Operation Featherweight: Month 22, Week 2, Day 1.

In recent weeks there has been growing tension between the United States and Turkey over an area of Syrian territory that has become known as "Erdogan's Pocket."

This stretches for some 100km (60 miles) west to east from the Syrian town of Azaz to the Euphrates River and around 50km (30 miles) to Aleppo City - the capital of Aleppo province.

The name comes from events in August 2015 when Turkish President/Prime Minister/Emperor Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the Al Nusra Front (ANF) - Al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria - and the Islamic Movement of the Freemen of the Levant/Harakat Ahrar ash-Sham al-Islamiyya (Ahrar al-Sham) factions of the Army of Conquest/Jaish al-Fatah (JAF) coalition to cede control of the town of Marea which sits at the heart of the Pocket to the Islamic Movement of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Turkey's purpose in doing this was to use the presence of ISIL so close to its border to provide it with an excuse to launch a full scale military invasion of Syria. The intention being to stop and then force back the advances of the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) who had succeeded in cutting ISIL's supply lines with Turkey between the Euphrates River and Syria's border with Iraq. Failing that Turkey wanted to preserve this small section of its border in order to continuing supplying ISIL and the Army of Conquest coalition.

It is the US' perceived endorsement of Erdogan's Pocket with the resumption of the Train & Equip program on March 28th (28/3/16) that triggered the renewed fighting in Aleppo province as the Army of Conquest coalition tried to exploit a unilateral ceasefire by the Syrian government to capture fresh territory including Aleppo City.

The rumour is that on or around April 19th (19/4/16) the US gave Turkey an ultimatum.

The Syrian Turkmen Brigades (STB) who are an irregular division of the Turkish military operating within Syria had two weeks to completely clear Erdogan's Pocket of both ISIL and the Army of Conquest coalition. If Turkey failed to do that then the US would back the YPG who have since formed a coalition of Arab, Assyrian and Tribal forces known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF/QSD) to cross the Euphrates for the east and seal Erdogan's Pocket. As the STB function as a coalition within the Army of Conquest coalition it is extremely unlikely that Turkey would be willing or able to meet the US' conditions.

Since mid-April the tension between Turkey and the US has increased. On April 26th (26/4/16) the US State Department issued a warning of increased terrorist activity within Turkey. This obviously gives the impression that the US views Turkey as a hotbed of terrorist activity and therefore a threat to US citizens.

The following day Turkey responded to the US' accusation with a suicide bomb attack in the city of Bursa which is around 115km (70 miles) south of Istanbul and around 330km (200 miles) west of the capital Ankara. No-one was killed in this bombing accept the attacker although a handful of people were injured. Up until yesterday no group had claimed the attack or was being blamed by the Turkish authorities.

The intention here was to cause confusion over what message Turkey was trying to send by carrying out the attack. It could either be trying to claim that it was an ally of the US in the fight against ISIL or remind the US that it is also trying to fight what it terms Kurdish terrorism. Obviously Turkey's ruling Justice & Development Party (AKP) has spent much of the last year trying to convince the domestic audience that ISIL and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) are the same group who along with others are a giant conspiracy against Erdogan.

Yesterday (1/5/16) there was a suicide car bombing against a police station in the city of Gaziantep that killed two and injured 20. Gaziantep sits around 40km (25 miles) north of Turkey's border with Syria and around 95km (60 miles) north of Aleppo City. It is the main Turkish distribution hub for Erdogan's Pocket.

Yesterday was Mayday or International Workers Day which is an important holiday for Trade Unionists and other left-wing groups across the globe.  As such the AKP were clearly hoping that the Gaziantep bombing would be viewed as the work of the PKK as part of their Mayday celebrations. This would allow them to play up the link they claim exists between the PKK and Russia. Turkey is currently agitating against Russia using both the Tatars (Turkmen) in Crimea and the Nagorno-Karabakh Region conflict.

The problem they had is that there is actually a conflict going on between the PKK and the Turkish government. This began on July 20th 2015 when ISIL carried out a suicide bombing in the Kurdish dominated Turkish city of Suruc. This sits around 10km (6 miles) north of the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobane - scene of the immense battle between the YPG and ISIL in the winter of 2014/15. In response to the Suruc bombing which killed 33 the PKK tracked down and killed a number of ISIL fighters who were being sheltered in Turkey.

The AKP took this killing of ISIL fighters as an attack on the Turkish state and used it as an excuse to launch an ongoing large scale military operation against Kurdish areas not only in Turkey's Kurdish south-east but also in Iraq and Syria. It was of course the flag waving nationalism that this operation produced that allowed the AKP to secure the Parliamentary majority in November 2015 that they failed to secure in June 2015.

