True Anon Truth Feed - EPISODE XIX: RETURN OF THE PISSPIG
Aired: 2019-10-19
Duration: 01:20:57


=== Gulenist Cleric Gambit (04:03) ===

[00:00:00]  Do you know any gulanists?
[00:00:02]  Oh, yeah.
[00:00:03]  So Fatula Gulan is, you know, the cleric, formerly boys with, he is actually kind of, if you think about it, he's like a Giuliani to Erdogan.
[00:00:15]  Like he's like, yeah, he's like this kind of silly buddy.
[00:00:19]  Turkey's mayor.
[00:00:20]  He's like, yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:00:23]  But they had a big falling out.
[00:00:25]  Turkey's basically a mafia state, so I can't even remember what it's for, but doubtless some shady shit.
[00:00:32]  Fatula Gulan also is like rumored by every single person in the world, no matter what side you're on, to be a CIA agent.
[00:00:39]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:00:41]  100%.
[00:00:41]  So he moves to the U.S. and opens a massive chain of charter schools.
[00:00:49]  That's like, there are documentaries out there, no doubt funded by the Turkish government, because who else would make this?
[00:00:55]  About Gulenist charter schools.
[00:00:57]  They're not like madrasas or anything.
[00:00:59]  They're like, I think just secular charter schools.
[00:01:02]  He lives in a, I think, where the fuck does he live?
[00:01:06]  He lives in like Virginia, I think.
[00:01:09]  Yeah, that's true.
[00:01:10]  And why do you think, why does Turkey want Gulen?
[00:01:13]  It's like a knight of the long knives thing, I think.
[00:01:16]  I mean, there's also like, there's like a deep state in Turkey that's like a real, I mean, there's a deep state in America too, but the one in Turkey is like, there's like a couple deep states, like parallel ones.
[00:01:26]  And there is a, there is a Gulenist one.
[00:01:30]  He also is blamed, of course, for the coup.
[00:01:32]  Yeah.
[00:01:33]  With bullshit.
[00:01:34]  Failed coup.
[00:01:35]  Which, let's be clear.
[00:01:36]  That coup, Erdogan knew it was going to happen, let it happen.
[00:01:41]  That's kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:01:43]  Because that coup sucked dick.
[00:01:44]  Like for, that was like.
[00:01:46]  Well, they didn't get very far.
[00:01:47]  That was like if, yeah, true.
[00:01:49]  But that was.
[00:01:50]  That was like last year, two years ago?
[00:01:51]  I think it was like two or three years ago.
[00:01:54]  That was like tune into Truanon where we definitely know what we're talking about and know things like facts and dates.
[00:02:01]  Yeah, I also 100% got where Gulan lives in America wrong, but I can't remember.
[00:02:06]  Oh, Pennsylvania.
[00:02:07]  I mean, what is Pennsylvania if not the Virginia of, you know, the Northeast.
[00:02:12]  The North.
[00:02:13]  Exactly.
[00:02:14]  But yeah, so Giuliani is looking to extradite Gulan.
[00:02:19]  It's so weird because it's not like he's not special counsel or part of like White House attorney.
[00:02:25]  He's just, but he's just referred to as Donald Trump's lawyer.
[00:02:28]  It's like, what?
[00:02:28]  That's not a thing.
[00:02:29]  Looks like sort of thing.
[00:02:30]  Michael Cohen is Donald Trump's lawyer.
[00:02:32]  Innocent.
[00:02:34]  Yeah, he's got a baby face.
[00:02:36]  Yeah.
[00:02:36]  Also, hot daughter that he wants to fuck.
[00:02:39]  Oh, that was no.
[00:02:41]  Yeah, that was very uncomfortable.
[00:02:44]  Yes.
[00:02:47]  But for sure, Giuliani also know.
[00:02:49]  I think all these guys just know how many children Donald Trump has had sex with.
[00:02:53]  And so he's like, do whatever you want.
[00:02:56]  No.
[00:02:57]  For sure, Michael Cohen does.
[00:02:59]  But yeah, Juliana's trying to extradite Gulan, which is like, nobody in America cares about Fatula Gulan.
[00:03:07]  Nobody.
[00:03:09]  Like in any capacity for anybody.
[00:03:14]  Inez Cantor.
[00:03:16]  Yes, okay.
[00:03:16]  Inez Cantor is a Gulen.
[00:03:18]  That's true.
[00:03:18]  But he's pro-Gulan.
[00:03:20]  Yes.
[00:03:20]  But nobody is like really anti-Gulan.
[00:03:22]  It's like people, it's like who the Chinese people?
[00:03:25]  Excuse me?
[00:03:26]  The Falun Gong.
[00:03:27]  Oh.
[00:03:28]  It's like you're not going to find anyone who really comes on on one side or the other, the Falun Gong issue, because they don't get what it's about.
[00:03:34]  The same with Fatula Gulan.
[00:03:36]  And so.
[00:03:37]  Similar sounding names.
[00:03:40]  Yes.
[00:03:41]  Yeah.
[00:03:41]  But I personally, it's going to be amazing to watch this happen because it's 100% Juliana is now going to get caught for taking money from Turkey.
[00:03:51]  All the Democrats take money from these people too.
[00:03:54]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:03:55]  It always ends up with the Democrats trying to accuse Republicans of like shit that everyone does.
[00:04:02]  So then it backfires on them.

=== Welcome To True Anony (04:24) ===

[00:04:04]  Yeah.
[00:04:04]  It's like them being like, you're doing this thing that we also do that's really easy to prove.
[00:04:07]  Okay.
[00:04:07]  And so then Trump is like, well, wait, what the fuck?
[00:04:10]  Yeah.
[00:04:11]  In his own Trump way.
[00:04:13]  Exactly.
[00:04:14]  And it's like the whole house of cards goes like Trump, you know, tumbling down.
[00:04:19]  And so this is what's going to happen with Giuliani.
[00:04:21]  It's like they're going to be like, you know, he's going to be like, oh, well, Nancy and, you know, all these people support MEK like me in Iran.
[00:04:30]  Yes, I forgot that Juliana's MEK, did you?
[00:04:33]  Yes.
[00:04:34]  Any like second-rate like psycho from that like a 500 mile kind of radius around there, just Giuliani loves.
[00:04:45]  He's Shia.
[00:04:47]  Well, since 9-11.
[00:04:49]  Yeah.
[00:04:49]  Yeah.
[00:04:49]  He converted to Shia after 9-11 in order to hard himself to fight against the hardened Sunni warriors of Al-Qaeda.
[00:04:59]  No?
[00:04:59]  He didn't?
[00:05:00]  Might have been reading a different history there.
[00:05:32]  Welcome.
[00:05:33]  Welcome, welcome, welcome to True Anony.
[00:05:36]  My brothers.
[00:05:38]  If you haven't already.
[00:05:39]  Silenced.
[00:05:40]  Jesus Christ.
[00:05:41]  Okay, speak.
[00:05:42]  If you haven't already guessed, we're talking about Syria.
[00:05:48]  Because we've had some people message us, tweet us, send us bat signals that they are like, what's going on?
[00:06:00]  I don't understand.
[00:06:02]  Oh wait, one of your co-hosts was in Syria, that's true.
[00:06:11]  So Liz was an Isis bride for several years, which a lot of people don't know.
[00:06:17]  Now i'm just an Isis divorcee exactly, and it's a different status of a tough subject.
[00:06:23]  But her husband is a martyr, or ex-husband, I mean, he will, you know, live eternally in paradise, but he is a martyr.
[00:06:30]  So I think I try to treat this subject respectfully.
[00:06:34]  No but, in all seriousness, people were asking and so um, we thought we should probably talk about it because, you know, we've got the famed uh, American jihadist here, Brace Belden, talk beer, brothers and sisters to mansplain.
[00:06:55]  What the hell is going on.
[00:06:57]  So Liz, you probably don't think war is that cool, do you actually I?
[00:07:02]  I war is very cool, all right.
[00:07:05]  Well, all right, I feel like that's a bit of a fascist thing to think.
[00:07:08]  I think, uh.
[00:07:09]  So what's going on is that by the time this comes out even this comes, if this comes out in two hours so much other crazy shit will have happened.
[00:07:18]  Yeah, but where we're stopping today?
[00:07:20]  What day is it?
[00:07:20]  Today is the 15th of october at some time at night.
[00:07:25]  I'm not telling you where it is, and people can track us somehow because of that.
[00:07:29]  Um uh, time tracking.
[00:07:32]  Uh and, as of now, America is leaving Syria, which leaving Syrian airspace.
[00:07:43]  Not don't know when i'll be back again.
[00:07:46]  No, they're still there.
[00:07:47]  Yeah well, they are not leaving Syrian airspace because they just bombed their own ammunition depot in the big cement factory base that they used to have uh, until about four hours ago.
[00:08:00]  Yeah, so lots of things are happening.
[00:08:02]  Um, I want to try and figure out a way to kind of like how we're going to talk about this, because I think that um, everyone's very confused.
[00:08:14]  Yes um, so I am going to basically interview You, Brace, and ask you some questions.
[00:08:21]  Absolutely.
[00:08:22]  Let's rock, baby.
[00:08:23]  First of all, first question, Brace.
[00:08:25]  Yeah.
[00:08:26]  What's Syria?

