Press TV has conducted an interview with Jim W. Dean, the managing editor and columnist at the Veterans Today from Atlanta, to talk about the rise of al-Qaeda-linked militants in northern Syria which has left Turkey with a new security threat and raised serious speculations about Ankara's policy towards the crisis in the Arab country.
The following is an approximate transcription of the interview.
Press TV: Jim Dean, we could look at how Turkey began going against Assad and there was one point of which the government there of Erdogan was supporting the group that is known as Jabhat al-Nusra and the belief that it was the most effective fighting force against Assad, but then you had the US that came and put that on the list of terrorist organizations.
So, it started from there, the beginning of this foreign policy of Turkey to kind of start falling apart. What happened there? What began with Turkey regarding the support that they were giving these groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra?
Dean: Well, it is just a classic mistake that you always find bigger powers often do. They always think that the war is going to be short, so they never worry about long-range consequences and you had, at the beginning, Turkey felt that because they were in NATO, they had protection from being very aggressive because if Syria retaliated, they were providing staging areas for the rebels which legally under international law makes you a combatant and Syria had the right actually to shell or even bomb and attack those staging areas.
But Turkey would have loved to have had that happened because they would have then invoked NATO that a NATO country has been attacked. So initially that was one of the redlines that they were trying to get Assad to cross over and then when that did not work and things started dragging out, they thought they could collapse the government through defections.
The Western media has hidden that they have had 300 to 350 assassinations of government officials which is really a huge number and then that did not collapse and that is when they started to get a little panicky and that is when they started searching all of the hovels of the Middle East for every dirt bag, every gangster, every kidnapping gang they could find and let them know that there was money to be made in Syria and they started organizing jailbreaks to bring in experienced Jihadi fighters and the idea there was very simple and that would divert Assad's forces and take heed of the Free Syrian fighters and they would have a two-flank war which they could collapse Syria that way and that has not worked.
So, now what they have done is they have released a bunch of Frankensteins that even after this Syrian situation is over, you are now going to have these very highly trained gangsters out of work and there is going to be people willing to offer them money, arms and ammunition to go somewhere else and create mayhem. So, what we have created here we are going to be dealing with for at least 25 years.
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NSA surveillance is not used for 'finding terrorists' at all, so what exactly IS it used for then?
NSA director admits to misleading public on terror plots