As part of that ongoing fighting the PKK did indeed launch an attack on the Turkish police in the city of Nusaybin - right on the Syrian border - when Turkey's military operations are currently focused. This attack saw the PKK ambush Turkish soldiers with Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPG's) killing 3 and wounding 14. With this attack taking place prior to the Gaziantep bombing it became much harder for the Turks to present the Gaziantep bombing as the PKK's big Mayday spectacular. This sent them into a bit of a panic.

Initially the Turks claimed that the Gaziantep bombing had been the work of ISIL. In order to support this they quickly raided the home of a suspected ISIL member in Gaziantep and arrested his father. This was a reference to the notorious Alparsan Celik - the STB spokesman who claimed responsibility for the shooting down by Turkey of a Russian Su-24 jet over Syria on November 24th 2015 (24/11/15).

Apart for the war crimes what is controversial Alparsan Celik is that he is Turkish rather than Syrian. Not only that but his father - Ramazan Celik - is the former Mayor of the Turkish city of Keban representing the Turkish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Alparsan Celik is widely suspected of being a member of the MHP's paramilitary wing - the Grey Wolves. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting down it was wrongly reported that Ramazan Celik had been the Mayor of Gaziantep. The confusion seemed to have been caused by the fact that Gaziantep is Turkey's main co-ordination centre for its activities in Syria.

Later on a claim of responsibility for the April 27th (27/4/16) Bursa suicide bombing emerged from the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK). As a largely fictional group a claim of responsibility from TAK has become a convenient way to acknowledge that The AK - as the AKP likes to be known - was responsible. TAK have also become a convenient way to reference the STB - particularly the Falcons of the Levant/Suquur al-Sham part of the coalition.

The rumours of a US ultimatum to Turkey over Erdogan's Pocket have been strengthened by the announcement on April 24th (24/4/16) that the US is going to deploy a further 250 Special Forces operators to Syria. Although the exact nature of the mission has not been disclosed realistically the only place they could be deployed to is the vast QSD controlled area between the Euphrates River to the west and the Iraq border to the east. The southern border of this area is roughly marked by the village of Ain Issa, the city of Hasakah and the M4 Highway.

Any US deployment in this area has got to be particularly concerned about the town of Qamishli which sits right across the border from the Turkish city of Nusaybin. Due to its proximity to Turkey Qamishli comes under daily artillery fire from the Turkish military with there being an average of 10 Turkish artillery strikes on the civilian areas of the town every day.

What makes this Turkish fire particularly hard to explain is that there is no ISIL or Army of Conquest presence anywhere near the town.

Instead Qamishli is long been fully under the control of the QSD save for a small pocket of Syrian government forces - the Syrian Arab Army (SAA). Both the QSD and the SAA have long since realised that they present nowhere near as much of a threat to each other than ISIL or the Army of Conquest  pose to either group. As such in various areas of Syria you get the rather strange situation where the QSD/YPG and the SAA control areas right next to each other with both groups working really hard to pretend that they can't see each other.

On April 20th (20/4/16) that fragile compromise failed dramatically in Qamishli when the Kurdish police force - the Ayayish - refused to stop at an SAA checkpoint. This triggered several days of fighting between the QSD and the SAA which left 10 QSD fighters, 22 SAA fighters and 17 civilians dead. By the end of the fighting the QSD had secured the main prison on the outside of the town leaving the SAA in control of just a handful of buildings within. As part of a Russian brokered ceasefire the Syrian government has agreed that the QSD will retain control of the territory it gained in the fighting.

During the midst of the fighting in Qamishli the Syrian government turned its attention to the Kurdish controlled Sheikh Maqsoud district of Aleppo City conducting airstrikes which wounded numerous civilians. This was on top of the constant artillery and sniper fire that civilians trapped in Sheikh Maqsoud have had to endure since the Army of Conquest launched their new offensive on March 31st (31/3/16). The Army of Conquest attacks on Sheikh Maqsoud which have included two chemical weapons attacks seem to be specifically targeted against civilians - particularly children.

The situation in Sheikh Maqsoud goes to the heart of the current resumption of fighting in Syria. Acting with the perceived permission of the US the Army of Conquest have been trying to rid Aleppo City of Kurds. To this end they having been moving to capture the main M5 Highway into the city in order to lay siege to it.

By around April 12th (12/4/16) the Army of Conquest's offensive brought them into contact with the SAA forces who currently control the M5 Highway. Aside from repelling the Army of Conquest's offensive the SAA launched a counter offensive of their own to liberate the main roads including the 214 running between Azaz and Aleppo City. The intention here is to cut the Army of Conquest's supply routes from Turkey via Azaz bringing their attempts to capture and cleanse Aleppo City to a halt. 

It is only as the Army of Conquest's offensive has stalled that people have suddenly started talking about the ceasefire collapsing and calling for pressure to be exerted on the Syrian government to simply surrender to the Army of Conquest.

17:05 on 2/5/16 (UK date).