Operation Featherweight: Month 13, Week 1, Day 7.

On or around June 21st (21/6/15) the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched an offensive to dislodge the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) from the city of Hasakah. Sitting around 165km (100 miles) north-east of the ISIL stronghold of Raqqa the City of Hasakah is the capital of Syria's Hasakah province and makes up part of the southern border to the humanitarian buffer-zone that has been established between ISIL positions and Turkey.

Following 39 days of battle which claimed the lives of 386 ISIL fighters the group were finally expelled from the city on Saturday (1/8/15) leaving Hasakah fully under YPG control. 21 YPG fighters gave their lives in the operation.

On Sunday (2/8/15) Turkey accused the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) of carrying out a suicide bombing against a police station in Dogubayezit, Agri province which sits around 300km (180 miles) north of Turkey's border with Iraq where Turkey is bombing PKK bases. If this is true then it would mark a dramatic change in tactics for the PKK who have never before used suicide bombers.

It would though fit in with a pattern of behaviour that has been taking place in Turkey throughout 2015. This began on January 6th (6/1/15) when a female suicide bomber blew herself up in a police station in Istanbul. On March 31st (31/3/12) amid widespread disruption across Turkey two armed men stormed a Courthouse in Istanbul taking prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz hostage before all three were eventually killed in a police raid. The following day (1/4/15) a man burst into the HQ of the Islamist Justice & Development Party (AKP) brandishing a sword and a Turkish flag.

Both the police station attack and the taking of Mehmet Selim Kiraz hostage were blamed on the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party Front (DHKP-C) who are a hardcore Communist group that really died out in 1996. In a nation such as Turkey which is prone to military coups and fake terror attacks to justify those coups the re-emergence of a group like the DHKP-C after an almost 20 year hiatus would lead many people to conclude that the attacks were actually carried out by what is referred to in Turkish politics as the "Deep State." The Turkish nationalist storming the AKP HQ would certainly feed the idea that the DHKP-C attacks were faked in an effort to dislodge the AKP from power.

However the woman who carried out the police station attack was eventually identified as a devout Salafi Muslim who is extremely unlikely to be accepted by either the atheist DHKP-C or the aggressively secular deep state. She though would have been right at home in the Islamist AKP. Therefore is seems much more likely that the AKP carried out these attacks in an effort to trick the Turkish people into thinking that the deep state were trying to dislodge the AKP.

That way the AKP could campaign as the protector of the Turkish people sweeping them to the victory in June 7th (7/6/15) General Election that party leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan needed to change the constitution to allow him to continue to run Turkey despite the expiration of his term limits.

Obviously this failed with the AKP being unable to secure a Parliamentary majority. As such you can't help but think that the AKP are provoking and faking PKK attacks in the hope of building them up into a bogeyman the AKP can campaign to protect the Turkish people from during a fresh round of elections. It also provides a pretext for Erdogan to provide support for his ISIL allies by attacking Kurdish positions in Syria and Iraq.

Unfortunately I don't have the time address either of those issues in anywhere near the level of detail I would like because we are still dealing with the fallout of US President Barack Obama's disastrous phonecall with Erdogan on July 22nd (22/7/15).

Rather then fully disclosing what was promised during that conversation the US is instead letting information leak out in dribs and drabs with fresh revelations - each as terrible as the last - emerging nearly every day. This makes it hard to assess the scale of the mistake that Obama has made let alone try and develop a solution to the problem.

However it is clear that the first step is getting Obama to admit that he has made a terrible, terrible mistake.

Although it has been frequently denied by the White House it is widely accepted that the purpose of the conversation was use the July 20th (20/7/15) ISIL bombing of Kurds in Suruc as a way to get Turkey to agree to allow the Incrilik airbase to be used in the fight against ISIL.

Incrilik is an United States Air Force (USAF) base that was opened in 1951 as part of Turkey's membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). As such the discussion is not about what concessions the US will make to Turkey in return for permission to use the base but what things the US will take away if Turkey continues to refuse to allow the base to be used.

Despite going very far down the concessions route it's emerged that Obama has still not managed to secure the use of Incrilik. Turkey has given permission for US aircraft to fly from the base but those aircraft are not permitted to attack ISIL targets in Syria in order to protect the buffer-zone that the YPG and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have established. As the YPG/FSA are currently the only non-Syrian government force fighting ISIL in Syria this is almost exactly the same as saying that the US cannot use Incrilik in the fight against ISIL.

Apart from allowing Turkish strikes against Kurdish forces it's emerged that the most dangerous concession Obama has made is to change the US-led coalition's rules of engagement to allow them to carry out strikes to defend Syrian opposition groups from attack - including from the Syrian government.

The first problem that this creates is that it is far from clear what is meant by "opposition groups." With the exception of the YPG/FSA that the US-led coalition has time and time again refused to support the only group opposing ISIL in Syria is the Syrian government and it seems unlikely they'll need the US' help to avoid attacking themselves.

The US has apparently trained and equipped a full 59 fighters in Syria who call themselves "Division 30 (D30)." Last Thursday (30/7/15) D30 announced that they had been kidnapped by the Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra Front (ANF). This struck me as a very convenient way for D30 to cover up the fact that they had defected to join ANF just like the US-backed Syrian Revolutionary Front (SRF) and Harakat Hazm did back in November 2014 while keeping the US weapons flowing. It appears not to be working because the US has since come out and denied ever being involved with D30.

Apart from the Syrian government, ISIL and the YPG the only other group operating in Syria is the Army of Conquest/Jaish al-Fatah (JAF). This was formed in the spring of 2015 when the Islamic Front (IF) coalition of Islamist terror groups such as the Islamic Movement of Freemen of the Levant/Ahrar ash-Sham (FML) and the Brigade of Islam/Jaish al-Islam (JAI) joined up with ANF.

The JAF group has shown absolutely no interest in fighting ISIL and have on occasion worked alongside them particularly at the Yarmouk camp for Palestinian refugees in the Damascus suburbs back in April and in the attack on the Druze village of Khadar in mid-June. JAF also made clear that it shares both ISIL methods and ideology when on July 1st (1/7/15) they released a video of hostages being executed and accusing ISIL of not being radical enough.

Although it has some presence in the south of Syria JAF's main area of operations is in the north-western Aleppo and Idlib provinces. Here it is constantly attacking the Syrian government in an effort to advance in the opposite direction from ISIL positions.

The JAF is headed by ANF who are named alongside ISIL on United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 2170 (2014) that authorises military action. As such they are a declared threat to international peace and security meaning that even if they were fighting against ISIL rather then alongside them the coalition is prohibited from supporting them. Also ANF's affiliation with Al Qaeda means that Obama would be breaking a host of domestic US laws if he were to attempt to assist them in any way.

Although it grants the use of military force in Syria against ISIL and the ANF with or without permission from the Syrian government Resolution 2170 (2014) most certainly does not allow for Syrian government forces to be attacked. In fact it specifically prohibits it by affirming Syria's sovereignty. As such if the US-led coalition were to attack Syrian forces those forces would be well within in their rights to shoot down coalition aircraft and they certainly have the weapons systems needed to do so.

Therefore unless Obama is going to change those rules of engagement back so they comply with international law we may have to see the breaking up of the coalition. The US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia will go ahead with an illegal war against Syria whilst the rest of the coalition - possibly backed by Russia - continue to fight ISIL.

16:10 on 3/8/15 (UK date).