Full stream ahead: Russia & Turkey launch TurkStream gas pipeline

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan have launched the long-anticipated offshore pipeline TurkStream, that will deliver Russian gas to Turkey and further to southern European states.

The 930 km pipeline running across the bottom of the Black Sea became operational on Wednesday, with the two leaders attending a special opening ceremony.

In his remarks at the inauguration ceremony, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said that the launch of one of “largest construction projects in modern history” marks a “historic day” for the world energy development as a whole.

TurkStream is the “Silk road of the energy world” and a big step forward for Turkey, as well as a cornerstone of the relations between the two nations, Turkish energy minister Fatih Donmez told the audience.

The TurkStream natural gas pipeline was created as an alternative to the South Stream pipeline after Bulgaria ditched the project in 2014, under pressure from the US. The two-string TurkStream boasts the total capacity of 31.5 billion cubic meters, with one line supplying Turkey and the other transferring the blue fuel to southern and southeastern Europe.

In a last-ditch effort to stop Russia’s energy projects, US President Donald Trump signed into law the massive National Defense Authorization Act in late December. According to the document, companies involved in the construction of both TurkStream as Nord Stream 2 could face US penalties unless they quit the Russian projects.

However, unlike Nord Stream 2, the offshore section of the TurkStream had been already completed by that time. Ankara has also vowed to retaliate against any US sanctions.

Some EU states are separately building their sections of the pipeline to get the gas supplies from Russia. In late December, Bulgaria announced its readiness to receive natural gas from Russia’s Gazprom via Turkey. The new route is more economically viable for the country and could make gas cheaper for its consumers by around 5 percent, according to the country's Energy Minister Temenuzhka Petkova.

Serbia is also looking forward to getting Russian gas supplies and has already completed its section of the pipeline. But the country is not directly linked to the pipe, and will have to wait until neighboring Bulgaria extends TurkStream to its border. Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier accused Sofia of deliberately delaying the construction of its section, warning that Moscow can find ways to bypass its territory, if necessary.

Serbia’s northern neighbor Hungary also wants to use the TurkStream natural gas pipeline to diversify national energy supplies. Budapest hopes that Sofia and Belgrade will finish their legs of the project in time, allowing it to get the first Russian gas supplies in 2021.

Turkey vows to retaliate if US imposes sanctions on Russian gas pipeline

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has hit back against US threats to impose sanctions on the TurkStream pipeline that is set to deliver Russian gas to Turkey and further to southern and southeastern Europe starting next year.

“Now they [the US] say ‘we will impose sanctions on TurkStream,’” Erdogan told reporters on Friday in Malaysia. “This is a complete violation of our rights,”he said, adding that Ankara would retaliate against such a step.

The TurkStream project was created as an alternative to the South Stream pipeline. The project to deliver Russian gas to southern Europe was blocked by Bulgaria in 2014 under pressure from the US.

TurkStream is a two-string pipeline that will go from Russia along the bottom of the Black Sea to the European part of Turkey and will have a throughput capacity of 31.5 billion cubic meters. The official launch of the pipeline is scheduled for January 8, when Russian President Vladimir Putin comes to Turkey to met Erdogan.

Earlier this week, the US Senate adopted the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, which stipulates sanctioning vessels that engaged in pipe-laying for the TurkStream project as well as punitive measures against companies working to complete the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. The bill is now on the way to the White House where President Donald Trump is set to sign it into law.

The bill also sanctions Turkey for its acquisition of the Russian-made S-400 air defense system and implies prohibiting the transfer of F-35 jets to the country​​​. Addressing the matter, the Turkish leader said these issues are “closed” and warned against treating Ankara as a “tribal nation.”

Reference:

https://www.rt.com/business/477097-russia-turkey-turkstream-launch/

https://www.rt.com/business/476485-erdogan-turkstream-retaliatory-sanctions-us/

The Kurds fighting for their survival, Turkey is not helping much

Over the past decade, Turkey has pursued a "break and dent" strategy against the Kurds, by which the Turkish government seeks to dismantle Kurdish groups and push resistant factions into neighboring Syria and Iraq. Turkey has now come to rely on this strategy outside its border, particularly in the northern Syrian region of Afrin.  Based on this approach, Ankara aims to “cleanse” all northeastern Syrian territories held by the People’s Protection Units, or the YPG. Yet this "break and dent" strategy is futile, and the Mahkmour refugee camp in Iraq, set up by Turkish Kurds banished from their native villages more than two decades ago, is an example of its futility.

On Dec. 13, a day after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced plans for a military operation east of the Euphrates in Syria, Turkish jets targeted Sinjar and Makhmour in Iraq. According to Ankara, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) — considered a terrorist organization by Turkey and much of the international community — is using the Makhmour camp as a base. Officials of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the dominant political force in Iraqi Kurdistan, pointed out that UN rules require the camp to not harbor armed elements.

The camp is hardly an ordinary camp. Discussing its links with the PKK is meaningless, for its residents are families who have lost children fighting in PKK ranks. Armed units have taken up positions in self-defense in the area to protect residents from the Islamic State (IS). The Makhmour camp is essentially a lab demonstrating the failure of Turkey's security-centered policies.

