{"id":30373,"date":"2018-01-31T08:01:56","date_gmt":"2018-01-31T13:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30373"},"modified":"2018-01-31T08:01:56","modified_gmt":"2018-01-31T13:01:56","slug":"how-regional-rivalries-threaten-to-fuel-the-fire-in-syria-and-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30373","title":{"rendered":"How regional rivalries threaten to fuel the fire in Syria and Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How regional rivalries threaten to fuel the fire in Syria and Iran<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Credit: Wikimedia\u00a0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Turkish allegations<\/a>\u00a0of Saudi, Emirati and Egyptian support for the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) threaten to turn\u00a0Turkey\u2019s military offensive<\/a>\u00a0against Syrian Kurds aligned with the PKK into a regional imbroglio.<\/p>\n

The threat is magnified\u00a0by Iranian assertions<\/a>\u00a0that low-intensity warfare is heating up in areas of the Islamic republic populated by ethnic minorities, including the Kurds in the northwest and the Baloch on the border with Pakistan.<\/p>\n

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Taken together, the two developments raise the spectre of a potentially debilitating escalation of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran as well as an aggravation of the eight-month-old Gulf crisis that has pitted Saudi Arabia and its allies against Qatar, which has forged close ties to Turkey.<\/p>\n

The United Arab Emirates and Egypt<\/a>\u00a0rather than Saudi Arabia have taken the lead in criticizing Turkey\u2019s incursion into Syria designed to remove US-backed Kurds from the countries\u2019 border and create a 30-kilometer deep buffer zone.<\/p>\n

UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash<\/a>\u00a0said the incursion by a non-Arab state signalled that Arab states would be marginalized if they failed to develop a national security strategy.<\/p>\n

Egypt<\/a>, for its part, condemned the incursion as a \u201cfresh violation of Syrian sovereignty\u201d that was intended to \u201cundermine the existing efforts for political solutions and counter-terrorism efforts in Syria,\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite Saudi silence,\u00a0Yeni Safak<\/a>, a newspaper closely aligned with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan\u2019s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), charged that a $1 billion Saudi contribution to the reconstruction of Raqqa, the now Syrian Kurdish-controlled former capital of the Islamic State, was evidence of the kingdom\u2019s involvement in what it termed a \u201cdirty game.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

How regional rivalries threaten to fuel the fire in Syria and Iran Credit: Wikimedia\u00a0 Turkish allegations\u00a0of Saudi, Emirati and Egyptian support for the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) threaten to turn\u00a0Turkey\u2019s military offensive\u00a0against Syrian Kurds aligned with the PKK into a regional imbroglio. The threat is magnified\u00a0by Iranian assertions\u00a0that low-intensity warfare is heating up in […]<\/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":[18242,250,441,18241,522,1026,701,776,818,2428],"class_list":["post-30373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-asmasdar-news","tag-egypt","tag-iran","tag-james-m-dorsey","tag-middle-east","tag-qatar","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-syria","tag-turkey","tag-united-arab-emirates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30373","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=30373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30374,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30373\/revisions\/30374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}