What’s Up With Raqqa in Trumpland?

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Who knows what it means? It may mean nothing. But let me point out something rather intriguing and a bit perplexing.

Remember the military option involving arming the Kurds, which Turkey opposed and Flynn (then in Turkey’s pay) nixed during the transition? That was an attack on ISIS’s de facto capital of Raqqa.

The city that was the origin of that intelligence which President Trump divulged to Lavrov and Kislyak? The specific city was supposedly key to revealing the intelligence. The city was guessable. But it doesn’t seem to have been mentioned in the US press. It was in Israel, the country that was the source of the intelligence. The city was Raqqa.

Now we learn that at least some sources claim that this secret channel, hidden from the US intelligence community, US military, diplomats etc, was to enable Flynn to speak directly with a Russian military officer in Moscow about the situation in Syria.

A lot of these developments turn on Raqqa.

Now, the obvious rebuttal would be that ISIS and Syria are central issues in global diplomacy right now, especially for the US and Russia. So Raqqa isn’t just some random town in Argentina. It’s central to a lot that is going on. It’s not terribly surprising that it crops up a lot. But still. Quite a few seemingly disparate developments in the Trump/Russia story seem to bring us back to the ISIS capital.

Late Update: For those who haven’t read my previous post, I don’t buy the Times account of the secret channel being tied to military options in Syria. But if it is true, etc.

 

Latest Editors' Blog
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: