According to the Turkish president, the country won't stop its attacks against Kurdish fighter posts in Syria.

Turkey will continue attacks on Kurdish fighter posts in Syria in return to alleged attacks by the Syrian Kurds, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's call for a no-fly zone (NFZ) over Syria is a risky strategy, going by historical precedents. Since their introduction in the '90s, there have been some significant fails.

After Russia's increasingly bold military engagement in war-torn Syria in favor of President Bashar al-Assad and the Shiite bloc, the regional Sunni powers -- Turkey and its ally, Saudi Arabia -- have felt nervous and incapable of influencing the civil war in favor of the many Islamist groups fighting Assad's forces.

Most recently, the Turks and Saudis, after weeks of negotiations, decided to flex their muscles and join forces to engage a higher-intensity war in the Syrian theater. This is dangerous for the West. It risks provoking further Russian and Iranian involvement in Syria, and sparking a NATO-Russia confrontation.

After Turkey, citing violation of its airspace, shot down a Russian Su-24 military jet on Nov. 24, Russia has used the incident as a pretext to reinforce its military deployments in Syria and bomb the "moderate Islamists." Those are the Islamists who fight Assad's forces and are supported by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Russian move included installing the advanced S-400 long-range air and anti-missile defense systems.

The US President has claimed that Russian involvement in Syria is a sign of weakness and has pressed for regime change in Damascus, brushing aside ongoing peace talks and ignoring steady gains by the Syrian army and Kurdish forces against terrorists.

"If somebody's strong, then you don't have to send in your army to prop up your ally," President Barack Obama said on Tuesday, taking a break from the ASEAN summit in California to speak to the press about the US Supreme Court and the Syrian crisis.

"They have legitimacy in their country, and they are able to manage it themselves, and then you have good relations with them," Obama added. "You send in your army when the horse you're backing isn't effective."

In Ankara and Riyadh a decent night's sleep must be hard to come by nowadays, what with the prospects of the Sunni state they'd envisaged being established across a huge swathe of Syria slipping away in the face of an offensive by Syrian government forces that is sweeping all before it north of Aleppo, threatening to completely sever supply lines from Turkey to opposition forces in and around the city, and all but ensuring that its liberation is now a question of when not if.

The success being enjoyed by government forces and its allies on the ground is a testament to their remarkable morale and tenacity despite the battering they have endured over five years of unremitting conflict. Key to this re-invigoration and success in routing opposition forces - forces which only a few months ago were in the ascendancy - has of course Russian air, communications, and logistical support. Moscow's decision to intervene at the end of September last year may have been pregnant with risk, but so far it has been validated, and perhaps even beyond initial expectations.

Moscow, not Washington, is calling the shots in the region now, announcing the birth of a multipolar world and marking an astonishing recovery given the parlous state of Russia throughout the 1990s as it struggled to recover from the demise of the Soviet Union. No sooner was the hammer and sickle flag removed from atop the Kremlin than a procession of crazed free marketeers descended from the United States, and elsewhere in the West, to impose neoliberal nostrums in return for an IMF loan that was necessary in order to avert complete economic collapse. The record shows that rather than this collapse being averted it was accelerated by the structural adjustment reforms implemented by Yeltsin and other Russian converts to the new religion.

In Washington at the time 'end of history' triumphalism reigned as oh how they laughed. Well, they're not laughing now.

The Syrian Arab Army and the YPG troops of the Syrian Kurds are making good progress in the Azaz pocket. The pocket formed after the Syrian army cut through the "rebel" corridor between Aleppo city and the Turkish border. The aim now is to push all foreign proxy forces who are still in that pocket (green) back north into Turkey and to get full control of the border.

The Syrian-Russian command decided to let the YPG (yellow) have the fun of cleaning the pocket only to taunt the Turkish President Erdogan. Erdogan has a serious domestic policy problems when the Kurdish forces gain control in parts of Syria that the wannabe Sultan Erdogan regarded as sacred neo-Ottoman ground. His court jester, the Prime Minister Davutoglu, announced that his country would not allow the town of Azaz to fall to Kurdish fighters. He will have to eat a flock of crows over that.

There has been much speculation whether foreign official institutions (central banks, SWFs, reserve managers and so on) are selling Treasurys or equities, or both as part of the Quantitative Tightening phenomenon.

Moments ago, courtesy of the latest TIC data we have an answer: based on the monthly flow report breaking down Treasury transactions between foreign official and private entities, in December the far more important, former, group sold $48.1 billion in US Treasurys: the highest single monthly outflow on record.

According to the French BFMTV news channel, 212 lawmakers of the French parliament's lower chamber, the National Assembly, supported the Interior Ministry's draft law on the measures extension up to May 26.

Last week, the upper house of the French Parliament, the Senate, voted for the three-month extension.

On November 13, a series of terrorist attacks across Paris left at least 130 people dead. The Daesh terrorist group, outlawed in Russia and many other countries, claimed responsibility for the tragedy.

Bernie Sanders, who has attracted numerous young, white, college-educated supporters in his bid for the presidency, says he is creating a movement and promises a political revolution. This rhetoric is an updated version of the "change" promised by the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama and by Jesse Jackson's earlier National Rainbow Coalition. Such Democratic electoral campaigns, at best, raise political consciousness. But they do not become movements or engender revolutions. They exist as long as election campaigns endure and then they vanish. Sanders' campaign will be no different.

No movement or political revolution will ever be built within the confines of the Democratic Party. And the repeated failure of the American left to grasp the duplicitous game being played by the political elites has effectively neutered it as a political force. History, after all, should count for something.

The Democrats, like the Republicans, have no interest in genuine reform. They are wedded to corporate power. They are about appearance, not substance. They speak in the language of democracy, even liberal reform and populism, but doggedly block campaign finance reform and promote an array of policies, including new trade agreements, that disempower workers. They rig the elections, not only with money but also with so-called superdelegates—more than 700 delegates who are unbound among a total of more than 4,700 at the Democratic convention. Sanders may have received 60 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, but he came away with fewer of the state's delegates than Clinton. This is a harbinger of the campaign to come.

Both government and opposition-held towns in Syria over the border from Turkey have fallen under Ankara's shelling that began last week, according the Russian Ministry of Defense. Turkey's artillery has fired more than 100 shells at bordering areas in the northwest province of Aleppo, targeting both Syrian government forces and the opposition, MoD spokesman Igor Konashenkov told reporters on Tuesday. "Impartial monitoring bodies have detected more than a hundred rounds of fire that targeted border towns in the province of Aleppo," Konashenkov said.

Last week Turkey started pounding Syrian Kurdish forces with fire in northern Syria in an apparent attempt to stop them from taking over the city of Azaz, Aleppo. On Monday, at least 14 people were killed after missiles hit a children's hospital, a school and other buildings, witnesses told Reuters. Ankara was quick to blame Russia for the strikes in Azaz. Monday's attacks have been condemned by the international community, with the UN calling on war parties to reduce hostility ahead of the planned ceasefire in Syria.

On a separate occasion, members of the United Nations Security Council expressed their concern with the aggressive actions carried out by Ankara in Syria and will urge it to follow international law. "The UN Security Council members are concerned with the Turkish attacks on a number of Syrian regions," UNSC President Rafael Ramirez said, according to TASS news agency, after a meeting held upon Russia's request, adding that the members "have agreed to ask Turkey to obey international law."