THEY CAN HAVE IT: Turkey seeks to ‘absorb’ northern Syria.

Ankara seeks “to absorb northern Syria into the greater Turkey,” because the Turkish authorities want to take possession of Syrian water and oil resources, says Richard Hayden Black, an Republican member of the Virginia state Senate.

Turkey uses terrorist groups like Daesh and al-Qaeda to carry out ethnic cleansing in northern Syria and pave the ground for Ankara’s dominance there, the senator told Press TV on Tuesday.

According to Hayden Black, “The group ISIS (Daesh) is sort of a tool of Turkey, of the United States, [and] of all of these groups (US allies). They don’t want [Syria] to eventually survive, because Erdogan sees himself as the head of a vast caliphate, [and] as [the head of] a resurgent Ottoman Empire that stretches from Europe onto China.”

Well, that’s a little over the top. It seems unlikely that however authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions are domestically, that he would want to take on the Arab world’s dysfunctions, too.