=== Syria's Complex Landscape (08:35) ===

[00:08:28]  Syria is a land of many contrasts.
[00:08:33]  Syria is a nation that is, you know, check this out for our Eurocentric listeners.
[00:08:42]  You know, Europe?
[00:08:43]  Check this out.
[00:08:45]  There's a continent next to Europe called Asia continent?
[00:08:50]  Yes.
[00:08:51]  Yeah, there's a continent of Asia next to Europe.
[00:08:54]  Jesus Christ.
[00:08:55]  And the very western part of Asia alongside the Mediterranean Sea are a few countries.
[00:09:00]  One, the country that I work for, Israel.
[00:09:03]  Above that is Lebanon.
[00:09:05]  And above that is Syria.
[00:09:10]  Syria.
[00:09:10]  The Levant.
[00:09:11]  The Levant.
[00:09:13]  Yes.
[00:09:14]  Yeah, I am speaking here of the Levant.
[00:09:19]  And above that, of course, is Turkey.
[00:09:20]  Yes.
[00:09:21]  And to the right of that, if we're looking at it the way you look at maps, usually if you're my house, there's Iraq.
[00:09:28]  Yes.
[00:09:29]  And then there's like all those other ones.
[00:09:31]  I'm kidding.
[00:09:32]  I know all the other ones.
[00:09:33]  There's Iran and blah, blah, blah.
[00:09:35]  But the ones we principally have to pay attention to are Syria and Turkey.
[00:09:40]  Yes.
[00:09:41]  A little bit of Iraq.
[00:09:42]  Yeah, a little bit of Iraq.
[00:09:43]  I think you assume you know some things, don't you?
[00:09:45]  Oh, I don't know anything.
[00:09:46]  I'm just a simple woman.
[00:09:47]  Yes.
[00:09:49]  A simple former slaver.
[00:09:52]  So Syria has basically been under the Assad family for, I think, Christ, I can't remember, several decades.
[00:10:05]  I think it's the 70s.
[00:10:06]  It was under his father, Hafez al-Assad, who came to power in what's called the corrective movement because there was a big nationalist movement sort of after World War II that had some stuttering stops and starts and eventually brought Hafez al-Assad to power.
[00:10:23]  The original lion.
[00:10:24]  The original lion.
[00:10:26]  The lion king.
[00:10:30]  The father of lions.
[00:10:31]  Yes.
[00:10:33]  And, you know, of course, he has a family.
[00:10:35]  There was supposed to be a guy that was going to be in charge named, I think, Basil al-Assad.
[00:10:41]  He died in a car crash.
[00:10:44]  Basil's not a very great name.
[00:10:46]  Yes.
[00:10:46]  So, of course, Bashar.
[00:10:47]  Yes.
[00:10:48]  I think he was an ophthalmologist.
[00:10:50]  British trained, so he's a bit of an English accent, actually.
[00:10:55]  So he comes to power in about 2000, is at first seen as like a reformer.
[00:10:59]  Then the reforms don't go.
[00:11:01]  So the economy is opened up and liberalized.
[00:11:04]  I mean, there's all these people who call it like this neoliberal product.
[00:11:06]  I don't think it's that.
[00:11:07]  But the economy did open up.
[00:11:11]  And there's always been some, to put it lightly, tensions between the more secular side of Syrian society.
[00:11:20]  What you would call ethnic tensions.
[00:11:22]  No, I wouldn't.
[00:11:23]  Well, somewhat.
[00:11:25]  A little bit of sectarian tensions.
[00:11:26]  Okay.
[00:11:27]  Between the sort of more secular side of Syrian society and then the Muslim Brotherhood.
[00:11:33]  Sure.
[00:11:34]  You know, Valerie Jarrett's old outfit.
[00:11:38]  Including this really big armed confrontation, which saw the death of many Muslim Brotherhood brothers.
[00:11:46]  And then there was a period where there was a lot of intellectual protest against the ruling government there.
[00:11:59]  And by the way, Assad is a Alawi, which some people call Shia, then other people say it's not Muslim at all.
[00:12:06]  But also known as Twelvers.
[00:12:08]  Or the Alawites.
[00:12:09]  Yeah, the Alawites.
[00:12:11]  And a lot of people do not like Alawites.
[00:12:14]  They're sort of the more super fundamentalist people.
[00:12:18]  And they are minority in Syria.
[00:12:20]  Syria has a lot of minorities anyways.
[00:12:22]  Armenians, Assyrians, Druze, Syriac Christians.
[00:12:28]  Kurds, of course.
[00:12:29]  Yeah, we'll get Zemis.
[00:12:31]  Yeah, so lots of, it's a real melting pot over there.
[00:12:34]  Anyways, I'm not going to get super crazy into the beginning of the sort of first parts of the Syrian Civil War, but there is, as many of you may know, an armed uprising.
[00:12:44]  First, a semi-peaceful uprising, then that later became an armed uprising due to some clashes with the state that got pretty heavy.
[00:12:51]  The U.S. greatly supports these.
[00:12:55]  And they send the ambassador out to protest to join the protesters.
[00:13:02]  What year is this that this is happening?
[00:13:05]  2011.
[00:13:06]  Right.
[00:13:07]  So listeners might remember Barack Obama really pushing back on involvement.
[00:13:17]  Yes.
[00:13:17]  Supposed involvement in, or at least formal involvement in the Syrian conflict.
[00:13:25]  There are lots of different actors, some of whom might be familiar.
[00:13:32]  Yes.
[00:13:32]  Names like Max Boot, also former Secretary of State, Ms. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
[00:13:39]  Absolutely.
[00:13:40]  Who were agitating quite vociferously for increased United States, let's say, involvement.
[00:13:53]  And remember, they're hot off the heels of their resounding success in Libya.
[00:13:57]  Yeah.
[00:13:58]  I mean, really knocked that one out of the park.
[00:14:00]  And so they're like, let's do this again, but with a bigger country.
[00:14:04]  Yeah.
[00:14:04]  And, you know, I'm not one to give Obama credit for much.
[00:14:10]  To his credit, he did kind of stand against, you know, a lot of these people.
[00:14:17]  Yeah.
[00:14:18]  Kind of.
[00:14:19]  Well, you can only stand so much against the deep state.
[00:14:22]  I mean, I have no idea what Obama's actual, I mean, he was, of course, the whole administration was Assad must go, Assad must go, which, I mean, we saw the Assad curse in action several times.
[00:14:33]  The Assad curse is when someone says Assad must leave office and then that person has their life ruined or dies or both in the case of the world.
[00:14:41]  So we're not saying either of those things on the podcast.
[00:14:45]  No, we actually are going to say now people are going to call us Assadists, though.
[00:14:49]  That's fine.
[00:14:50]  Technically, I'm a member of the Syrian army.
[00:14:52]  Right.
[00:14:53]  Well, we'll get to that in a second.
[00:14:54]  Yeah.
[00:14:55]  But I do want to say that, you know, as we kind of flush forward, let us recall that Ms. Hillary Clinton did, I mean, in debates with Professor Dr. Donald Trump, was campaigning on what was what's called a no-fly zone in Syria.
[00:15:19]  And at the time, I mean, I remember watching the debates in Holly Weird, California.
[00:15:25]  And my jaw was on the ground when she was saying this because I knew what it meant.
[00:15:32]  But everyone, it sounds so friendly.
[00:15:34]  It's like no fly zone.
[00:15:35]  Oh, well, that sounds nice.
[00:15:36]  It's just like then people aren't voting each other.
[00:15:39]  And no one flies there.
[00:15:41]  But no, Because someone, aka the United States, has to police the area, aka shoot down the other planes and fly around.
[00:15:51]  So then no one else flies around.
[00:15:53]  So what she was actually agitating for was war in Syria.
[00:15:57]  Yeah.
[00:15:57]  Which let's be clear.
[00:15:59]  A lot of people have said, oh, Obama stayed out of the war.
[00:16:02]  They did not stay out.
[00:16:04]  They did not.
[00:16:05]  That wasn't what I was saying.
[00:16:06]  Yeah, I know.
[00:16:06]  Oh, no, that's, I wasn't accusing you of that, dear Liz.
[00:16:10]  But a lot of these sort of more rebel sympathetic people were like, you know, they just didn't do shit to help us.
[00:16:15]  A lot of these groups, and there's a lot of bad actors here, got a lot of guns and a lot of money.
[00:16:23]  Yeah.
[00:16:24]  And there was no shortage of CIA little jackasses running around there.
[00:16:31]  No, not at all.
[00:16:32]  But so I do want to like just kind of pin like that Hillary was really at, was like, I mean, vocally agitating for this in this kind of, you know, the way that we talk about war and conflict now, you know, it's also sanitized, I think.
[00:16:49]  It's sanitized or, you know, I think it's purposefully, it tries to purposely obfuscate exactly what, you know, is being done.
[00:16:57]  It sounds like, you know, no one's getting involved when in fact it's quite literally the opposite.

=== U.S. Funding Factions (07:00) ===

[00:17:04]  Yeah.
[00:17:04]  I mean, I think that the U.S. government has realized that large amounts of boots on the ground is going to be seen as war, but anything less than that is just seen as, well, it's just another deployment, you know?
[00:17:16]  Right.
[00:17:17]  It's like deployments in proxy war.
[00:17:20]  Exactly.
[00:17:20]  And there's some actually, there's some parallel here with the rhetoric around this in Turkey right now, because they're insisting on calling their new incursion into Syria Operation Peace Spring.
[00:17:32]  And in fact, if you call it war, operation, that's Operation Peace Spring.
[00:17:37]  And if you call it war in Turkey, if you're like a broadcaster or somebody in the media presence or probably someone without media presence, just a man on the street who a long person overhears you, that is akin to treason, I think.
[00:17:52]  And there have been people arrested for it.
[00:17:56]  And yeah, by just calling it war.
[00:17:59]  So it's the same sort of thing here.
[00:18:00]  They're just more blatant about it.
[00:18:01]  Like, oh, no, it's just a deployment.
[00:18:04]  Right.
[00:18:04]  So that brings me to my next point, which is that last night, the presidential debates or, I don't know, Democratic candidate debates were on.
[00:18:17]  Did you watch them?
[00:18:18]  I've got to wait.
[00:18:18]  What are you talking about?
[00:18:19]  I was doing push-ups.
[00:18:22]  I don't want to end up like Bernie.
[00:18:24]  What?
[00:18:25]  The future president of the United States of America.
[00:18:28]  You would be so lucky.
[00:18:30]  Yeah.
[00:18:32]  No, so Miss Tulsi Gabbard got in a bit of a spat with friend of the pod, Mayor Pete.
[00:18:43]  Ooh.
[00:18:44]  I'm going to fucking talk about that jackass in a second.
[00:18:51]  Nope.
[00:18:51]  Keep it in.
[00:18:53]  Yep.
[00:18:55]  Overruled.
[00:18:57]  But so she went on a bit of a tirade.
[00:19:00]  And her position on Syria has been completely, in my opinion, completely smeared in the media and misconstrued.
[00:19:11]  But without getting into that, I will say that she was really pushing back on Mayor Pete, saying, you know, we have to end these regime change wars.
[00:19:22]  She kept saying regime change.
[00:19:24]  Yeah.
[00:19:25]  And she started talking about how we were funding Al-Qaeda, which actually, surprisingly, no one on stage pushed back on, which I thought was pretty funny.
[00:19:32]  It's an unassailable fact.
[00:19:34]  Well, yeah, some journalists today have pushed back on it.
[00:19:37]  Yeah, which is how it's like, fact check, we're not funding al-Qaeda.
[00:19:42]  Nearly all the major people I saw push back on it had themselves called for funding Al-Qaeda within the past four years by name.
[00:19:49]  Yeah.
[00:19:52]  But I, you know, so I do think, you know, you and I were talking about this earlier because it's, it's a real question, I think, of was what the United States, what we were doing in Syria, would you call it a regime change or not?
[00:20:08]  And I think it gets a little funny because like you say, there's all this sort of like long-standing sectarian conflict.
[00:20:15]  There's already some, you know, unrest, civil unrest just sort of naturally occurring, plus the spillover from what's happening in Iraq.
[00:20:26]  That, you know, natural, so as the kind of like civil unrest is increasing, you know, you don't have to have an all-out, you know, this isn't George W. Bush on TV giving Assad an ultimatum.
[00:20:45]  And it doesn't need to be that in order for us to call it a regime change, because what you have then is the United States basically funding, selling arms, whatever, you know, supporting all different factions at different points to increase destabilization.
[00:21:04]  And you know, that's true.
[00:21:05]  Actually, the U.S. has literally supported every single faction in the Syrian civil war, including Assad, within the past 20 years.
[00:21:16]  Yeah, every single one.
[00:21:17]  So you've got Assad, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Kurds.
[00:21:22]  The Kurds.
[00:21:23]  Turkey.
[00:21:24]  Turkey.
[00:21:24]  The Free Syrian Army, which, you know, kind of has overlap with Al-Qaeda and ISIS, which of course have overlap with each other.
[00:21:33]  I mean, you want to count Nusra as a separate one.
[00:21:37]  And the white helmets, which are a PR outfit from Israel.
[00:21:43]  The Oscar Award-winning white helmet.
[00:21:45]  That was started by a former British intelligence agency agent.
[00:21:49]  And before you call me crazy, it's on their fucking Wikipedia under founder.
[00:21:53]  Yeah, no, don't.
[00:21:53]  Which is where I found out about it.
[00:21:55]  I'm just kidding.
[00:21:56]  I knew that.
[00:21:57]  So anyway, I guess my point is to say that the United States, even though on paper it says, you know, or, you know, Mayor Pete can say this isn't a regime change.
[00:22:09]  It's not technically a regime change.
[00:22:10]  And it's like, no, no, no.
[00:22:12]  Like, it is, though, because the goal was always to get Assad out of there.
[00:22:17]  Well, yes.
[00:22:19]  Yes and no.
[00:22:20]  I'm a little torn on this.
[00:22:22]  The goal is certainly contra Assad, right?
[00:22:25]  Right.
[00:22:26]  Whether it is to get, it is to end the government now or to weaken it so much that it's basically unable to do anything in the future and sort of dies a quote-unquote natural death later is kind of with these latest developments, right?
[00:22:42]  Right.
[00:22:43]  I think the main, I mean, obviously we know the main enemy of the United States of America are those guys who torment me every day who I can't stop thinking about, the goddamn Iranians who've ruined every good thing in my life, fucked all three of my wives, took my children from me.
[00:23:00]  Iranians.
[00:23:01]  I know.
[00:23:01]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:23:02]  You know, Joker wants their ambassador in a comic book.
[00:23:05]  No.
[00:23:06]  Yes, he was.
[00:23:07]  It is absolutely true.
[00:23:08]  I'll show you afterwards.
[00:23:09]  I have the little vignette tattooed on my chest.
[00:23:11]  No, it is true.
[00:23:13]  Well, he wasn't actually their ambassador, but in a comic book.
[00:23:15]  Wait, one last thing about Mayor Pete.
[00:23:17]  Yeah.
[00:23:18]  So no one trusts this guy.
[00:23:20]  I don't think any of our listeners do.
[00:23:22]  But Mayor Pete, as we know, was, I mean, you know, by his own admittance, you know, famously was quote-unquote deployed to Afghanistan.
[00:23:32]  Another deployment, huh?
[00:23:35]  Where he, you know, after Harvard, he went into naval intelligence.
[00:23:38]  And then after that, he went into McKinsey, a private equity firm.
[00:23:42]  By the way, his time in the Middle East overlaps with his time at McKinsey in his own biography.
[00:23:53]  And in his book, he talks about how McKinsey had sent him all over the world, including, and he lists this, a bunker in Iraq.

