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US tells Turkey it will take back weapons from Kurdish militia- Turkish sources
[Ynet] Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told his Turkish counterpart that weapons provided to the Kurdish YPG militia in Syria would be taken back once Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
 was defeated, Turkish defence ministry sources said on Thursday.

In a letter to The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
's Defence Minister Fikri Isik, Mattis said the United States had informed Turkey about the weapons it had given the YPG and that it would provide monthly lists of the arms supplied, the sources said in a statement.

Relations between the two NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis....
 allies have become strained due to the support the United States has given the YPG, which Turkey has fought in northern Syria, to support the campaign against Islamic State.

In his letter, Mattis told Isik that the United States would take determined measures to address Turkey's security concerns, the sources said, and that Arabs would comprise 80 percent of the forces to capture Syria's Raqqa from Islamic State.

The YPG is a leading part of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which launched an operation earlier this month to capture Raqqa, Islamic State's de facto Syrian capital. Turkey has said that it would retaliate against the YPG if it felt a threat from the group.
Interesting that it is anonymous Turks said to be somewhere in the defense ministry telling us what the American defense secretary wrote, and not Secretary Mattis himself or his representative....or even the Turkish defense secretary himself. Based on what we've seen since the American election last year, the odds are good the anonymous sources live only in the journalist's imagination, or have no connection to the matter being reported and therefore have only malice to contribute instead of actual facts.

Posted by: trailing wife 2017-06-23
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=490963