A very high profile journalist was gunned down in broad daylight inside Turkey for not towing the Erdogan government’s narrative. Authorities are claiming this was done by ISIS militants. It may be true as the Erdogan government can always request his ISIS friends to do job of silencing dissent for him.
Or, he can order his own intelligence officers to accomplish the same job. How harder would that be to order the assassination of one or two journalists compared to shooting down a Russian warplane?
Either way, the line between terrorist and government is as clear as smuggled oil, to say the least, in that part of the world.
There is now a climate of fear inside Turkey, and only a pocket of the Kurdish community are standing up against the oppression of which they are being punished with sporadic clashes with Turkish military.
Syrian journalist & filmmaker who exposed ISIS Aleppo atrocities assassinated in Turkey
A prominent Syrian journalist and filmmaker, who produced anti-Islamic State documentaries was gunned down by unknown assailants in broad daylight in Gaziantep, Turkey. This is the third assassination of a journalist in the country over the last three months.
Naji Jerf, editor-in-chief of the Hentah monthly, known for his documentaries describing violence and abuses on Islamic State-controlled territories (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) was shot and killed near a building housing Syrian independent media outlets in the Turkish city of Gaziantep. His death was originally reported by a group of citizen journalists he was working with.
💥Naji Jerf,journalist&dic of '#Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently'shot dead by unidentified gunmen in #Gaziantep
📸 pic.twitter.com/USd8JyZbHa— Mete Sohtaoğlu (@metesohtaoglu) December 27, 2015
Jerf recently completed a documentary investigating violence and crime in the IS-held parts of Aleppo for the RBSS group [“Raqa is Being Slaughtered Silently”]. The film won a Committee to Protect Journalists’(CPJ) International Press Freedom Award in November.
coming soon
Documentary film " Raqqa is being slaughtered silently "
Produced by : RBSS
Directed by : Naji Jerf pic.twitter.com/54ddWLYN85— Mhammad Safef (@yman_mohammad) September 29, 2015
According to reports, he was hit by a bullet in the head as he was walking in the street. He was taken to hospital, where he died. The attack happened in front of security cameras nearby, according to Turkish news outlet T24 website.
A friend of Jerf’s has told AFP the journalist was “supposed to arrive in Paris this week after receiving, along with his family, a visa for asylum in France.”
The Brussels-based European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has said in a statement for RT that “the EFJ strongly calls on Turkish authorities to step up measures to protect Syrian journalists and media workers based in Turkey.”
“The EFJ notes that this killing comes after Islamic State claimed responsibility for the deaths of the executive director and the head of the production department for a Syrian media collective, in Urfa, in October. It seems clear to us that Syrian journalists and media workers who have fled to Turkey are not safe at all,” the statement stressed.
CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator Sherif Mansour said “Syrian journalists who have fled to Turkey for their safety are not safe at all,” recalling several Syrian journalists as well as prominent Turkish opposition figures murdered in Turkey over the past months.
“We call on Turkish authorities to bring the killers of Naji Jerf to justice swiftly and transparently, and to step up measures to protect all Syrian journalists on Turkish soil,” he added.
Earlier in November, president of the bar association and a campaigner for Kurdish rights, Tahir Elci was shot dead by unknown gunmen on a street in Diyarbakir in Kurdish-dominated southeastern Turkey. RT’s crew covering Kurdish protests following Elci’s murder was teargassed by the Turkish police while filming on the spot.
In October, two Syrian journalists, Ibrahim Abd al-Qader and Fares Hamadi – also an early member of RBSS group – were found slain in an apartment in the town of Urfa in southeastern Turkey.
Can Erimtan of the Istanbul Gazette has told RT the murderers might be “local supporters of Islamic State, given the fact they knew where to go and how to do their business.”
“As for the reason why this man [Naji Jerf] was targeted, he was working towards exposing the atrocities committed by Islamic State, and for that reason silencing him seemed like a fair option to them,” he said.
Erimtan added “there is a clear link between Islamic State and the Ankara government” and “[there is] a lot of ISIS activity in the country, [while] the authorities are either unwilling to take drastic measures [or are unaware] of what to do.”
https://www.rt.com/news/327226-syrian-journalist-assassination-turkey/
Erdogan wants to turn Turkey into Islamist state, bets on uneducated masses – CIA veteran
The skies above Syria are crowded with military planes from various nations. However, the non-stop bombardment of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) seems to be producing nothing in return. The group still maintains the ability to strike anytime, anywhere – even in the US. And while Western nations along with Russia are trying to destroy IS, some of America’s alleged “allies” in the region seem to be playing their own game. Can a war be won in such conditions? Can progress be made if only some are committed to end the fighting? We pose these questions, and many more, to an ex-CIA agent and counter-terrorism expert. Philip Giraldi is on Sophie&Co today.
