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Policy Blunders Cause Chaos In Middle East

The Middle East was once the cradle of civilisation. Today it's the cauldron of conspiracy theories where locals believe they are victims of malevolent Magi driven by Machiavellian plots to shatter their peace and progress.

The bad news, the news that nobody can bare to hear in the Levant, is that there is no conspiracy - not from the West and its allies anyway.

The unprecedented unravelling of the region and its collapse into expanding violence comes from a series of never-ending blunders.

Take for example the recent kidnapping of most of the Syrian rebel fighters who graduated from the American-run programme to build a moderate rebel army of at least 5,000.

It is absurd enough that, according to The New York Times, they were sent into Syria with no guarantee that there would be air support if attacked by the regime forces of Bashar al Assad.

But to have been sent to try to negotiate with an alliance, Jaish el Fateh, which is dominated by the al Nusra Front, the al Qaeda franchise, is downright dim.

Criminally so if, as was the case, the Front gets bombed by the US-led coalition a couple of days before the meetings.

Small wonder they have been kidnapped by al Nusra, who no doubt will employ them as human shields.

Turkey is also in danger of adding its own territory to the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields, but before we get to that many might ask "who was the nitwit who thought it would be a good idea to insist that new recruits (mostly battle-hardened rebels of four years' combat experience) must undertake not to fight the Assad regime - only so-called Islamic State?"

Almost all volunteers to the programme walked out after being asked to do this, leaving 54 (now kidnapped) graduates.

America's plan has run into the quicksand of hope over intelligence.

The Turks, however, are hardly ignorant - they ran the region for centuries and are part of it.

Yet President Tayyip Erdogan, himself the leader of an Islamic party, has launched close to an all-out war against the PKK, Kurdish separatists, in northern Iraq, in response to the killing of two policemen.

A tit-for-tat round of killings has followed and Turkey has concentrated on bombing the Kurds.

Kurdish parties won 13% of the vote in Turkey's elections last year, denying the president a parliamentary majority and the chance to change the constitution to enhance his powers.

He may now be calculating that a clamp down on the Kurds might deliver a different result in polls he plans for later this year.

But the peace process he successfully initiated and paused in a 30-year conflict that took 40,000 lives looks close to the grave.

Turkey is now bombing the very forces, the Kurdish forces, who have proven the only reliable ally for the US-led coalition against the IS death cult. Yet Turkey is a NATO member and ally of the US.

Turkey has long, and in most people's eyes rightly, argued that getting rid of the Assad regime should be a priority.

That isn't even a serious aim for the US.

In short, the whole thing is an incoherent mess of cross-cutting agendas that can only benefit Assad and IS - it would seem this mess needs a conspiracy very badly.