Darrell Castle tries to make sense of the Syrian Civil War which has been raging sometimes hot and sometimes cold for many years.

Transcription / Notes:

THE NEO-OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 13th day of December in the year of our Lord 2024. I will be talking about the Syrian Civil War which has been raging sometimes hot and sometimes cold for many years. It’s very difficult to make sense out of something that makes no sense, but I will try to do so.

This is the Christmas season here in the Castle household and therefore it is the last Friday that I will be able to bring the Castle Report this year. I will join you again, God willing, on Friday, January 3, 2025. Enjoy the holidays with those you love and by all means celebrate Christmas.

The title of this report indicates that I am taking the position that Turkey won the Syrian Civil War because the fall and removal of strong man Bashar al Assad paves the way for strong man Recep Tayyip Erdogan to emerge and reap the benefits of the demise of the Assad family’s hold over Syria which has lasted for some 60 years. Erdogan came to power in Turkey in 2014 and my position is that he imagines himself to be the return of Suleiman the Magnificent who ruled the Ottoman Empire in the 1500’s when it was at the peak of its power. The Ottoman Empire served as the connection between the Middle east and Europe for some 600 years.

The Ottoman Empire, sometimes referred to as the Turkish Empire, ruled the Middle East until it was defeated and dissolved with the British and American victory in World War l. The destruction of the Ottoman Empire led to the power vacuum that has existed, at least to some degree, until today. Great Britain created the nations of the Middle east after its victory by simply drawing lines on the sand and making a map with those lines as separate countries which were really just a collection of Nomadic Tribes. I believe Erdogan came to power in Turkey with a dream of returning his country to the greatness it once had and he is currently going about the business of rebuilding the Ottoman Empire under Turkish control.

His rebuilding uses overt war as we have recently seen, but it also operates through diplomacy and even subterfuge which he used to gain acceptance into NATO. Yes, that’s right, this Muslim country of Turkey, whose culture, religion, and way of life is completely averse to those of the West is a full-fledged NATO member. A close member of Erdogan’s inner circle of advisors recently said in a public interview that the goal of the Erdogan administration is the destruction of Western Civilization. The NATO alliance should remove Turkey because of that, but the problem is that the NATO charter has no provision for involuntarily removing a member or kicking someone out.

A majority of NATO members may want Turkey out but the alliance is pretty woke right now and must think this is a woke world, so they try to read the tea leaves and apparently that requires more fear of being labeled Islamophobic than it does having an enemy nation in its midst. Erdogan, in the meantime, apparently seeks to Islamize Europe through Muslim immigration. He has, in essence, held Europe hostage and demanded money to prevent refugees from traveling upward from Syria through Turkey into Europe. The Europeans have paid the ransom in the past but right now one out of every 20 Syrians in the world resides in Germany thanks to Erdogan and the policies of former Chancellor Angela Merkel.

I could go on with this Neo-Ottoman story all day but to sum it up a little he is putting together a collection of Sunni nations in opposition to the Shiites that have ruled Syria in the past by way of Iran and to some extent Iraq. This is a coalition against Iran in other words, which brings me to how this played out in the war. I imagine that right now the leaders in Iran are feeling regret that they allowed the...