=== Mountain Turks: Kurdistan's Struggle (13:06) ===

[00:24:04]  Weird.
[00:24:04]  Why would he get sent to a bunker in Iraq?
[00:24:07]  Never trust any intelligence motherfucker, especially naval.
[00:24:10]  Yeah, naval and oof, belly of the beast.
[00:24:12]  Yeah.
[00:24:13]  So anyway, you know, Mayor Pete is not, you know, him pushing back on Tulsi on this stuff.
[00:24:21]  Don't trust him.
[00:24:23]  Yeah.
[00:24:23]  He's a bad guy.
[00:24:25]  Yes.
[00:24:26]  So satanic vibes.
[00:24:28]  Back to Pete's home place, place of origin, Iran.
[00:24:33]  Iran and Russia are, as you may know, Syria's major allies in this war, right?
[00:24:40]  It's pretty much like sort of common wisdom that the government was pretty much on the ropes until Russia really came in in force and hooked them up with some more effective weapons than the barrel bombs they've been forced to use.
[00:24:55]  And Air Force support.
[00:24:57]  Yes.
[00:24:58]  Yeah.
[00:24:58]  But yeah, troops, Air Force armor, pretty much everything.
[00:25:01]  What is Iran doing for them?
[00:25:02]  Iran is doing the same thing on a smaller scale and on kind of a different scale, I guess.
[00:25:08]  Actually, yeah, I guess it's not the same thing.
[00:25:10]  There are armed groups there who are brought by Iran.
[00:25:15]  They're sort of under a looser command structure.
[00:25:18]  The Syrian army isn't like the United States Army or whatever.
[00:25:21]  I mean, there is a regular army, but there are a lot of, let's say, affiliate groups.
[00:25:27]  And a lot of these are brought over by Iran, which is no secret.
[00:25:32]  It's not like this is, I'm just repeating the State Department or whatever.
[00:25:34]  There are like Pakistani Shias, for instance, who live in Iran that have their own sort of battalion over there.
[00:25:43]  There are Afghanis who are hosted by Iran that have their own outfits over there.
[00:25:50]  And regular Iranian troops.
[00:25:52]  And of course, the GOAT, Qasem Suleimani, who is Iran's famous general.
[00:25:58]  And very grizzly.
[00:26:00]  He's sort of, yeah, grizzled, beautiful-looking man.
[00:26:05]  It would be an honor to be killed by him.
[00:26:09]  So Russia and Iran, Syria's guys.
[00:26:12]  Yeah.
[00:26:14]  His shooters.
[00:26:18]  On the other flip, on the flip side of that.
[00:26:21]  Oh, on the flip side of that, we have, well, there's a few flip sides, which is sort of the problem with Syria.
[00:26:26]  We have the, let's call them the FSA.
[00:26:30]  The free Syrian army originally was defectors from the regular Syrian army, which within about a year just became like crazier than anything you've ever seen before.
[00:26:40]  So they defected from the Assad regime.
[00:26:43]  Yeah.
[00:26:44]  And are extremists.
[00:26:46]  Well, at first, it was a mix, basically.
[00:26:50]  It was, you know, sort of people for whatever reason defected.
[00:26:54]  And then within a year, pretty much all those people were sidelined by extremists.
[00:27:01]  Okay.
[00:27:01]  Yeah.
[00:27:02]  And which has been ever since, I mean, any sort of, remember the whole moderate rebels debate?
[00:27:07]  Like, it couldn't find them.
[00:27:09]  Yeah.
[00:27:10]  Well, they couldn't because there's none there.
[00:27:13]  One day we'll find those moderate rebels.
[00:27:15]  Yes.
[00:27:16]  R.I.P. John McCain.
[00:27:17]  Yeah, my man.
[00:27:18]  It's killed by his moderate brain tour.
[00:27:23]  But yeah, so there's the Rebels, which is a really motley, motley, motley crew and totally tons of different groups ranging from groups of about 20 people big to several thousand fighters.
[00:27:39]  The biggest of which I think is a Raral Sham right now.
[00:27:43]  And they are originally controlled quite a bit of the country, now pushed back to just a few points.
[00:27:50]  One right near Israel.
[00:27:51]  It's crazy how that happened.
[00:27:53]  Almira, what?
[00:27:54]  Wow.
[00:27:54]  Wow, that's strange.
[00:27:56]  One just a little bit in the southeastern corner called Al-Tanf, which is the only place that American troops are continuing to stay and their only outpost in the US.
[00:28:07]  Interesting.
[00:28:07]  Very curious.
[00:28:08]  Yeah, it's just like a base in the middle of the desert with like 50 U.S. troops and like a bunch of psycho-jihadists, which I'm sure that they have a fabulous time being at together.
[00:28:20]  And then in the north, there are the Turkish-backed FSA, who I should just still call the FSA because that's still what they are.
[00:28:27]  They're called the new, I think, the Syrian National Army now.
[00:28:30]  That's confusing.
[00:28:32]  Yes.
[00:28:32]  I know, exactly, because it's like you guys live in Turkey.
[00:28:35]  And then there are the northern Syria, or excuse me, is colloquially called Rojava, but it is, which means West in Kurdistan.
[00:28:49]  They call it sort of West Kurdistan, although it's not the official name anymore.
[00:28:54]  That is under the control basically of the YPG, which is people's protection units.
[00:29:01]  the outfit I was with.
[00:29:03]  And then there's the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is a broader group that the YPG is in, and that has, I think, about 80,000 fighters and made up of everyone from ex-FSA groups to little militias from various towns to tribal militias, basically under one command structure.
[00:29:26]  And various, they've lately changed it to where their model is various military councils by region.
[00:29:33]  Got it.
[00:29:33]  Okay, so let's pause on this for a second.
[00:29:35]  Yeah.
[00:29:38]  So, General Brace.
[00:29:41]  Actually, what was your...
[00:29:42]  Did you have a...
[00:29:45]  No, there was no ranks.
[00:29:47]  There's just general, and then everyone else is kind of the same rank.
[00:29:49]  All right.
[00:29:50]  So unranked General Brace.
[00:29:52]  Yeah, future General Brace.
[00:29:56]  Before we get into exactly what has happened in the last week, the United States involvement, why don't you just, if you could, man explain a little bit about who the Kurds are and what exactly is their deal.
[00:30:16]  All right.
[00:30:16]  So my haplo group homies, listen up.
[00:30:19]  The Kurds are an Indo-Iranian.
[00:30:22]  No, I don't know what fucking race the Kurds are.
[00:30:23]  I don't know what I mean.
[00:30:24]  No, that's not what I mean.
[00:30:25]  That's not what I mean.
[00:30:25]  The Kurds are a...
[00:30:27]  You mentioned Rojava.
[00:30:28]  You mentioned the YPG.
[00:30:30]  You mentioned the SDF.
[00:30:32]  SDF, PKK.
[00:30:34]  Yes.
[00:30:35]  Well, I didn't mention them.
[00:30:35]  No, you didn't.
[00:30:37]  But they've been on people's lips.
[00:30:40]  So the Kurds are an ethnic group that are in a part of Iran, a part of Iraq, a part of Syria, sort of the northern parts of those countries, and then a large swath of Turkey.
[00:30:54]  That sort of region is all interconnected.
[00:30:57]  And if you ask Kurd, they'll call it Kurdistan.
[00:31:01]  They are a fairly old ethnic group.
[00:31:04]  I think Saladin was a Kurd.
[00:31:08]  And also Abraham Lincoln.
[00:31:11]  And Fidel Castro.
[00:31:13]  That's a rumor, isn't it, about Castro?
[00:31:16]  No, Castro was Serbian, I think.
[00:31:19]  Oh, that's right.
[00:31:19]  Yeah, never mind.
[00:31:21]  Which he was.
[00:31:22]  So they are the largest sort of most numerous stateless people in the world, right?
[00:31:29]  If you think about it this way, there are 35 million Kurds.
[00:31:33]  There are 12 million or something Jews, I think 14 million.
[00:31:38]  And we have our own state.
[00:31:40]  Best state in the world.
[00:31:41]  State that pays for this podcast.
[00:31:43]  I'm just kidding.
[00:31:45]  We are pro-Nuki states.
[00:31:48]  And, well, I guess.
[00:31:53]  Let me get myself together here.
[00:31:56]  So the Kurds have had a very fraught relationship with the modern state of Turkey, as have many other minorities.
[00:32:04]  I think of Kim Kardashian's wonderful activism around the Armenian genocide.
[00:32:09]  Yes.
[00:32:10]  She's trad posting about it now.
[00:32:11]  She is?
[00:32:12]  Oh, dude, I fucking wish I didn't fuck that up between me and her.
[00:32:17]  So they are oppressed.
[00:32:22]  They aren't allowed to speak their language.
[00:32:24]  There's this process of sort of Turkification.
[00:32:26]  They're actually called Mountain Turks, which I think is really funny.
[00:32:30]  Yeah, Mountain Turks.
[00:32:31]  I'm like, I made up this whole system.
[00:32:34]  That sounds like an indie rock band from 2004.
[00:32:37]  Mountain Turks, yeah, absolutely.
[00:32:43]  And in the 1970s, there are various sort of insurgencies before then.
[00:32:49]  In the 1970s, a man named Abdul Ojalan and several of his friends create a group called the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which was a Marxist-Leninist sort of Maoist influence group.
[00:33:02]  I think he was in university or something when he did that.
[00:33:06]  There he always are.
[00:33:07]  Yeah.
[00:33:07]  That begins a brutal war, basically, for independence up until now.
[00:33:17]  There is, I believe, I don't, I'm not exactly sure on this for, I believe the PKK, which is the parti and Karkeran Kurdistane.
[00:33:29]  Karker means workers and party.
[00:33:31]  I think you can get that part.
[00:33:32]  I think they're the largest armed guerrilla group or like left-wing guerrilla group at least in the world.
[00:33:38]  There are many thousands of members.
[00:33:41]  I mean, that's not even counting YPG.
[00:33:43]  They have a huge base of operations in the Turkish mountains and now especially in the Iraqi mountains.
[00:33:49]  Because of course, in Iraq, in the northern part of that, is the Kurdistan regional government, which is a basically like Mafia state controlled by the Barzani clan and then the Talibani clan.
[00:34:01]  There's intermittent warfare between those two and between those two and the PKK and between PKK with maybe the PUK, which is the Talibani one versus the Barzani one.
[00:34:12]  There's a lot of fighting, basically.
[00:34:14]  Well, Iraqi Kurdistan is, I mean, it's pretty separate, though, from... Iraq?
[00:34:21]  No, am I wrong?
[00:34:22]  No.
[00:34:23]  Yes and no.
[00:34:24]  It's kind of a complicated situation.
[00:34:26]  They had an independence referendum a couple years ago.
[00:34:29]  No, no, I mean it's pretty separate from Syrian Kurdistan.
[00:34:32]  For sure.
[00:34:33]  Yeah, no, they will arrest your ass if they figure out you've been in the YPG.
[00:34:38]  In Iraq.
[00:34:39]  Yeah, well, at least the Barzani types will.
[00:34:41]  The Talibani types, you know.
[00:34:43]  Because I know that a lot of people were wondering if Barzani was going to help out the Syrian Kurds.
[00:34:49]  No, in fact, there is a Barzani-sponsored sort of political group called ENKS in northern Syria who they, for some reason, get to be in all the peace negotiations.
[00:35:00]  There's like 50 of them.
[00:35:01]  And they get to be in all the peace negotiations while the YPG and their political party, the PYD, are forbidden.
[00:35:08]  Right.
[00:35:09]  When I was at a train station that was turned into a sort of youth bunkhouse in Kamishlo, which is the major city in the north of Syria, I met these like pretty psycho, like jacked up teens who are, like all you know, drinking a bunch of energy drinks and all hyper.
[00:35:25]  And I was talking.
[00:35:26]  I was like oh, what have you guys been up to?
[00:35:27]  And they're like man, we just went to watch the fire.
[00:35:29]  I'm like what, what fire?
[00:35:30]  And they're like someone burned down the NKSA office and I was like who did that?
[00:35:34]  I was like I was like I don't know some patriotic citizen.
[00:35:41]  So yeah, they do not have the ENKS, do not have a large presence there right, okay?
[00:35:48]  And so yeah, there's also the Rojava Peshmerga, which is the the.
[00:35:53]  The Iraqi Kurds call there both of their militias, the Peshmerga, which means those who face death.
[00:35:59]  Usually they face it and then immediately run away from it, and they well, not usually actually yes usually, fuck.
[00:36:07]  I'm not a huge fan of the KDB Peshmerga, but they have their own sort of Peshmerga that are like exiles from Rojava, who they've tried to basically use as like political pawns many times and actually had them fight Yazidis at one point that were aligned with the PKK, so PKK basically springs up in Rojava.
[00:36:27]  I mean, they've been organizing there for a long time.
[00:36:29]  Hafez Al-Assad and Abdullah Ojalan had some connections.
[00:36:34]  Ojlan lived in Damascus for a while.
[00:36:37]  They were trained in the Beka I mean, the PKK was originally trained in the Becca Valley by the PFLP, and so there's sort of this connection with the Palestinian movement, which has its own history with Syria and eventually, when actually when Ojalan is arrested, he had to get kicked out of Syria because Turkey was threatening to invade.
[00:36:56]  Unless Hafez kicked him out, which you know, it sucks a little bit understandable for him to get the boot, though my favorite countries in the world actually helped track down Ojalan and arrest him.

