Unsurprisingly, The Guardian has a very good piece on the Putin Deal that is very thorough in explaining the nuts and bolts of how it works. Moreover, they also explain where there is still uncertainty of arrangements, and issues that remain to be decided, such as Assad’s offer of Amnesty for Kurdish fighters who rejoined Syria.
In both Derbesiye & Qamishlo today, false rumors have spread via Facebook and word of mouth that a fresh Turkish assault is already underway, causing people to flee.
The same happened a week ago in Qamishlo – among political shifts, civilians remain fearful of Turkish invasion. pic.twitter.com/pr3iN5Qu3m
Welp, accidentally saw another few people get shot. Awesome. Fucking Twitter autoplay.
Anyway, shit may be getting worse on the ground already. Not a rigorous review of evidence, but from my vantage point it seems like there is an uptick in the Turkish backed militia sharing violent atrocities in social media.
They’d been doing it before—throughout the five day thing-fire period, there were pictures and video coming out that demonstrated troops were doing precisely what Turkish government supporters were denying they were doing. But now we’re seeing random beatings on the street, troops stomping on pictures of Öcalan, we learned that the politician that was killed a week or so ago wasn’t shot but raped and stoned to death.
Stuff like that. It looks like the Turkish affiliated forces are feeling empowered to behave poorly, emboldened by the US withdrawal. The practice of random violence to create chaos and fear would unequivocally be terrorism if these acts were carried out against a recognized mation state.
But they’re not.
In many ways, this is sadly not very surprising; check this out:
The municipal government in Konya, Turkey's most #Islamist city, dominated by the AKP, posted billboards quoting Koran 5:51: "Do not take Jews & Christians as allies. … God does not guide wrongdoers."
Me: – Turkey is becoming Iran #2 – When will the world awaken to the danger? https://t.co/5iUKaZVu74
Konya Metropolitan Municipality billboards “Jews and Christians do not make friends. Allah does not lead the wrongdoing community” verse was written. (Surat al-Ma’ida – Verse 51)
I was going to post some pics and video of what’s going on on the ground in Syria but… but now I’ve thought better of it. Anyone who wants can find it easily enough, so it seems better not to “impose” it one people given the graphical nature of the content.
Russia’s leader hosted his Turkish counterpart as a U.S.-brokered cease-fire with Kurdish forces came to an end, underscoring Moscow’s emergence as a powerful player in the Middle East.
Reverend
Yuck.
geoduck no quahog
Next question: How can Putin shield Trump from taking a hit on this? I suspect he cannot be content with the prospect of his asset losing face (and office) over facilitating a sort of alliance between Russia and a NATO ally.
barbed wire Bob
You’re assuming Putin gives a shit about Trump. In Russia’s eyes Trump was merely a tool that happily fell into their hands* but I’m sure they are reading the polls and are concluding he will be, at best, another first term president. At this point he’s an asset that is quickly becoming no longer useful. They will probably try to spit in the soup again by posting a bunch of crap of Facebook and Twitter supporting him and weakening the Dems but, other than that, not much. It would be interesting to see if they throw Trump under the bus to help the Dems impeach the man because impeachment hearings in an election year (with all the polarization that goes along with it) would really paralyze the government and fuck up things in general.
*The original goal was to weaken President Hillary by spitting in the political soup but don’t believe they ever seriously thought Trump would be elected.
dhappy42
Not saying you’re doing this, but it’d be a mistake to think that Russian election ratfucking is limited to helping Trump or messing with Clinton and the next Dem nominee. Social media gets all the attention because we see it every day, but the real game is played with campaign contributions and favors. Russia has infiltrated the NRA and channeled millions in contributions through people like Alex Torshin to most Republicans. Oleg Derepaskaya is investing $200 million in #MoscowMitch’s Kentucky for a reason. We’ve basically made it easy and quasi-legal for foreigners to spend huge sums of money to buy US politicians. And then there’s kompromat. Who knows what the Russians have on whom.
barbed wire Bob
Thank you for adding this
BroodsSexton
So basically we’ve given up our influence so that the Russians can expand theirs, with the effect that our allies in the region who are most closely tied to democratic efforts are going to be displaced and cleansed.
Seems like a strong geopolitical move, Trump.
Reverend
Trump at a poker table would obsess over who won the most hands without bothering to keep track of chip piles, palm an extra card when dealing, then give his cards to Putin thinking hey are worthless, not realizing that when combined with Putin’s they nail the inside straight, but doesn’t stick around to find out how the hand would play out instead sulking our of the room, but not before, in a fit of rage, he hurls his stack of chips at Putin, because that’ll show him.
Seriously: He gave away everything.
In juxtaposition with Trump, you gotta wonder if Putin will end up with the Nobel Prize.
I keep asking myself, how the hell can Putin be negotiating unilaterally but in coordination with Syria AND Turkey… AND the Kurds. I mean, what the he-
And then I remember what Putin used to do to earn a living. At what point do you just tip your cap.
Note: I do limit how much of this would have been intentional versus strategically opportunistic in my thinking, as I don’t think Putin knew Trump was going to do what he’s done. But one way or another he’s pulled a pretty neat trick so long as it doesn’t blow up in his face.
There is simply no way that this decision was in American interests. Which raises the question: if the President directs action that is so plainly not in American interests, who carries it out? I mean, if you’re the Secretary of Defense, and you get the order to burn the Kurds, is that something you can in good conscience do?
