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British Empire's Nightmare Coming True,
as Turkey, Russia, Iran Relations Solidify

by Dean Andromidas
December 2016

kremlin.ru
President Putin (right), Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev (center) and Iran President Hassan Rouhani (left), before the start of a trilateral meeting Aug. 8, 2016.

Dec. 21, 2016 (EIRNS) -- For more than 200 years, the British Empire has endeavored to prevent an alliance among Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Now their policy has thoroughly failed. The assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, the first in 187 years (Russia's ambassador to Tehran was assassinated in 1829), has only solidified the commitment of the three nations to cooperate to prevent the destruction of Southwest Asia.

The solidarity of the three is reflected in an editorial by Turkish daily Yeni Safak's chief editor, Ibrahim Karagül, who functions as a mouthpiece for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He wrote that the July 15 coup attempt was part of a plan to "pull apart" Turkey, to pit it "against Russia and Iran; pushing the region into a calamity; and then starting a world war from this calamity. The international atmosphere has never been this harsh since World War II. Countries have never come so close to war ... and the world had never been divided into East and West camps so sharply. The main powers and the medium-scaled countries had never been dragged into such a multifaceted war before."

kremlin.ru
kremlin.ru President Putin at a news conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, following talks on Aug. 9, 2016.

He continued, "A conspiracy against an ambassador is a part of multinational scenarios. It is directed at the region and the countries of the region. It is a part of regional scenarios. It is directed at continuing the war in Syria and dividing the region through Syria. It is directed at sabotaging the affiliation between Turkey and Russia, and the possible negotiation between Turkey-Russia-Iran on the Syria issue....

"We know Turkey is under multinational attacks. We also know that it is trying to be [sic] dragged into civil war, that someone at the least wants to push it into war with a few countries so it becomes exhausted, and that someone wants the maps of Syria and Iraq to be redrawn through Turkey. The two attacks were aimed at this. The other is aimed at obviating regional rapprochement, defense, and stopping the attempts to close the doors to greater conflict.

"Which means, Russia, too, is an open target. This attack aims to annihilate the rapprochement between Turkey and Russia that Turkey started after July 15. It aims to end the possibility of Turkey, Russia and Iran ending the war in Syria."

kremlin.ru
Vladimir Putin paid last respects to the Ambassador of the Russian Federation to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, who died tragically in Ankara in a terrorist attack on December 19, 2016.

He goes on, that had July 15 coup been successful, that "would have actually been the date the New World War would have started. ... We need to see that the threat comes from the Atlantic, that terror attacks are planned here and that these organizations are administered from here. We have to know that they want to ruin Russia just as much as they want to ruin Turkey and that Russia might be facing open attacks, too. We have to realize that the matter isn't just Turkey and that the scenario is on a global scale. We have to realize that the world is being dragged into a scary future; thus, the leaders of all the countries, especially those who will be affected the greatest, must come together and make attempts to disappoint this tendency."

A similar editorial appeared in the Hurriyet Daily News, which is not a mouthpiece for the government. Columnist Abdulkadir Selvi wrote, "They were trying to assassinate Turkish-Russian relations. Those who were not able to destroy Turkey with a coup on July 15 are now staging a chaos scenario. They organized an assassination against Russia, which is our most important foreign support, to drag Turkey into chaos."

Selvi called for the file on the shooting down of the Russian warplane to be re-opened "because a finger, insistently, is plotting to destroy Turkish-Russian relations," describing Russia as Turkey's "most important ally." He said "An assassination conducted against the Russian ambassador one day before a meeting with Russia, Turkey and Iran on Syria shows that we are face to face with an international operation."

Assassin Mevlüt Mert Altintas, he said, was a member of the "sleeper cells" of assassins controlled by the "Fethullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ- th the Gulen network)" and until the 2015 downing of the Russian plane, Turkey and Russian did not allow the assassination to undermine their relations.

Various news sources report that al-Nusra is taking credit for the assassination.