=== Erdogan's Threat: Prison Camps Invade (14:56) ===

[00:37:11]  That would be America and the great state of Israel, which again is sponsoring this episode of Truan.
[00:37:19]  So PKK in 2011, 2012, when the uprising started, the PKK's armed organization in northern Syria, which by that point before then had been inactive, the YPG rose up, was given control of the north of Syria by the Assad government and some parts of other parts of Syria as well, Sheikh Massoud and Aleppo.
[00:37:42]  And as many of you may know, fought a very bloody war with ISIS after that and the FSA at times, which eventually received American air support, which ballooned into troops on the ground and weapons, things of that nature too.
[00:38:02]  Things of that nature.
[00:38:03]  I don't know.
[00:38:04]  Money, probably.
[00:38:05]  Who knows?
[00:38:06]  So, okay.
[00:38:07]  Before we, and I promise that we're going to get to this about explaining what has happened the best we can over the past week and trying to understand what is kind of going on with all these different factions.
[00:38:19]  The last one I just want to touch on to give everyone kind of a update and look at all these different, all these different guys, are our good personal friends of the pod, ISIS.
[00:38:36]  Oh my God.
[00:38:37]  God, I haven't thought about them in so long.
[00:38:39]  Well, why is that?
[00:38:41]  Because I think, is it because ISIS Loki fell off?
[00:38:46]  ISIS Loki fell off.
[00:38:48]  Well, they're kind of back now.
[00:38:49]  Well, but are they?
[00:38:50]  I don't know.
[00:38:51]  I mean, does ISIS really ever go away?
[00:38:53]  It's like electroclass.
[00:38:55]  This is my understanding, Commander Brace.
[00:38:58]  Yes.
[00:38:59]  And please correct me if I'm wrong, although I don't think I am.
[00:39:05]  That, so, you know, as, you know, many American decorated generals and Professor Dr. Trump, I want to say, is that, you know, we defeated ISIS or whatever.
[00:39:18]  Let's setting aside who we is for a second.
[00:39:21]  But for the most part, ISIS, you know, has been corralled into all these different prison camps.
[00:39:28]  They're pretty much like the caliphate was kind of disassembled.
[00:39:34]  Yes.
[00:39:34]  Correct?
[00:39:35]  But my understanding is that rather than kind of being contained, that ISIS has basically spread more so into Afghanistan, other parts of Asia, certainly in northern Africa.
[00:39:51]  And, you know, so the idea that it has been completely like, it's not like these people have been eradicated.
[00:39:59]  No.
[00:40:00]  And that compounded with then the refugee crisis has basically spread a lot of these, let's say, extremist types.
[00:40:14]  Because I don't want to say they're all ISIS or whatever.
[00:40:16]  No, no.
[00:40:17]  But certainly not.
[00:40:18]  Sir, no, no, no.
[00:40:19]  I don't mean refugee, but you know, that that rather than it all being contained in these prison camps, it has actually spread to different parts of the globe.
[00:40:28]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:40:29]  I mean, ISIS was always sort of a glow.
[00:40:31]  ISIS is like a state of mind.
[00:40:33]  It is.
[00:40:34]  California.
[00:40:35]  Like, you can leave California, but you always have a little bit of California with you.
[00:40:38]  Yeah.
[00:40:39]  That's how I feel.
[00:40:40]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:40:41]  About ISIS, I mean.
[00:40:42]  Yeah, that's why you did that, you know, shooting in there.
[00:40:45]  Okay.
[00:40:46]  Las Vegas.
[00:40:48]  But that being said, I did, because I just wanted to point that out because I do think that there's this idea that it, you know, whatever, whatever, all of it's destroyed, blah, But I do want to say that, you know, that's not totally true.
[00:41:03]  But at the same time, you know, the Kurds have been basically policing ISIS camps.
[00:41:09]  Yeah.
[00:41:10]  Right?
[00:41:11]  Yeah.
[00:41:11]  Oh, have they?
[00:41:12]  I mean, there are huge camps.
[00:41:14]  And so these are.
[00:41:15]  80,000 people in one of them.
[00:41:17]  Yes.
[00:41:17]  Okay.
[00:41:17]  So multiple sites with like 30 to 80,000 people in them that are all ISIS fighters, wives, children, from my understanding.
[00:41:29]  Yes.
[00:41:29]  Wives and children kept separate from the husbands.
[00:41:32]  I would, yes.
[00:41:34]  But that those prison camps that basically the I mean, this is all the hubbub that a lot of the people have, a lot of Americans have been criticizing Trump for, is that a lot of those camps now might be, you know, threatened.
[00:41:55]  The kind of policing of those camps might be threatened now that the United States has withdrawn its support from the Kurds.
[00:42:00]  Yeah.
[00:42:01]  I mean, the thing is about the policing of the camps, that is true, but it's not true, I think, for the reason most people think it's true.
[00:42:10]  The American troops were not guarding ISIS prisoners from siren, siren, siren.
[00:42:16]  People need to know that.
[00:42:17]  Yeah, they were not guarding ISIS prisoners.
[00:42:18]  That was solely the SDF that were doing it.
[00:42:21]  I believe the Americans at some point like put some bars on some windows and shit like that.
[00:42:26]  But it was, it was.
[00:42:28]  The Americans prefer to fund the ISIS prison.
[00:42:30]  Exactly.
[00:42:31]  Yeah, and we'll get to that too.
[00:42:33]  But yeah, these were not like, I mean, a camp of 80,000.
[00:42:38]  There's not like a building for 80,000 people out there.
[00:42:40]  You know what I mean?
[00:42:42]  It basically looks like an IDP, internal displaced person, internally displaced persons camp.
[00:42:47]  Bunch of tents.
[00:42:48]  And there have been some vicious attacks because the ISIS wives, much like fellas, all of our wives, are fucking insane.
[00:42:58]  And they like, you know, there's been like people, I think, have been almost bitten to death.
[00:43:04]  Just always picking fights.
[00:43:05]  Yes, exactly.
[00:43:06]  Like always being like, oh, I'm not hungry.
[00:43:09]  And then like, I don't know where we should go to dinner.
[00:43:12]  Exactly.
[00:43:13]  Why don't you just pick a place?
[00:43:15]  Yeah.
[00:43:16]  Shoot them all.
[00:43:17]  No.
[00:43:18]  So it's like there have been stabbings.
[00:43:22]  They have somehow sometimes they get just guns and start shooting everybody.
[00:43:26]  I mean, obviously there are 80,000 people.
[00:43:28]  I'm sure there's in fact just last week, or in fact, just a few days ago, they actually rescued a former Yazidi slave who was in there because they can't really verify anyone's identities.
[00:43:39]  There's, I'm sure, still slaves being kept in the camp by ISIS wives who are not known to be particularly friendly to them.
[00:43:48]  And it's just, it's really a difficult situation because what do you do with these people?
[00:43:51]  You can't put them in prison.
[00:43:53]  I mean, you can't, the U.S. hasn't taken them back.
[00:43:55]  Europe's not taken them back.
[00:43:56]  No.
[00:43:57]  And by the U.S. maybe taking them back, I mean, that's the CIA who gave them money is not like, you know, taking the Bahamas or whatever.
[00:44:04]  And it's a really, you know, since for years, actually, the YPG has been calling for, okay, we can set up international tribunals here.
[00:44:13]  And, you know, like you can try the people here if you don't want to take them back.
[00:44:18]  Of course, they refused.
[00:44:19]  And so there's these kind of people just hanging out there in limbo for forever because what the Brits do is, and other countries followed suit, is they just strip these people of their citizenship, which means that they can't leave, which means they just live in Syria after that.
[00:44:35]  It doesn't make any sense.
[00:44:36]  Which is only contributing to the chaos in Syria.
[00:44:39]  Exactly.
[00:44:39]  So now, of course, that the Turks have, you know, marched south, these guards, these were not, I mean, they were guarded camps, but not super heavily.
[00:44:50]  Those guards, a lot of them had to split.
[00:44:52]  And, you know, there's pictures of ISIS wives and children walking up the main streets of some of these towns afterwards.
[00:45:00]  Yeah, it is.
[00:45:00]  It's not a great situation.
[00:45:01]  Yeah, in fact, I believe some of them were like, oh, yeah, some of the brothers came by and let us free because that's what's a little...
[00:45:09]  I would not put it past...
[00:45:11]  In fact, I would immediately assume that part of the culprit here is, in fact, our armed forces, our intelligence services, being like, all right, well, we're out of here.
[00:45:21]  We'll leave a little present for Assad in the form of, you know, all these people loose.
[00:45:28]  And of course, there's still a bunch of cells that occasionally spring up and have these attacks to find buried weapons and stuff like that.
[00:45:36]  So yeah, ISIS is still very much there.
[00:45:39]  That doesn't mean the U.S. should stay there.
[00:45:43]  But ISIS is definitely a force.
[00:45:45]  And of course, they spread in the Philippines.
[00:45:47]  Right.
[00:45:48]  Mali.
[00:45:48]  They're just relaunching.
[00:45:49]  Boko Haram.
[00:45:50]  Yeah.
[00:45:51]  I mean, basically.
[00:45:53]  Oregon and parts of Oregon.
[00:45:56]  San Francisco.
[00:45:57]  The Mission District.
[00:45:58]  Yeah.
[00:46:00]  Okay.
[00:46:01]  So.
[00:46:02]  Yes, sister.
[00:46:04]  Let's run through exactly, or not exactly, but just broadly speaking, what has happened over the last week?
[00:46:13]  And there's been a lot of debates between Democrats and Republicans and socialists and what's weapons over, you know, should the Americans be supporting the Kurds?
[00:46:27]  Should we be in Syria?
[00:46:28]  How much are we in Syria?
[00:46:30]  Trump is pulling out of Syria.
[00:46:33]  You know, a lot of Democrats are getting angry at him because I think the line is like, we're going back on our word.
[00:46:42]  No, America has never done that.
[00:46:44]  Certainly not to the Kurds.
[00:46:45]  No.
[00:46:49]  Or, you know, there's just, there's a lot of people kind of screaming at each other.
[00:46:53]  And I feel like they're kind of using the Kurds.
[00:46:57]  You know, I guess this is how they've been used throughout history as a proxy for their own kind of ideological arguments.
[00:47:06]  So it's true America is not, is no longer giving support to the Kurds.
[00:47:12]  No.
[00:47:12]  Well, no, they aren't.
[00:47:14]  They are still, they actually just said today that they're like, we're still willing to work with the SDF.
[00:47:19]  To back up a little bit, October, I think it was 6, Trump had a phone call with President Erdogan.
[00:47:29]  And after that, he announces pretty abruptly that- Like on Twitter, right?
[00:47:35]  Yeah.
[00:47:35]  Yeah.
[00:47:35]  That the United States will be pulling out of northern Syria.
[00:47:40]  Now, a little bit of background on this.
[00:47:41]  The Kurds control these two candidates called Hasaka, or excuse me, called Jazir and Kobani, Cantons.
[00:47:48]  You know, it's like in Switzerland.
[00:47:49]  It's like a state or something.
[00:47:52]  And they used to have a third one called Afrin, which wasn't connected to the other two.
[00:47:56]  Last year, the Turks invaded Afrin.
[00:48:01]  They basically gutted the town, right?
[00:48:02]  Totally.
[00:48:02]  I mean, it was one of the only places in Syria that there was absolutely no fighting the entire war.
[00:48:09]  No ISIS, nobody.
[00:48:10]  It was totally peaceful.
[00:48:13]  Not like a bullet had been fired.
[00:48:16]  Within a few days, the YPG's resistance collapses.
[00:48:20]  The government sends some sort of allied militia units up, all get killed.
[00:48:24]  Not all get killed, but a lot of them get killed.
[00:48:27]  And Turkey invades using these proxies who cut off the women fighters' breasts and mutilate them and rapes and lootings, et cetera.
[00:48:35]  Now it's basically a fiefdom of these Turkish-backed groups.
[00:48:40]  Anyways, since then, Erdogan's been threatening to invade northern Syria because, of course, the PKK is a terror.
[00:48:47]  And the PKK and the YPG, cats out of the bag, let's just say, you know, they're all part of the same movement, right?
[00:48:55]  Right, right, right.
[00:48:58]  And now that the president's calling the PKK, you know, they've been like, there's this terror corridor, there's this terror corridor.
[00:49:05]  And remember, there are 3 million and a half refugees from Syria in Turkey.
[00:49:10]  Yes.
[00:49:11]  So this is key.
[00:49:12]  Yes.
[00:49:12]  Because basically Turkey, I mean, from my understanding, is that Erdogan is like, we got to get these guys out of here.
[00:49:20]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:49:21]  You got to go back.
[00:49:22]  Right.
[00:49:23]  And so that would require basically moving them in after an invasion.
[00:49:30]  Absolutely.
[00:49:31]  And not the in northern Syria where the border is, that's where the PKK, I mean, okay.
[00:49:41]  YPG.
[00:49:42]  YPG.
[00:49:43]  We can friends.
[00:49:45]  Yes.
[00:49:46]  Loosely.
[00:49:47]  Were basically, I mean, they had massive forts patrolling and kind of protecting the border there, correct?
[00:49:55]  Yeah.
[00:49:55]  And they had some American support.
[00:49:58]  Well, there was basically Americans just there to make sure that the Turks didn't invade.
[00:50:03]  Right.
[00:50:04]  Right.
[00:50:04]  Like, they weren't really like pointing guns at Turkey or anything.
[00:50:07]  They were just standing around or sort of patrolling around so that Turks would invade.
[00:50:11]  Myself, I personally saw the, from the Turkish side, because this group I was in, which is actually a Turkish group called Bog, which is United Freedom Forces, which is kind of a corny name, but it's a communist group from Turkey that our base back then was on the border, and I was sent there for a few weeks of training.
[00:50:33]  And I watched people try to get over to the Turkish side and Turks would shoot at them.
[00:50:40]  Okay.
[00:50:40]  Refugees.
[00:50:41]  Right.
[00:50:41]  I'm talking about.
[00:50:42]  So there are three and a half million refugees in Turkey and that is a big problem.
[00:50:45]  There's a lot of racism towards them and people want them gone.
[00:50:48]  Yeah.
[00:50:50]  So it was their bright idea.
[00:50:52]  They worked out this deal with the Americans and the Americans were really pressuring YPG into this or the STF into this into making this sort of safe zone for them.
[00:51:00]  For three million people, there's three million people in northern Syria right now with double the population.
[00:51:06]  Yeah, it's like saying, I mean, imagine if they were like, we've got three and a half million Canadians that need to just move into the northeast.
[00:51:15]  Just this little, it's like by the way, Rojava is small.
[00:51:20]  Yeah.
[00:51:21]  Like it is not, it looks big on a map.
[00:51:23]  Syria is not a big country.
[00:51:26]  Like it's bigger than like Lebanon.
[00:51:28]  But like I drove from the very tip of the border to the front in about two hours.
[00:51:37]  So it's it's all super close to each other.
[00:51:40]  It's like that's that's nothing.
[00:51:42]  You know, you could actually, it was crazy.
[00:51:45]  You could take a bus into Raqqa from where I was.
[00:51:48]  I was like, why don't we all just do that?
[00:51:50]  Like disguise as civilians and then just beat them up from there.
[00:51:53]  You could take a bus from the, where I was in Syria to fucking Lebanon, but you'd have to go through everybody's territory.
[00:51:59]  But you could do it.
[00:52:02]  So.
[00:52:03]  Public transportation for you.
[00:52:04]  Exactly.
[00:52:05]  Yeah.
[00:52:05]  No Ubers there.

