rt.com/op-edge/323531-hell-place-pilots-russia/
John Wight has written for newspapers and websites across the world, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal. He is also a regular commentator on RT and BBC Radio. He wrote a memoir of the five years he spent in Hollywood, where he worked in the movie industry prior to becoming a full time and activist and organizer with the US antiwar movement post-9/11.
Hell has special place for murderers of downed pilots
*Only a grotesque distortion of the English language could apply the word ‘moderate’ to people that shoot pilots as they parachute helplessly to the ground. Yet these are the very people being armed and supported by Turkey and its Western allies.
A special place in hell is reserved for those who murder downed pilots as they descend to the ground after ejecting from crippled aircraft. It was a practice associated with the SS during the Second World War and is now labelled a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
As if this isn’t bad enough, the Turkmen ‘rebels’ responsible for this vile deed filmed the body of the Russian pilot they had shot and could be heard repeating religious slogans. At one point they even discuss burning the body.
These are the moderates the world is constantly being assured constitute the answer to both ISIS and Assad. In so doing they have plumbed the depths of indecency and immorality these past five years, as they work for the Islamization of Syria and its destruction as a secular state in which the rights of religious and ethnic minorities are protected and upheld.
The Turkmen, however, are the one Syrian minority that has thrown in their lot with the opposition. They are ethnic Turks and in Syria number between 100,000-200,000, primarily located close to the Syrian border with Turkey in the north of the country. Not only have they been fighting against Syrian government forces, they have also been involved in fighting against the Kurds of Syria, under the influence of their Turkish ally and sponsor.
The idea that there is such an entity as moderate rebels fighting in the Syrian conflict was exposed as a myth before this incident. It was exposed, for example, back in 2013 when an FSA commander had himself filmed cutting open the body of a dead Syrian soldier, before removing his inner organs and taking a bite out of them.
None other than retired US supreme NATO commander General Wesley Clark agrees. In a recent interview with CNN, he said: “All along there’s always been the idea that Turkey was supporting ISIS in some way,” before going on to opine: “Someone’s buying that oil that ISIS is selling, it’s going through somewhere, it looks to me like it’s probably going through Turkey.”*