Did Turkey Bomb Kurds With Chemical Weapons in 2009?

14 Aug, 2010 by Warner Todd Huston

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News is just beginning to eek out that Turkey might have used chemical weapons to kill some Kurdish activists a year ago in the Kurdish area of southeastern Turkey. If this is true it could severely complicate relations between the EU and Turkey, an applicant for EU membership.

Germany’s largest magazine, Der Spiegel, is reporting that German officials have received photos of eight members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) all of whom were killed by Turkish military forces in 2009.

A German photo fraud expert pronounced the photos authentic after assessing them since March. A forensics report confirming that the photos are of people killed by chemical agents has also been reported.

Members of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union are demanding that Turkey answer to these accusations but Turkish officials have been for years stonewalling all attempts to get answers about the practices of the Turkish military and its campaigns against the Kurds.

Interestingly few European news sources seem very interested in discussing this story much. Israeli news outlets, though, are covering this story heavily. This is interesting because if Turkey really is using chemical weapons against its internal, political enemies this fact will cause immeasurable difficulties between the relations of members of the EU and the increasingly Islamized Turkish nation.

Perhaps the Europeans are not interested in looking into these allegations, ones that seem pretty assuredly true, because it will cause a political rift and force upon them all some extremely uncomfortable realities right in their backyards?

Perhaps the old claims about how much they abhor war and despise nuclear and chemical weapons constantly made by EU member nations is not really all that strongly held?

It would certainly be easier for weak-spined Euros to hide their heads in the sand than deal with an Islamic threat right next door, wouldn’t it?

Now imagine the din and uproar that the EU would raise if it was thought that Israel or the United States had used chemical weapons on anyone. Do you think they’d wait a year to five months to gin up their Euro-like outrage?