{"id":17521,"date":"2016-02-08T20:28:14","date_gmt":"2016-02-09T01:28:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17521"},"modified":"2016-02-08T20:28:14","modified_gmt":"2016-02-09T01:28:14","slug":"turkey-saudi-arabia-mull-syria-ground-invasion-as-russia-hezbollah-decimate-rebels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17521","title":{"rendered":"Turkey, Saudi Arabia Mull Syria Ground Invasion As Russia, Hezbollah Decimate Rebels"},"content":{"rendered":"

Turkey, Saudi Arabia Mull Syria Ground Invasion As Russia, Hezbollah Decimate Rebels<\/a><\/h3>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s going on in Syria can only go on for so long. At some point it has to change,\u201d Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters on a plane back to Turkey from Latin America over the weekend.<\/div>\n
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As we\u2019ve documented extensively over the past several days, Ankara, Riyadh, and Doha have their backs against the wall when it comes to the effort to oust Bashar al-Assad and perpetuate Sunni hegemony in the Arabian Peninsula.<\/p>\n

Hezbollah has surrounded Aleppo and their advance is backed by what\u2019s been described as an unrelenting Russian air campaign.<\/strong>\u00a0The rebels\u2019 supply lines to Turkey have been cut and without a direct intervention by either the US or the Gulf states, the battle for Syria will have been lost for the opposition which pulled out of peace talks in Geneva citing the ongoing aerial bombardment by Moscow.<\/p>\n

Now, with time running out,\u00a0both Saudi Arabia and Turkey are weighing ground invasions<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t talk about these things. When necessary, you do what\u2019s needed,\u201d Erdogan said, when asked if Ankara was considering sending troops into Syria. \u201cRight now our security forces are prepared for all possibilities,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

For Erdogan, there\u2019s only one acceptable outcome: Sunni militants oust Assad and take control of Damascus. Assad\u2019s ouster is the desired outcome for the Saudis as well, but Erdogan has a secondary agenda in Syria: preventing the conflict from strengthening the Kurds. That means he\u2019s against any support for the YPG – even if such support would help facilitate regime change.<\/p>\n

Over the weekend Erdogan blasted both Russia and the US.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you doing in Syria? You\u2019re essentially an occupier<\/strong>,\u201d he said, in a message to Vladimir Putin.\u00a0\u201cHow can we trust you?<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Turkey, Saudi Arabia Mull Syria Ground Invasion As Russia, Hezbollah Decimate Rebels \u201cWhat\u2019s going on in Syria can only go on for so long. At some point it has to change,\u201d Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters on a plane back to Turkey from Latin America over the weekend. As we\u2019ve documented extensively over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[35,189,7913,683,694,701,1633,1634,1899,776,818,827,857,12279],"class_list":["post-17521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-assad","tag-damascus","tag-erdogan","tag-reuters","tag-russia","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-shia","tag-shiite","tag-sunni","tag-syria","tag-turkey","tag-united-states","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-ypg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17521"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17522,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17521\/revisions\/17522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}