Follow @SophieCo_RT
Sophie Shevardnadze: Philip Giraldi, it’s really great to have you with us today – thanks for coming to Russia!
Philip Giraldi: Well, thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed it.
SS: So, I wanna start with Turkey. You think that Turkey’s downing of the Russian plane was a deliberate action, and it was actually aimed at derailing of the anti-ISIS efforts. Why would they want to do that? Don’t they want to beat ISIS as well?
PG: Well, that’s a complicated question. I’m convinced it’s deliberate, because I know the way their government works – there’s no way that a local general or colonel would have ordered the shoot-down of the Russian plane. It had to come straight from the top, meaning from the President himself, Erdogan – and knowing that, it had to be premeditated, it had to be something they were setting up and were prepared to do. I think, it’s very clear it was a premeditated act.
SS: But why would they want to shoot it down? What is the reason behind it, in your opinion?
PG: They wanted to create an incident that would derail what was developing as a large coalition against ISIS.
SS: And why would they want to do that?
PG: Turkey has no interest in defeating ISIS. Turkey has one foreign policy objective in the Arab world, and that’s to keep Kurdish state from development. They are fearful of a Kurdish state developing, taking Turkish territory, Syrian territory, Iraqi territory and Iranian territory.
SS: Now, before this incident between Turkey and Russia we had good neighborly relations – why is Erdogan upon himself – sanctions and tensions – does he not care?
PG: Erdogan made a miscalculation. He thought that by staging this attack on the Russian plane, claiming that Russians had attacked him, that he would get NATO to line up behind him and NATO would support him in a policy against Al-Assad. Now, that didn’t happen, and Erdogan is now saying: “I wish I had never done it”.
SS: Why do you think Turkey is having so many problems controlling the flow of weapons, ISIS recruits, the oil flow back and forth across the border – even Washington is saying that Turkey should take care of the 100 km border line it has with Syria.
PG: Well, they’re having problems because they don’t want to control it. They, essentially are putting a lot of pressure on Europeans by letting the refugees through – so that’s one aspect of what they’re thinking, and also, supplying weapons to ISIS and Al-Nusra is Turkish policy, secret policy, and in return they’re able to buy the oil that ISIS is selling, and then they re-export it. The Turkish president’s family is involved in making a profit from this.
SS: So, I want to read out your quote: “Turkish war against ISIS is mostly a war against the Syrian Kurds and it’s own Kurdish insurgency”, and while the government may paint the Kurds as more dangerous than ISIS – are they really?
PG: Well, of course, most of us know they’re not. The real enemy is ISIS, but the Turks tend to see this in a very limited terms, in terms of their own very narrow interests, and their very narrow interest is to….
SS: But is ISIS not a threat to Turkey though?
PG: No.
SS: Really?
PG: ISIS has not targeted Turkey, except there’s been a couple of incidents that have been attributed to ISIS, but I don’t believe that ISIS actually did them. I think the Turkish intelligence service did it. [This was the false flag attack on civilians, among other operations, just before the last election that reextended Erdogan’s power.]
SS: Do you think Ankara is hoping to use ISIS to actually advance its policy agendas?
PG: Yeah, I think Ankara sees ISIS as an enemy of the Kurds, and therefore it’s a friend of Turkey in a way.
SS: But what makes the Turkish establishment think that they won’t backfire?
PG: I think they hope they will have good luck, but that, of course, doesn’t always happen. I think, in this case, they’re demonstrating that their optimism about how they could play this situation has been unfounded.
SS: Mr. Erdogan’s leadership is slowly eroding the secular nature of the Turkish society. How far can this go?
PG: Well, that’s a good question. It certainly is what is occurring: Turkey is becoming more islamist in many ways, and Erdogan is the one that’s pushing this. Most of the Turks I know are secular and we may call them “Kemalists”, embracing the original constitution of the Turkish Republic. They are very resentful of all of this, and the fact that they even had big demonstrations during the recent elections and also the last summer, demonstrates that there’s an undercurrent opposing this. I think that Erdogan will reach a point where he can’t push this very quickly or very much further.