=== Diplomatic Wrangling in Syria (14:55) ===

[00:52:07]  So there was Erdogan kept threatening it.
[00:52:11]  There's these fortifications on the border.
[00:52:12]  There's this sort of like safe zone that they're working out with Trump or with the Americans, and the Americans keep like it's it was when I read the details of the safe zone.
[00:52:20]  I was like, this is never gonna happen.
[00:52:22]  Like, this is both sides are just bullshitting each other.
[00:52:24]  And eventually, Trump maybe figured that out.
[00:52:26]  So he was one day.
[00:52:27]  He was just like, they're gonna.
[00:52:29]  Well, first he was like, let's destroy these fortifications, guys.
[00:52:32]  It's like, you guys don't need these.
[00:52:34]  We got this agreement coming up.
[00:52:36]  By the way, you guys can't come to the peace process we got going on, but don't worry, we'll totally stick up for you there.
[00:52:41]  We're gonna block you coming from to the UN Altsyria roundtable.
[00:52:47]  It's cool, totally get it, but yeah.
[00:52:50]  So President Dioles basically blew up the YPG's forts that were protecting the border extensive fortifications and then banned them from peace discussions for like the eighth year in a row, yeah.
[00:53:04]  Including at the UN.
[00:53:06]  Yes.
[00:53:06]  Okay, so Donnie Dioles deals again.
[00:53:10]  Yes.
[00:53:11]  And then without talking to anybody, he's like, all right, enough on Twitter.
[00:53:14]  We are leaving northern Syria.
[00:53:16]  Yeah, and so everyone freaked out about this.
[00:53:18]  Exactly.
[00:53:18]  Especially because at first it just seemed like we were just leaving the border.
[00:53:22]  The YPG was taken rather by surprise because maybe they don't remember the U.S. is entire history.
[00:53:30]  And the Turks started a couple of days later.
[00:53:33]  And boy, did they start.
[00:53:35]  So what?
[00:53:36]  So how far have they moved in?
[00:53:39]  Not far at all.
[00:53:40]  Okay.
[00:53:40]  The Turkish army hasn't been able to beat the PKK in like 45 years.
[00:53:45]  They aren't great fighters and they have the FSA kind of in as their forward units.
[00:53:51]  The FSA appears to spend their time ripping civilians out of cars and shooting them on camera on the side of their highway.
[00:53:59]  Yeah, I mean, very, again, I said off to a great start.
[00:54:04]  The biggest headline from that sort of that first part of the operation was that the FSA took a Kurdish woman politician out of her car and shot her.
[00:54:17]  And then the official ruling party linked newspapers in Turkey were like another successful terrorist neutralized all these pictures of her, which she was not at armed in any way, etc.
[00:54:31]  So they're just filming music videos.
[00:54:32]  Yeah.
[00:54:33]  And so they are attacking this town, Sarakani.
[00:54:35]  They have failed to take a single large or even medium-sized town since they started.
[00:54:41]  Okay.
[00:54:42]  America, I mean, the Kurds eventually go and are like, America backstabbed us.
[00:54:48]  Like they wait a couple of days and they're asking for assistance, asking for assistance.
[00:54:52]  They realize it is not forthcoming.
[00:54:54]  And General Muslim Kobani, who is sort of the leader of the SDF, finally, I think in these leaked documents, it's like with his communications with the U.S., it's like, you backstabbed us.
[00:55:05]  We are like, we don't care about your shit anymore.
[00:55:08]  We are looking for our people, for our people, like all your shit against ISIS, we don't care about.
[00:55:13]  We are talking to the government.
[00:55:15]  Finally, we can do this because you will stop preventing us because the U.S. had prevented the Kurds from talking to the government and actually tried to outbid the government or tried to get the Kurds to sell their oil at lower prices to the U.S. and or to neighboring countries rather than the higher prices the government would pay.
[00:55:37]  The Kurds did sell it to the government.
[00:55:38]  Okay, so wait, quick pause here.
[00:55:40]  Yeah.
[00:55:40]  So when we say the government, you're talking about Assad.
[00:55:44]  Yes.
[00:55:45]  So let's just back up a second.
[00:55:47]  So there was a lot of, there had been a lot of talks over the years about whether or not the Kurds would make a deal with Assad.
[00:55:55]  Yes.
[00:55:56]  And basically like securing their areas.
[00:56:01]  Certainly not like a nation status, but like some degree of autonomy, yeah.
[00:56:07]  Exactly.
[00:56:08]  And what you're saying is that the U.S. consistently intervened in those discussions.
[00:56:14]  In fact, I remember during sort of the talk around Afrin where the U.S. was like, we won't help you in Afrin because they...
[00:56:20]  When the Turks invaded.
[00:56:21]  When the Turks invaded because the YPG in that part of Syria collaborated with the Russians who kind of screwed them over there too.
[00:56:28]  Oh, God, we haven't even talked about Russia.
[00:56:29]  Yeah, well, it's a lot to get into.
[00:56:33]  But they, when the last sort of big round of negotiations with the government was happening, coincidentally, there was a lot of violence around those times of negotiations.
[00:56:43]  And what I and many other astute observers thought was that the U.S. was probably paying sort of unscrupulous folks to create trouble.
[00:56:52]  Exactly.
[00:56:53]  Okay.
[00:56:54]  Because a lot of people have said, well, the YPG, the Kurds should have made a deal sooner.
[00:56:59]  And what you're saying is that wasn't really...
[00:57:01]  Pretty much not on the table.
[00:57:03]  I mean, it was in some cases, and they have bungled some negotiations, but in like a full-throated, like, we're dealing with each other, you know, sort of as equals.
[00:57:13]  And the possibility of collaboration was never there before now.
[00:57:17]  Right.
[00:57:17]  So now that the U.S. has kind of like backed out, and they don't really have many options.
[00:57:24]  Yes.
[00:57:25]  They're now making a deal with the Syrian government.
[00:57:29]  Yes.
[00:57:29]  And in fact, this was actually part of their demands from the beginning is that they were like, we will dissolve the YPG into the Syrian army.
[00:57:39]  Like we will all join the Syrian army if we degree to some degree of decentralization for the North.
[00:57:46]  And now it appears that this process has sped up quite a bit.
[00:57:50]  I mean, within a few days of the Americans leaving, you have troops of the Syrian Arab Army going up through Inisa and now as of tonight into Gobani, which is right on the border, like literally on the border.
[00:58:04]  On the border, the Syrian Turkish Turkish border.
[00:58:07]  And of course, the Russians providing air cover.
[00:58:10]  So there was a very entertaining video of Syrian troops sort of in their like little trucks going past these American vehicles on the highway.
[00:58:20]  Right.
[00:58:21]  It was like a like, you know.
[00:58:23]  So the change in the guard, right?
[00:58:25]  Yeah.
[00:58:26]  One person going one way, the other going this way.
[00:58:28]  And honestly, this has made me sort of very happy because this was the only solution to the Syrian civil war in the north.
[00:58:35]  This is the only solution to the Kurdish question that is on the table right now.
[00:58:39]  You mean a deal with Assad?
[00:58:40]  Would deal with the government.
[00:58:41]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:58:42]  Because there was no state ever, I mean, there couldn't be.
[00:58:44]  It's about the size of, it would be like a Luxembourg size.
[00:58:49]  Bigger than that.
[00:58:50]  But it's just, it's not in the cards.
[00:58:54]  And this, you know, they were like, we will preserve the territorial integrity of Syria.
[00:58:58]  And, you know, there's been a lot of talk about what exactly is going to happen.
[00:59:02]  These are just tentative agreements.
