Operation Featherweight: Month 13, Week 2, Day 7.

I had been hoping to take a couple of days off because frankly my brain hurts.

Unfortunately US President Barack Obama has b*ggered off on holiday without informing Turkish President/Prime Minister/Emperor Recep Tayyip Erdogan that his plan to invade Syria in support of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) won't be receiving US support. As a result Erdogan has been pressing ahead with plans for that invasion.

Yesterday (9/8/15) Al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria the Al Nusra Front (ANF) announced that it will be withdrawing from positions along the Syria/Turkey border. In theory this will leave the other members of the Army of Conquest/Jaish al-Fatah (JAF) coalition to fight ISIL in these areas. This has clearly been done in an attempt to circumvent the problem that the US in particular is forbidden from providing support to any Al Qaeda linked group by a host of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions and its own domestic laws.

It is widely understood that Turkey was able to exert this influence on ANF through the other big group within the JAF which Turkey supports - the Islamic Movement of the Freemen of the Levant/Harakat Ahrar ash-Sham al-Islamiyya (FML). Formed in Egypt in 2011 the FML's stated aim is to overthrow the Syrian government in order to establish an Sunni Islamic State in the Levant. To most people this sounds remarkably similar to ISIL's stated aim of overthrowing the Syrian government in order to establish an Sunni Islamic State in the Levant.

You may even suspect that the reason why most western - particularly US - news outlets insist on referring to this mythical "ISIS" group is to trick people into thinking that the second "S" refers to "Syria" rather then "Sham" - the Arabic word for "Levant" - in order to disguise the connection between the two groups.

Despite receiving international support from Turkey and the Gulf States on the basis that they are the moderate opposition who are to fight ISIL neither the FML nor ANF or when they are working together as the JAF have show much desire to actually fight ISIL. In fact in areas such as the Yarmouk camp for Palestinian refugees in Damascus there has been very clear evidence of both co-ordination and collaboration between ISIL and the JAF coalition.

As a result the best outcome of this news that ANF are to withdraw from the Syria/Turkey border regions is that absolutely nothing will change. However it is much more likely that the FML sections of the JAF will not only avoid fighting ISIL but will actively assist them in turning the area into a safe haven in which ISIL can re-group and re-gain strength.

Erdogan's hope is clearly that a stronger ISIL will provide an excuse to invade Syria on the pre-text of removing this ISIL safe haven but in reality provide more support to JAF and ISIL in an effort to defeat both the Syrian government and the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG).

This really serves to highlight the problem with the US' plan to train Sunni-Arab fighters in Jordan but particularly in Turkey. Numbering just 60 the US' own contribution to this effort - known as Division 30 (D30) - are in practical terms an irrelevance against an ISIL force of around 30,000. However by participating in the program the US has given permission for Turkey to provide it's own training and support to groups within Syrian and rather unsurprisingly Turkey is being far less rigorous in screening the groups it supports.

As a result with Turkey's support the JAF seem to have absolutely no interest in fighting ISIL. Instead they are focused on fighting the Syrian government and have made recent gains pushing out of Aleppo and Idlib Provinces to attack Latakia Province which sits on Syria's border with Lebanon. This is where the majority of Syria's religious and ethnic minority groups including Assyrian Christians, Druze and Alawite Muslims are located.

By fighting the Syrian government rather then ISIL the JAF have reduced the Syrian government's own ability to fight ISIL and this is allowing ISIL to gain ever more territory. Last Thursday (6/8/15) ISIL succeeded in forcing the Syrian government from the town of Al-Qaryatain which sits around 65km (39 miles) south-east of the city of Homs and around 120km (70 miles) north-east of the Syrian capital of Damascus. As they always do when then enter a new town ISIL immediately burned the homes of some 100 Christian families and rounded up some 230 members of religious minorities who are presumably to be executed or sold into slavery.

Today within Turkey the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) killed four Turkish police officers with a roadside bomb and a Turkish soldier when they shot down a Turkish military helicopter both in the southern province of Sirnak. The PKK are actually a political rival of Democratic Union Party (PYD) which is the political wing of the YPG but this fits in very much with their traditional guerrilla warfare tactics of ambushes against military personnel.

Since July 24th (24/7/15) Turkey has been carrying out multiple, daily bombing attacks against PKK positions in it's southern provinces - particularly Sirnak. Although it is never a good sign when a nation starts conducting air-strikes against its own population I have refrained from commenting on these because I see it as an internal Turkish matter unrelated to the fight against ISIL in Syria and Iraq.

Also today there were twin attacks in Turkey's largest city Istanbul. The first of these attacks was a largely failed car bombing that caused a fire that badly damaged a police station in the Sultanbeyli district. The second attack was a gun attack on the US Consulate which resulted in no injuries. 

With the ongoing PKK attacks in response to the Turkish air-strikes you would immediately suspect that the Istanbul attacks were also the work of the PKK and the by-standers who started chanting anti-Kurdish slogans certainly thought so. You would also think that an attack against a US diplomatic building would so enrage the US that it would immediately join Turkey in attacking those believed to be responsible.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it Turkish police were able to capture alive one of the US Consulate attackers at the scene. This rendered it impossible for Erdogan to suggest that either attack had been carried out by the PKK and blame was quickly placed on the Revolutionary People's Liberation Army Front (DHKP-C) instead.

The DHKP-C are a mysterious group who have previously been linked to one of the vast military conspiracies that Erdogan is always accusing of trying to overthrow him. In the run-up to Turkey's June 7th (7/6/15) General Election the DHKP-C suddenly sprung back into life being blamed for a suicide bombing at and Istanbul police station in January and an attack on a Court house also in Istanbul back in March.

Despite these fears that his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) were about to be unseated by a military coup Erdogan was unable to generate the wave of support he needed to change Turkey's constitution to make him President for life. The AKP are once again threatening to withdraw from coalition negotiations in order to trigger a fresh round of elections.

17:15 on 10/8/15 (UK date).