More than 12,000 Kurds live in the camp, located on a slope of the Qarachokh Mountains. How they ended up there is a long and tragic story, which began in the '90s, when Turkey emptied 4,000 Kurdish villages as part of a military campaign to “root out” the PKK.

The story of Sakir Tong, a 37-year-old resident of the camp, is more or less the story of the camp itself. In an interview with Al-Monitor, the father of six, who makes a living as a construction worker in Erbil and Sulaimaniyah, recounted how his family fled their village in 1993 and crossed into Iraq.

Tong was born in 1981 in southeastern Turkey, in the small village of Isikveren, known as Bileh in Kurdish, located a stone’s throw from Uludere and the Iraqi border. In the early '90s, the Turkish government escalated its extrajudicial killings of PKK members and sympathizers in the region. During that period, the PKK raided a military outpost in the nearby village of Tasdelen, which marked the onset of a harsh government crackdown, Tong recounted.

The Turkish government “branded everyone terrorists,” he continued. “The road to Uludere was already closed for a year. We were meeting our needs from Zakho [in Iraqi Kurdistan]. The villages were shelled almost every night. We could not sleep and people got killed. Once a week, they would surround our village and search the houses for [PKK] guerrillas.”

The villagers, Tong said, came under pressure to join the village guard, a government-armed militia backing the army against the PKK. “They would keep people out in the snow and torture them. ‘You’ll choose either the mountain or the state,’ they would press. When the villagers refused to join the village guard, they said, ‘Then you go away.’ The village had 75 households, and all of them, except seven or eight, fled in September 1993. Bileh was the first village to be emptied,” he said, adding that other villages shared the same fate the following year.

The villagers went to Zakho across the border, where two camps were set up to harbor them, with the United Nations providing aid, Tong said. The refugees, he explained, had to move four more times until May 1998, when they settled outside Makhmour, a town 62 miles south of Erbil.

The location of the camp in Makhmour was not without reason. Turkey did not want the refugees near the border because it believed they would abet the PKK. The Kurdistan Democratic Party also saw the refugees as an extension of the PKK. The refugees then moved southward, toward Makhmour, out of the control of Iraqi Kurdistan but still within the boundaries of the US-enforced no-fly zone, which protected the Kurds from Saddam Hussein. In short, the place was a buffer zone. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which had already granted the group refugee status, was responsible for running the camp. Provisions came to the camp as part of the UN Oil for Food program. In 2011, the aid was reduced before being terminated in 2013. The Iraqi government began sending monthly flour supplies. That assistance was scaled down to once every three or four months in the wake of Iraqi Kurdistan’s independence referendum in 2017. Apart from that, charitable people continue to provide food and fuel to the refugees.

The residents of the camp, which once resembled a prison, established committees to deal with all their affairs. Thus, the “democratic self-rule” promoted by the Kurdish movement was for the first time put into practice here, rather spontaneously and under the strain of harsh conditions. The camp is run by the following entitites: a local administration based on neighborhood assemblies; a popular assembly selected every two years; a three-member council selected by the assembly; and an executive body. In other words, Makhmour became a pilot scheme for democratic self-rule, even before the effort in Rojava in Syria.

According to information Al-Monitor obtained from the Makhmour administration, nearly 3,000 pupils attend four kindergartens, five primary schools, a secondary school and a high school built by the UN. Their diplomas are certified by the Iraqi Ministry of Education. Textbooks from Turkey are used in the curriculum. Volunteers from the camp serve as teachers. Those who wish to pursue higher education go to universities in Erbil, Sulaimaniyah and Dahuk. Graduates of medical schools work in the camp’s hospital, replacing the doctors appointed by Baghdad. The imams of the two mosques are also from the camp.

The Makhmour camp came under the spotlight when Ankara expressed its desire to open up peace talks with the Kurds. In a gesture of support for the peace process, a 34-strong group, including PKK militants from the Qandil Mountains and residents of the Makhmour camp, crossed to Turkey from Iraq in October 2009. The gesture, which was coordinated with Ankara, backfired and seven members of the group were eventually sent to prison on charges of affiliation with the PKK. The incident showed how risky the way back home could be, even with a greenlight from Ankara.

Among the camp's residents, only about 20 elderly people hold Turkish passports. They managed to renew their ID cards during trips to Turkey, before the peace process collapsed in 2015. Without a passport, a series of bureaucratic and legal procedures become impossible for camp residents. The camp residents received three-year residence papers from the Iraqi government in 2013, but the documents have yet to be renewed. Many work on construction sites in Kurdistan, while others raise livestock.

When it comes to the issue of armed men in the camp, the PKK sent guerrillas from Qandil to help rescue the camp after it was captured by IS, along with the town of Makhmour, in August 2014. The camp’s liberation was followed by the creation of a 300-strong self-defense force, and the PKK took defense positions in the mountain pass. The UN, which closed its office at the entrance of the camp in 2014, is now under pressure from Ankara to crack down on the camp. Ankara argues that the camp has been taken over by terrorists.

