Wildfire

The Ottoman Empire in 1914

According to reports just released on RT, Turkish troops are amassing on Syria's Northern border, whilst Saudi troops are ammassing on the Southern border.  This looks like the beginning of a shooting war which will pit the forces of Sunni-Clerical fascism, and feudalism, backed by the US against the Alawite, Bonapartist regime in Syria backed internally by Syrian Christians, and externally by Russia, and the forces of Shia Islam based mainly in Iran and Iraq.  It comes on top of recent Turkish air incursions into Iraqi Kurdistan, and against the PKK, as part of what has been described as a move to Neo-Ottomanism, by the Islamist regime in Turkey.  It also follows the incursion into Syrian airspace by a Turkish jet that was at the least on a spying mission to look for information on air defences, or else was actively testing out those air defences.

The Assassination Of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Sparked WWI

Any such shooting war holds out the danger of setting off a wildfire reaction similar to that which led to WWI.  The situation in Turkey itself is already fractious with fault lines between the Islamic regime, and the forces of the military.  It is not just that Turkey has historically stood at a cross roads between Europe and Asia, but that it has likewise stood at a cultural cross roads too dividing the Islamic East, and the Judaeo-Christian West.  It carries within it all of those conflicting forces.

The attack by Turkey on Iraqi Kurdistan, and the increased attacks on the PKK inside Turkey, also illustrate the potential sparks that could lead not just to a shooting war between Turkish and Syrian forces, but could spark a regional war, and possibly one that could spread way beyond regional borders.  The Civil War in Syria, has increasingly divided along religious lines, and spread into Lebanon.  Turkey, alongside the feudal, Monarchical, regimes in the Sunni Gulf States, have been sending in troops, special forces, money, and the latest weapons into Syria for some time.  That has sometimes even come into conflict with some of those Syrians who had their own reasons for opposing Assad's regime.  Some of these external forces have clearly been responsible also for some of the massacres that have occurred, such as the Houla Massacre, which was blamed on forces supporting Assad, but which its been shown were actually committed AGAINST supporters of Assad.

On a proportional basis more people have been killed by
the Bahraini regime, supported by Saudi Arabia & the West
than have died in Syria.

Any war launched by Turkey, and by the Sunni Gulf states will almost inevitably be seen by Alawites, Christians and Shia, as an attack on them.  Given the continuing protests by Shia in Bahrain and other Gulf states against their oppression by the Sunni rulers of these feudal regimes, the likelihood of this being intensified at the very least seems likely, and any attack by Saudi on Syria, could well be met by an attack on Saudi by Iran and Iraq, using a defence of oppressed Shia in Gulf states as their own cover.

The Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Armenia are likely to see any such conflict as an oportunity to push their own claims for statehood, opening yet another front of the war into Central Asia, which directly affects the strategic interests of both China and Russia, who have their own Islamists to deal with.  With the on going Civil War in Libya, the potential for a Civil War in Egypt as conflict between the Military and the Muslim Brotherhood erupts, along with the existing conflict in Sudan, and Mali, the potential exists for the conflict to also spread in a southerly direction into Africa.

Most dangerously, however, with increasing tension in Turkey over the increasing islamisation of the country being carried out by the Government, any war against Syria that is seen as part of a sectarian civil war, is likely to result in the eruption of fighting in Turkey itself between Christians and Muslims, which then threatens to result in the historic tensions between Christian Greece, and largely Muslim Turkey to erupt.  That brings such a war not just into the sectarian bear pit that has always existed in the Balkans, igniting renewed fighting in Kosovo, Bosnia etc., but also then threatens to draw in Albania on the side of the Muslims, and Italy on the side of Christians.

There is no shortage of Nationalist and fascist demagogues that have crawled out of the woodwork over the last few years, as a consequence of the economic crisis who would have no qualms about fanning the flames of war to pursue their own political interests.  And some of them are located within the European centre, as well as in its periphery.