[00:59:04]  But the important thing to know is that the YPG has not disarmed and is, in fact, manning posts side by side with Russian and Syrian army troops.
[00:59:13]  So you mentioned something earlier about the oil fields.
[00:59:17]  Yes.
[00:59:18]  So the YPG PKK, if we want to, being pretty general here, they controlled a good amount of oil.
[00:59:32]  Most of it.
[00:59:33]  Right.
[00:59:34]  Yeah.
[00:59:35]  So they had some bargaining chips.
[00:59:37]  Yeah.
[00:59:37]  I mean, Syria is not like the Gulf states or something where it's, but it did get a lot of foreign currency before from its oil sales.
[00:59:46]  I think it was like 5% of their revenue was oil.
[00:59:49]  Right.
[00:59:49]  Which is a lot.
[00:59:49]  And also like for use internally in the country.
[00:59:52]  Right, right, right.
[00:59:54]  And the U.S., the, the, the Syrian, or excuse me, the YPG held it.
[00:59:57]  They sold it to the Syrian government.
[01:00:00]  Same with ISIS.
[01:00:01]  ISIS sold it to everyone else in Syria too.
[01:00:04]  But now the Syrian government, it appears, will get that back because that is in Deir Azor in the very sort of southernmost part of the territory that YPG holds.
[01:00:13]  I was actually really against them going on those operations because the locals there don't like them.
[01:00:19]  Like, they don't really like the Syrian army either.
[01:00:22]  It's big ISIS territory.
[01:00:25]  And it was just not, it's obvious that the Americans pushed them to do that.
[01:00:29]  So I should expect the Syrian army to take that back pretty soon because they've had to like buy oil from Iran and stuff like that.
[01:00:36]  Right, right.
[01:00:37]  So that leads me to my next question.
[01:00:40]  The Russians.
[01:00:41]  The Russians.
[01:00:41]  Laruskis.
[01:00:42]  So Daddy Putin.
[01:00:44]  The Russians are probably pretty anxious to make this deal too, as the Russians now have the sole rights to the extraction of these oil and natural gas in Syria.
[01:00:56]  They will, yes.
[01:00:57]  Yeah.
[01:00:58]  But they couldn't exactly get to that.
[01:01:00]  Before.
[01:01:01]  Yeah.
[01:01:01]  It's funny.
[01:01:02]  Actually, the biggest refinery in Syria was made by Konoko.
[01:01:06]  Conanco?
[01:01:07]  The American company.
[01:01:09]  Conanco?
[01:01:10]  Why are you looking at me like that?
[01:01:11]  I don't know what that company is.
[01:01:13]  Am I fucking taking crazy pills here?
[01:01:16]  Konako?
[01:01:18]  Yeah, Konoco gas stations.
[01:01:20]  All right.
[01:01:21]  It's a major U.S. brand of oil, according to Wikipedia.
[01:01:24]  Anyways, yeah, he used to have concessions there, but now they're all Russia's, which, you know, I guess fair trade there.
[01:01:31]  So, okay.
[01:01:34]  And Russia, from my understanding, is now policing a bit of a no-fly zone.
[01:01:39]  Yes.
[01:01:40]  As because they're kind of lending air support to Assad.
[01:01:46]  Yeah.
[01:01:47]  As well as now, apparently, the YPG.
[01:01:50]  It would appear so.
[01:01:51]  Against the Turks.
[01:01:53]  Yeah.
[01:01:54]  And there has been firing between the Turks and the FSA, at least.
[01:01:59]  Yes.
[01:02:00]  And it appears that a Turkish serviceman had died, a fucking serviceman, a goddamn mercenary for the Turkish government has died, along with many FSA members.
[01:02:11]  So they haven't stopped their advance.
[01:02:13]  No.
[01:02:13]  Just because the SAA and the SAA, the Syrian army, and the Russians rolled in.
[01:02:18]  Okay, so we are going to have to...
[01:02:22]  This has been a bit of meandering through lots of very complicated conflicts in the Middle East.
[01:02:29]  But I have a bit of lightning round questions for you.
[01:02:33]  Okay, let's do it.
[01:02:34]  Commander Brace.
[01:02:35]  I'm ready.
[01:02:36]  Shirtless right now.
[01:02:40]  Okay, how close, like, how close are we from, because I think a lot of people don't really, like, understand the extent or how serious some of this, you know, or, you know, what exactly is going on.
[01:02:55]  How, like, is there a possibility of this erupting into a greater conflict?
[01:03:02]  No.
[01:03:02]  I mean, between Russia and Turkey, absolutely, probably not.
[01:03:06]  There's definitely some diplomatic wrangling going on here.
[01:03:09]  I think Putin and Erdogan are meeting.
[01:03:11]  Russia just sold Turkey.
[01:03:14]  The S-400 anti-aircraft system.
[01:03:17]  Yeah, so it's not like, I mean, you know, my understanding is it's going to be a lot more like, all right, all right, all right, stop doing this, knock it off.
[01:03:28]  Exactly.
[01:03:28]  And Erdogan's going to, you know, kind of retreat a little bit.
[01:03:33]  And unfortunately, Syria, the Syrian government doesn't seem to be able to have its own independent foreign policy, which it's, you know, it's sort of.
[01:03:41]  It's tied up.
[01:03:42]  It's with daddy Putin there.
[01:03:45]  Much like this podcast.
[01:03:46]  We switched from Israel since I last spoke.
[01:03:49]  I got a new text message.
[01:03:51]  Well, you know, I am nothing if not a Putin protectorate.
[01:03:55]  Exactly.
[01:03:57]  Yeah, you're like Karelia.
[01:04:00]  So what?
[01:04:03]  Frigid and northern.
[01:04:06]  Anyway, I know what northern means.
[01:04:09]  But yeah, so it is probably going to be worked out somehow diplomatically.
[01:04:15]  Yeah, this is not like an Archduke Ferdinand situation.
[01:04:17]  No, and the whole thing with Turkey being a part of NATO, no one really, I mean, fucking look at Cyprus.
[01:04:22]  No one really thinks that.
[01:04:23]  Well, they should think, you know, they want Cyprus.
[01:04:25]  Yeah, they want, but I'm saying like NATO countries fight other people.
[01:04:28]  It doesn't mean you're going to back them up.
[01:04:30]  I mean, look at Iraq.
[01:04:31]  And I think something that we were talking about that also maybe is important to mention is the situation within Turkey.
[01:04:37]  Yes, it is hot and it has been hot for a long time.
[01:04:42]  Yeah, and this was something that Trump mentioned in his, you know, a man of letters, if I've ever, if I've ever seen one.
[01:04:53]  Just an incredible.
[01:04:56]  It's a shame that Howard Bloom just died because I would have loved to have such a, you know, such a insightful read into the words of the professor, Dr. Trump.
[01:05:13]  But, you know, Turkey's economic situation, but as well as its political situation.
[01:05:22]  Suck shit.
[01:05:23]  Yeah, it's not great.
[01:05:25]  Erdogan just lost some pretty major elections in Istanbul and Ankara, I believe, was the other city.
[01:05:36]  But, you know, a lot of unrest.
[01:05:41]  Certainly, you know, Trump's bluster about being able to bankrupt Turkey or what have you, you know, is hilarious.
[01:05:49]  But, you know, in all seriousness, the Turkish economics situation is pretty bad.
[01:05:54]  Not great.
[01:05:55]  And they have all these refugees like we've talked about.
[01:05:57]  Exactly.
[01:05:58]  And it seems to me that Erdogan is using this kind of invasion, or what did you say?
[01:06:03]  You can't say war.
[01:06:03]  What is it?
[01:06:04]  The Operation.
[01:06:06]  Operation Spring Peace.
[01:06:08]  A Peace Spring.
[01:06:09]  All right.
[01:06:09]  Whatever.
[01:06:12]  You had the words, right?
[01:06:13]  Just the old words.
[01:06:13]  Yes, for our dyslexic Turkish listeners.
[01:06:16]  Yeah.
[01:06:17]  Marhaba.
[01:06:19]  But he's using it as a kind of way to work around some of the more internal conflicts.
[01:06:28]  That's true, because if in the there was like a vote of confidence or whatever, like a vote to approve the operation in parliament, every single party voted for it of the major parties.
[01:06:39]  Yeah, it's a real rah-rah.
[01:06:41]  Go Turk, go.
[01:06:42]  And Erdogan, the HDP, which is the Kurdish mixed with other left-wing.
[01:06:49]  Well, of course, they're not going to be.
[01:06:50]  But because Erdogan has invoked the great Ottoman Empire.
[01:06:57]  Yes.
[01:06:58]  He wants to bring back, you know, Turkish glory.

