of thousands of troops massed near the Syrian border) and Saudi Arabia (with its sophisticated air force) follow through on threats and intervene militarily to save their rebel clients, who include Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, from a powerful Russian-backed Syrian government offensive, then Russia will have to decide what to do to protect its 20,000 or so military personnel inside Syria.

A source close to Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that the Russians have warned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Moscow is prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons if necessary to save their troops in the face of a Turkish-Saudi onslaught. Since Turkey is a member of NATO, any such conflict could quickly escalate into a full-scale nuclear confrontation.
Given Erdogan’s megalomania or mental instability and the aggressiveness and inexperience of Saudi Prince Mohammad bin Salman (defense minister and son of King Salman), the only person who probably can stop a Turkish-Saudi invasion is President Obama. But I’m told that he has been unwilling to flatly prohibit such an intervention, though he has sought to calm Erdogan down and made clear that the U.S. military would not join the invasion…

But Erdogan’s short fuse may have grown shorter on Wednesday when a powerful car bomb killed at least 28 people in Turkey’s capital of Ankara. The bomb apparently targeted a military convoy and Turkish officials cast suspicion on Kurdish militants who also have been under assault from Turkish forces inside Turkey.

Though showing no evidence, Turkish officials suggested the attack may have been sponsored by Iran or Russia, another sign of how complicated the geopolitical morass in Syria has become. “Those who think they can steer our country away from our goals by using terrorist organizations will see that they have failed,” declared Erdogan, according to The Wall Street Journal.

(On Wednesday night, Turkey retaliated for the Ankara bombing by launching airstrikes against Kurdish targets in northern Iraq.)

The dilemma for Obama is that many traditional U.S. allies, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have been the principal backers and funders of Sunni terror groups inside Syria, including Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and – to a lesser degree – the Islamic State. Now, the “allies” want the United States to risk a nuclear confrontation with Russia to, in effect, protect Al Qaeda.

Parry continues writing about the steady conflict that has been growing between the U.S. and Russia ever since Putin agreed to back Syrian rebels.

Initially, Official Washington mocked the Russian effort as incapable of accomplishing much, but the Syrian military’s recent victories have turned that derisive laughter into shocked fury. For one, the neoconservative flagship Washington Post has unleashed a stream of editorials and op-eds decrying the Syrian-Russian victories.

“Russia, Iran and the Syrian government are conducting a major offensive aimed at recapturing the city of Aleppo and the rebel-held territory that connects it to the border with Turkey,” the Post lamented. “They have cut one supply route to the city and are close to severing another, trapping rebel forces along with hundreds of thousands of civilians.”

Though one might think that driving Al Qaeda’s forces out of a major urban center like Aleppo would be a good thing, the Post’s neocon editors pretend that the rebels controlling that area are only noble “moderates” who must be protected by the United States. No mention is made of Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, so as not to spoil the desired propaganda theme.

The Post then badgered Obama to do something: “In the face of this onslaught, which promises to destroy any chance of an acceptable end to the Syrian civil war, the Obama administration has been a study in passivity and moral confusion. President Obama is silent.”

In another hysterical editorial, the Post’s editors conjured up what they called “the real world” where “the best-case scenario after five years of U.S. inaction is a partial peace that leaves Syria partitioned into zones controlled by the [Assad] regime and the Islamic State, with a few opposition and Kurdish enclaves squeezed in. Even that would require the Obama administration to aggressively step up its military support for rebel groups, and confront Russia with more than rhetoric.”

However, in the actual “real world,” the Obama administration has been funneling military equipment to rebels seeking to overthrow an internationally recognized government for years. That assistance has included averting U.S. eyes from the fact that many of those rebel groups were collaborating with Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and/or the Islamic State…

But Obama seems to recognize enough of the actual reality that he has so far resisted the frantic cries of Official Washington’s neocons and liberal hawks. I’m told Obama also has discouraged Turkey and Saudi Arabia from taking matters into their own hands.

After all, a full-scale invasion by Turkey and Saudi Arabia in support of Al Qaeda and other Sunni rebels would pit the invading force against not only the Syrian army but its Iranian and Hezbollah (Shiite) allies – and most dangerously Russia, which lacks the manpower inside Syria to match up with the Turkish army but could deploy tactical nuclear weapons if necessary to save the lives of Russian soldiers.

Source:Consortiumnews