SS: But is advancing a political Islam a tool or a goal for him?
PG: I think it’s both. It’s an objective. He believes in it, and at the same time it’s a tool, because where he has been successful is to get, basically, relatively uneducated and deeply religious part of the Turkish population to come out and vote for him, and this has been successful.
SS: So, we have a little situation here. While American planes bomb ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Turkey hosts ISIS fighters in their hospitals, they can come over the border, get well, go back and fight; the oil smuggling, obviously, that we all know about. Now, Syrian Kurds who receive money from the Americans are being bombed from the same Turks who are actually one of America’s biggest allies… How does that really go together? How does that mesh together? After all, why does America, Washington still have Turkey’s back?
PG: That’s an excellent question. Having Turkey’s back is being questioned in the U.S. right now. There were editorials before I left Washington three days ago, suggesting that Turkey should be pushed out of NATO, for example, because it’s no longer a reliable ally. So, there’s a lot of understanding that Turkey has been playing a double-game, as it were pretending to be part of coalition.
https://www.rt.com/shows/sophieco/325829-syria-isis-us-allies/
Why Turkey Remains Indifferent Over State Violence Against Kurds
Sputnik, 05:42 27.12.2015(updated 23:37 27.12.2015)
There are four reasons for residents of the west of Turkey to be indifferent or even hostile to the state violence against Kurds in the southeast, as described in a fresh column published in Al Monitor.
The first reason is related to suppression of any opposition in the country.
“It is not easy to raise one’s voice in Turkey against the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government on any issue, especially when it involves the [outlawed in Turkey Kurdistan Workers’ Party] PKK. Multiple times peace activists have fallen victim to terrorist attacks and arrests. For example, most recently 15 Dokuz Eylul University students were arrested in Izmir while protesting for peace,” Al Monitor explains.
Any enthusiasm in the struggle for peace was thus simply put down by the brute force of the repressive regime – news and gossip about harsh arrests and the murders of activists spread quickly.
The second reason is that Kurds, who don’t live in the southeast and don’t face everyday violence perpetrated by Ankara’s security forces, are highly assimilated by the Turkish majority.
“Although [the leader of the only pro-Kurdish parliamentary party, HDP, a Kurd himself, Selahattin] Demirtas is calling upon the people in western Turkey to raise their voices, even the majority of Kurds have not shown willingness to take on this call,” Al Monitor states.
To a large extent, such a low morale is intertwined with the first reason mentioned – simple fear for the repression machine of Erdogan’s Turkey. Even Turks who sympathize with Kurds are afraid to raise their voices.
The third reason for people in western Turkey remaining silent as full-scale civil war in the southeast is getting momentum is the moral dilemma of speaking up while the number of deaths of police and soldiers steadily grows.
“The majority of people in the west do not view the current unrest as nonviolent resistance but as terror attacks. Several towns in the southeast that had a majority of HDP voters in the last elections have declared ‘self-rule’ and have started digging ditches around their towns. People in the west of Turkey cannot comprehend the meaning of self-governance or the necessity of the trenches, both of which have negative connotations,” Al Monitor details.
The last but not the least reason is the lack of trustworthy information. In Turkey, the majority still gets the news from TV, which is predominantly government-controlled. Social media may not serve as a viable alternative due to the abundance of biased and unverifiable information, Al Monitor notes.
http://sputniknews.com/society/20151227/1032352998/turkey-silent.html
Now, that the Erdogan intelligence posing as ISIS militants has silenced another real working journalist, the suppression of the Truth will only continue.
Democratic America considers suppression of the freedom of speech as one of the fundamental enemy of democracy and is using it, among others, as the moral backbone to enter a sovereign country like, Libya, and Iraq. Now, let them unseat the Erdogan government inTurkey in the name of freedom of speech and democracy.
The hypocrisy is grossly overwhelming.
As an aside, a murder of a Dr. Andrew Moulden was also perpetrated to silence dissent against medical madness, depopulation agenda and the Corporatocracy at large.
So, we humbly ask when will the assassination of the high-level Bilderberger starts?
Resignation of a Queen and replaced by her own son, or a Pope replaced with another pope, a Jesuit Pope in fact, are all a big joke. Purely ceremonial.
The system is self-sustaining unless we refuse to participate in it, at the very least.