=== Inter-Agency Conflicts Revealed (09:56) ===

[01:07:03]  Why don't you go north?
[01:07:04]  Take Armenia.
[01:07:05]  Armenia, excuse me.
[01:07:05]  Do not mean that.
[01:07:07]  I'm so sorry.
[01:07:08]  Michael.
[01:07:09]  I'm sorry.
[01:07:10]  Please.
[01:07:11]  Wow.
[01:07:11]  I meant Serbia.
[01:07:14]  Why did you go back into the Balkans?
[01:07:18]  Don't do that either.
[01:07:19]  Let's get some highlights up in this bitch.
[01:07:21]  I don't think he's going to get very far.
[01:07:23]  I don't think so either.
[01:07:24]  But so suffice, you know, I just wanted to bring that up because I think it's important that people understand that what, you know, because from an American perspective, it sounds completely and totally insane.
[01:07:39]  Trump withdrawing and the way it all happened, you know, kind of is, but that it's not, this isn't like World War III.
[01:07:48]  No, it's just some people getting fucked over and then Syria, of course, getting, and the Syrian people getting screwed over once again by America.
[01:07:57]  Yes.
[01:07:59]  Which is, you know, at least historically, you know, something we've always done.
[01:08:05]  Yeah.
[01:08:07]  One last thing I want to ask you about.
[01:08:10]  So some of our.
[01:08:12]  Happy is the man who calls himself a Turk.
[01:08:17]  Some of our other friends of the pod, Mr. Jack Prilasek.
[01:08:23]  Oh, yes.
[01:08:25]  Naval intelligence.
[01:08:26]  Ex-Naval intelligence Pasobi.
[01:08:28]  I think Cernovich has been talking about this too.
[01:08:32]  I'm sure.
[01:08:32]  I mean, they're basically the same thing.
[01:08:34]  Two mouths, one voice.
[01:08:36]  They have, and it's a bit concerning, actually.
[01:08:39]  And this is a bit on a serious note because while we don't have World War III, we might have a different situation in our hands.
[01:08:45]  One host.
[01:08:47]  Which is that they have been tying, and I've seen this with other right-wing guys.
[01:08:52]  Yeah, including some guys that actually Trump retweeted to defend him about this.
[01:08:58]  Yeah, so they have been basically suggesting that, you know, the Kurdish communists, either with the YPG, PKK, and they've been conflating the two.
[01:09:10]  I mean, so have we on the pod, but in a different way.
[01:09:14]  That they have, they've been training antifa fighters.
[01:09:17]  Yep.
[01:09:18]  That's what they've been calling them.
[01:09:19]  Antifa soldiers.
[01:09:20]  Yes, antifa troops.
[01:09:21]  Yeah.
[01:09:22]  Yeah.
[01:09:23]  Both American and European.
[01:09:26]  Yeah.
[01:09:27]  And that this was, you know, people earlier in the year have been floating the idea of calling Antifa a terrorist organization.
[01:09:38]  So this would be actually very serious if, say, Trump were to adopt any of that kind of.
[01:09:45]  Yeah.
[01:09:46]  We can see Trump sort of sliding in that direction.
[01:09:49]  He's been more and more sort of, let's say, gritty in his rhetoric towards the PKK and towards the.
[01:09:57]  Especially as the Democrats, you know, try to take this like bullshit line of like, we're betraying our, you know, our commitments to the Kurds.
[01:10:06]  Well, we did betray the community.
[01:10:07]  Well, sure, of course, but these people don't give a shit.
[01:10:09]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:10:09]  It's not, they don't actually care about the Kurds.
[01:10:11]  That's not me saying that.
[01:10:12]  Yeah, okay.
[01:10:12]  Newsflash.
[01:10:13]  No one gives a shit about the Kurds.
[01:10:15]  I mean, we do, but not.
[01:10:16]  But like, Nancy Pelosi does not care about Kurds.
[01:10:20]  Mayor Pete?
[01:10:21]  Mayor Pete would shoot a Kurd.
[01:10:22]  He probably has.
[01:10:23]  Literally, if a Kurd just lived in Afghanistan when Mayor Pete was there, he would have shot him in the head.
[01:10:28]  He probably wouldn't bend Indiana, too.
[01:10:30]  Whatever he was doing in Iraq.
[01:10:33]  But my point is, is that the more the Democrats are adopting the, and this is my worry, that the more the Democrats are adopting this, like, you betrayed the Kurds, blah, blah, blah.
[01:10:42]  Again, using the Kurds, as we always have as a proxy for other political engagements.
[01:10:48]  The harder Trump's rhetoric and political.
[01:10:50]  The harder Trump's rhetoric is going to get.
[01:10:52]  And here's, you know, our dear listeners, you should care about this because we have a troop right here in the room.
[01:11:01]  Mr. Bryce Belden.
[01:11:02]  Yep.
[01:11:02]  Commander Brace.
[01:11:04]  Now, if you are designated an anti-foterrorist.
[01:11:10]  I don't know what that would mean.
[01:11:12]  Does that mean I would go to Guantanamo?
[01:11:14]  Or is that just for people who don't aren't American?
[01:11:15]  Well, I don't, I, you know, I don't even want to think about it.
[01:11:19]  Yeah.
[01:11:20]  Well, so.
[01:11:20]  I'm not even going to entertain it.
[01:11:23]  I will say Trump has in the past few days said, of course, the Kurds didn't fight with us at, you know, what was it, Normandy.
[01:11:31]  And I mean, the Kurds, Kurdish fighters, were in World War II, yeah.
[01:11:37]  Okay.
[01:11:38]  On every side.
[01:11:39]  I'm just kidding.
[01:11:39]  No, on the Allied side, the Soviets and the, I believe it was a French.
[01:11:43]  No, there's a Kurdish Soviet state.
[01:11:44]  Let's not forget.
[01:11:45]  Exactly.
[01:11:46]  Well, briefly, the Republic of Mahabad at the end of World War II.
[01:11:50]  There's also a Red Kurdistan, which is like an area kind of in Armenia, which is no longer, I mean, it's a complicated story.
[01:11:56]  And then, of course, Trump recently said that the ISIS, excuse me, ISIS has some communists among them, which friend of the show, Seamus Malakafaldzali, Malikafalzal Fazli, can't pronounce it.
[01:12:08]  It's a Persian last name, I think.
[01:12:10]  What did he do?
[01:12:11]  He pointed out, if it's not Persian, my bad.
[01:12:16]  He pointed out that Trump is obviously getting this from somebody who got it from like a Turkish sort of tabloid newspaper article because Turkey, every newspaper there will be like, oh, ISIS and the PKK are collaborative.
[01:12:29]  I actually have a newspaper page there.
[01:12:31]  Right, right, right.
[01:12:31]  And it said 50,000 ISIS fighters joined PKK shit like that.
[01:12:35]  So it's obvious that somebody's just relaying, possibly Rudy Giuliani, this sort of Turkish propaganda to Trump, who's so fucking stupid that he's just like takes it seriously.
[01:12:45]  But, you know, he's saying there are no angels.
[01:12:46]  And in fact, Trump said today that the Kurds may actually be worse terrorists than ISIS.
[01:12:53]  Jesus Christ.
[01:12:54]  Yeah.
[01:12:55]  We'll see.
[01:12:57]  Yeah, I mean, I think the takeaway is as with everything with trying to understand Trump.
[01:13:04]  I mean, at least this is my takeaway.
[01:13:08]  I don't know.
[01:13:09]  I don't think this is controversial, actually, but I think some people might, probably not our listeners, but that behind the scenes, there are basically inter-agency fights happening with different allegiances.
[01:13:25]  And we're seeing it play out between the kind of schizophrenic diplomatic and military policy that we're taking in Syria.
[01:13:35]  I could see that between State Department and CIA.
[01:13:37]  I mean, the CIA and State Department once had rebels fighting each other.