According to Tong, Turkey’s Dec. 13 air raid hit a farming area adjacent to houses, killing a 14-year-old girl and three women, among them a woman in her 70s. “About 75% of camp residents are women and children," Tong said. "All people here are relatives. There is great pain and anger.”

Tong added that military officials came from Makhmour to examine the damage. “They promised protection and went away," he said. "UN officials are coming every other day and saying they will reopen the office. There is indignation toward the UN for doing nothing.”

According to Tong, “The guerrillas came in 2014, but they left in 2016. Camp residents are now maintaining the security. People aged 18 to 60 are keeping watch, including women without children.”

The round-the-clock watch in the camp stems from fears that IS might return. “Daesh is still active in the Gani Hazali area, which is 3 kilometers from the camp,” Tong said, using the Arabic acronym for the jihadi group. “The US forces occasionally bomb Daesh targets. In 2016, Daesh attacked again, killing two people. The Daesh threat is not over.”

The Makhmour camp holds a mirror to Ankara's failed Kurdish policies. In pursuing the break-up of the Kurdish regions in northern Syria, Ankara will reach yet another dead end.

Author:

Fehim Tastekin

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/12/turkey-iraqi-kurdistan-makhmour-camp-kurdish-policy.html

Qatar blockade

Qatar is a very special emirate of the Persian Gulf coast.
One of its peculiarities is that, with 145,000 US dollars per person per year, it is the state with the highest per capita income in the world.
Another peculiarity is its small size, barely 11,580 km2 with 2,600,000 inhabitants of which only 300,000 are from Qatar, 2,300,000 are foreigners, usually migrant workers from Asian countries.
Its territory is extremely arid, with very high Summer temperatures (they can reach 50 degrees Celsius). There is practically no natural agricultural land, scarce production was limited to date palms, extensive rearing of camels and goats, fishing on its Gulf coasts, and diving for pearl oysters.

With these limited natural resources it is not surprising that the population was traditionally very scarce. In 1904 it amounted to only 27,000 inhabitants.
Nor was there too much interest in seizing the territory by the colonial powers. In spite of that, at the end of the XIX century, Qatar was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire and from 1916 on it was integrated into the British Empire with the status of "Protectorate".
In 1971 the Emirate gained its independence. At that time the population amounted to 112,000 inhabitants. Since 1940 oil had been discovered, production initially grew slowly, but in the last 25 years, after the discovery of large gas natural fields in Qatar Gulf waters. it has grown significantly, making Qatar one of the wealthiest countries of the world, reaching $ 145,000 per capita.

These large revenues enabled the country to invest its financial resources in many ways; public works, creation of a large global airline, purchase of professional sports teams, establishment of a news agency (Al Jazeera) and collaboration with other governments and organizations increasing its regional and global influence.
Enter "the Kingdom"
Recently Saudi Arabia has undergone some changes at the governmental level. The current king is Salman ibn Abdul Aziz but the effective government is carried out by his son Mohammed ibn Salman (although formally the prince of the crown and successor of the king is Muhammed bin Nayef who at the moment does not have any power having been left to the margin of the political decisions).
Following the seizure of power by Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia began to develop aggressive expansionist policies. This can be seen in the continuing bombings in Yemen (fighting the Shi'ite-based Houthi government) at the head of a Saudi-controlled coalition with strong US support.
Donald Trump's clumsy visit to Saudi Arabia took place recently, irresponsibly accepting Saudi suggestions of Qatar's role in promoting terrorism.
With the approval of the US, Saudi Arabia has decided a general offensive against Qatar, including breaking relations, expulsion of diplomats and Qatari citizens, banning overflight of airspace by Qatar Airways, closure of Al Jazeera offices in Arabia , etc. The Saudi decision was accompanied by the Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, Maldives and several pro-Saudi movements in the Middle East.
                    Prince Mohammed bin Salman  
The blockade of Qatar leaves the emirate partially isolated with a single aerial and maritime exit through the territory and inland waters of Iran. At the same time, Erdogan, the president of Turkey decided to take the opportunity to intervene "supporting" the Qatari government by establishing a base in Qatari territory and sending troops.

In short, unexpectedly, Qatar is gaining support from Iran and Turkey. 
If the situation gets more tense, indirect support from Russia may appear.
If that were the case, an unusual geopolitical situation would occur. 
The hyper-enemies of all history: Iran (Persia), Turkey (Ottoman Empire) and Russia (Tsarist Empire), who have almost always been militarily and politically opposed, could ally themselves by supporting Qatar.

                                                 Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Emir of Qatar
On the other side we may find Saudi Arabia (and its economically dependent countries, including Egypt and Bahrain), the United Arab Emirates and, unusually, the United States.
The US would enter into a regional conflict in a position of great clumsiness and high vulnerability. Perhaps Trump reverses his decision, but probably it does not. At that moment a situation of great uncertainty for the future of the region and the world may be generated. ..