[01:13:40]  Yeah, and not even saying that it's one agency against the other, but just like different people fighting within the State Department, within the, you know, there is, you know, we probably don't have time to get into this, but, you know, when Hillary Clinton took over the State Department, there was a massive, I mean, it was a real reorientation from away from a lot of the changes that happened under Cheney and Rumsfeld.
[01:14:09]  I know they weren't in charge of the State Department, but they had, they were overseeing a lot of the kind of different, you know, the different shifts around like DOD, CIA, and state and the different kind of orientations they were taking.
[01:14:24]  And so my understanding is that there was a lot of house cleaning that happened within the different bureaucracies.
[01:14:31]  And so there's a lot of people with all different leanings, all different, you know, ideological commitments, you know, different commitments to different bosses, etc.
[01:14:43]  And so when you talk about someone like Giuliani, or, you know, you've got fucking Mike Flynn.
[01:14:48]  Yeah.
[01:14:48]  And the GOAT.
[01:14:50]  Even someone like Roger Stone, when you see these kind of like old, I don't know, it's like, it's like interagency access and allies.
[01:15:00]  But then it all just comes out as like schizophrenic tweeting by this fucking like blob.
[01:15:05]  It's all like, it's all contained in him.
[01:15:09]  It's amazing.
[01:15:10]  Yeah.
[01:15:11]  Trump is the greatest president we've ever had.
[01:15:14]  Just kidding.
[01:15:17]  Yeah.
[01:15:17]  So I don't know if that I hope that was helpful.
[01:15:21]  Yeah.
[01:15:21]  I mean, at the end of the day, I guess I'm owned because I thought the I thought that the U.S. is trying to do regime change.
[01:15:33]  And I'm like, but from the beginning, since I was out there, I was like, damn, the Kurds should not collaborate with the U.S.
[01:15:38]  They will abandon them when Turkey invades.
[01:15:41]  Exactly what happened.
[01:15:42]  Look at you.
[01:15:43]  Exactly.
[01:15:43]  Prescient fella.
[01:15:45]  But I mean, I do think we wanted regime change.
[01:15:49]  But like, but like you said, internal culture.
[01:15:52]  Exactly.
[01:15:52]  Yeah.
[01:15:53]  But like, yeah, I guess.
[01:15:55]  I don't think Dulcie's wrong in calling it regime change.
[01:15:57]  I think she's wrong about a lot of things.
[01:15:59]  Oh, that's fine.
[01:15:59]  I'm not talking about that.
[01:16:01]  She noticed how she only gets shit for that.
[01:16:03]  She's wrong about a lot of stuff.
[01:16:05]  That's fine.
[01:16:05]  I think she does not like Muslims very much.
[01:16:07]  Well, look, I'm not talking, I'm not evaluating her as a politician, and I really don't care to.
[01:16:11]  Oh, I'm evaluating her as like a Hindu fascist.
[01:16:14]  Yeah.
[01:16:15]  Much of the regular Hindus.
[01:16:17]  yeah i don't really care to get into any of that um but um i do think that it's instructive that she gets a lot of shit that only about that only about that And she gets smeared as, you know, a lot of different things, which is not.
[01:16:33]  But a lot of it revolves around her being a Russian spy and all this stuff and a butcher of tool, friend of the butcher Assad, which, I mean, think of how many people America is butchered.
[01:16:43]  And then, yeah.
[01:16:45]  Yeah, also, I mean, these, well, I'm not going to go off on the chemical attacks.
[01:16:49]  Yes.
[01:16:51]  Yes.
[01:16:53]  Shout out to Friend of the Pod, Seymour Hirsch.
[01:16:56]  Yes.
[01:16:56]  Well, or is he a limited hangout himself?

=== Steampunk & Cyberpunk Curiosities (02:56) ===

[01:16:59]  But yeah, shout out to Hirsch.
[01:17:02]  That's crazy that he's the one who broke that.
[01:17:03]  Anyways, we got to wrap up here.
[01:17:06]  By the time this has happened, I'm sure the Kurds will have found a nuke or something, or someone will have launched some sort of device at other people.
[01:17:16]  But yeah, let's hope this conflict ends soon.
[01:17:21]  I don't really think that's going to happen.
[01:17:23]  I'm only saying that so that somebody can one day replay me saying that like 11 years when it's actually spilled over into the Balkans.
[01:17:32]  We're going to get Ottoman 2 versus Roman Empire 2.
[01:17:38]  Yes.
[01:17:39]  Versus the German Reich.
[01:17:41]  Also known as the European Union.
[01:17:43]  Oh, that's the new Roman Empire.
[01:17:46]  We'll talk more about this after the show.
[01:17:50]  My opinions are too crazy.
[01:17:52]  Holy Roman Truanon.
[01:17:55]  Wait, did you see how Trump got a bunch of shit for saying he was like, America has a lot in common with the Holy Roman Empire?
[01:18:03]  No, but I love that.
[01:18:04]  Did you see that?
[01:18:04]  And then, of course, all the, you know, I like the idea of him just going full Bronze Age pervert.
[01:18:10]  Oh, oh, God.
[01:18:11]  Bronze Age president?
[01:18:13]  Yes.
[01:18:14]  Dude, I'm the fucking, I'm the nuclear age pervert.
[01:18:17]  I'm the steam age pervert.
[01:18:19]  Wait, like steampunk?
[01:18:21]  Yeah, I'm the steam age pervert.
[01:18:22]  I don't think steampunk is a thing anymore.
[01:18:25]  Like clock cats and things.
[01:18:26]  Sorry, my girlfriend who's also a cat that's in a Zeppelin would love to speak with you about that.
[01:18:32]  But I'm too busy having sex with her using my penis, which is a can, on a spring that's also somehow made of gears.
[01:18:41]  All the steampunk people, like over the past six years.
[01:18:46]  It's like, okay, so you know how all libertarians have become like monarchists over the past like six years?
[01:18:52]  Do I?
[01:18:53]  Why do you think I call you my queen?
[01:18:56]  The same thing has happened with like, it's like steampunk people or people who were like steampunk curious or empathetic to the, or sympathetic to the steampunk crowd, which, by the way, don't be.
[01:19:09]  We call them pogs, people always wearing gears.
[01:19:13]  They're now all cyberpunk.
[01:19:15]  Oh, yeah.
[01:19:16]  So it's like they took the like libertarian steampunk attitude and now they're just like cyberpunk monarchists.
[01:19:23]  Yeah.
[01:19:23]  And it's like, I see through you.
[01:19:25]  Yeah.
[01:19:26]  This is all nonsense.
[01:19:27]  It's all the same nonsense.
[01:19:28]  Man, that's crazy that you come into contact with these people.
[01:19:34]  Liz, you're literally wearing a top hat that's made of microchips right now.
[01:19:38]  You have nothing to say about steampunk.
[01:19:40]  Also, one of your eyes cybernetic and you keep using your finger that's also a USB stick to hack into mainframes while we've been doing this.
[01:19:47]  So none of your cyberpunk anti-my mainframe is actually just one giant clock.
[01:19:53]  Oh, fuck.

=== Libertarian Steampunk Nonsense (01:01) ===

[01:19:55]  Damn.
[01:19:56]  Whoa, cyber steampunk.
[01:20:00]  Man, I'm having a malfunction thinking about this.
[01:20:02]  Okay.
[01:20:04]  Thanks, guys.
[01:20:05]  This has been Truanon Syria Edition.
[01:20:11]  Shout out, Assad.
[01:20:12]  Thanks for listening.
[01:20:13]  We'll talk soon, baby.
[01:20:14]  Hope asthma gets better.
[01:20:16]  Not asthma, the conditioned's wife.
[01:20:18]  She has cancer.
[01:20:20]  I am Brace Hival Rashid Fawad Belden.
[01:20:25]  I'm Liz.
[01:20:26]  And that is our producer, Qasim Soleimani Young Chomsky.
[01:20:31]  And this has been Truanon.
[01:20:34]  See you next time.
[01:20:35]  Bye-bye.
[01:20:36]  Kochara.
[01:20:40]  Jeffrey Laste.
[01:20:44]  Jeffrey Yaxter.
[01:20:48]  Jeffrey Laste.
[01:20:53]  Just Jack, Jeffrey Exton.
[01:20:55]  Come out.
[01:20:56]  Come in.