Reverend
Pompeo is the guy I have my eye on.
[REDACTED COMMENTS: PLACEHOLDER]
QUESTIONS: RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ASSAD AND “THE KURDS”
I can try, but i don’t know anything about local culture stuff which is super involved and complex with multiple overlapping layers of affiliations, but pretty much what you’d expect the relationship between a Ba’athist dictatorship (of the proletariat… not.) and a liberal democratic regime in rebellion against it. Maybe a little bit more antipathy because the Kurds represent not just a rebel population, but also a new form of state and politics the survival of which would be a threat to all the strongmen in the region.
Bear in mind that Assad is, along with other leaders in the region, is the kind of guy who looks at Stalinist totalitarian regimes and thinks, “Y’know, I could do that.” He’s a wanna/be Grand Moff Tarkin with bad facial hair, and his opponents are just as diverse.
So, from Assad’s POV, there are allies in Russia and Iran (I’m not always clear what Assad gets from Iran; anyone here know? I feel like I knew but now forget.). And then there are the rebel opposition that come in two major flavors: SDF and SNA (Syrian National Army is their latest brand, trying to bring steadily more organization to the factions that are not aligned with the Kurds.
So basically Assad thinks they’re all rebel scum, just in different flavors. Assad opposes the SNA because they want jihad and (depending on the country—some only want to take over the country or to gain independence, but that strategic goal is held by fewer and fewer of the SNA militias it would appear.) to take over the world country—or as much of it as they can. Assad opposed the Kurds because they want liberal democracy, and also they are an obstacle to regaining oil revenue which has been cut off because of he civil war. SNA wants to be ISIS. They both pose threats to Assad’s regime, as exemplified by the civil war, eh?
Finally, Syria and Turkey have not been at war, but each has its problems with stability (obviously) which makes them ornery with each other (also should be obvious by now) Syria tries not to provoke Turkey because Turkey is one of he largest armies in the world and would hurt them bad. Also, not a lot of people know this, but the national sport of both Syria and Turkey is “coup.” True story.
Ultimately, Assad’s Syria doesn’t have good relations with people trying to rebel, which undermines their territorial integrity and disrupts their economy and so forth.
Except that, in the case of Assad’s SAA and the SDF, they’re now standing shoulder to shoulder with each other. Which is fucking insane. Dogs and cats, man. Dogs and cats.
[REDACTED COMMENTS: PLACEHOLDER]
QUESTIONS: HOW HOMOGENOUS A POPULATION ARE THE KURDS?
Yeah, that’s a very good point. Failure to recognize, in Iraq for example, that the people were tribal which meant a whole different layer of relationship structures was a big problem with the attempt at regime change; failure to dig down to the grassroots to understand the factions makes pursuing collective goals more difficult if not doom the attempt to failure. Huge problem in Iraq; it would be cool if some of the vets had any insight into this.
I haven’t gotten as close to as granular understanding of the situation on the ground as I think you’d need for some of this. I mean, there are like 30 SNA militias each with their own name and regimental patch (Is that the right term?) and flag. And looking up fucking flags to identify who is in pictures sucks.
Basically, I’ve gotten as far as exploring how different spellings and languages (English, Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish are the four I’ve concentrated on; google translate is amazing.) reveal different subsets of the larger conversations. It’s fascinating, but yeah, I don’t have that level of depth of knowledge of the region.
I can’t believe nobody’s made a mint making a movie about these people yet. I mean, how much did that silly Benghazi movie with Jim from The Office* rake in? Shit, YPJ make Wonder Woman** look like My Little Pony.
*which I enjoyed.
**also enjoyed.
ZMart100
Just to be 100% sure, you are claiming to have enjoyed The Office and not 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi , correct?
Reverend
I take it you are unfamiliar with my unabashed love of crap.
OK, so it should be easy enough to figure out what’s going on, yeah?
absintheofmalaise
I couldn’t get my phone to link, but according to CNN, Iraq has not given us permission to station the troops from Syria in northern Iraq yet. They could rotate some of the existing US forces out and have the Syria special forces take their place. IOW, no plan = even more of a total fuck up by this administration.
Maybe not.
[REDACTED COMMENTS: PLACEHOLDER]
GENERALIZED QUESTIONS RECAPPING SITUATION
Reverend
Well, when you put it that way, all listed out like that, it sounds awful!
But basically, yeah. A few minor tweaks, since you seem to want to nail it all down:
The oil fields are in south eastern Syria, just east of the Euphrates which (obviously) provides for a more defensible position between Damascus and “the Kurds”; the region is sorta jointly run by Assad and the Kurds, but the spigot has been turned off for like 8 years.
The location matters because it’s smack dab in the middle of Iran’s covered northern corridor to Lebanon, so Assad has multiple reasons to want to control the area. Also, during their withdrawal, a bunch of the US forces parked for a bit by the oil fields. People speculate it was to send a message, but seeing as they promptly left for Iraq, what that message was is anybody’s guess.
Speaking of the withdrawal, yes there were more US bases/posts than the media reports made it sound like. The US had a base in Manbij-a relatively good sized one, and it would not be surprising if there were outposts. As part of their withdrawal, the US left the Manbij base (after transferring control to the Russians; the officers in charge of this need medals) for Kobani, where their base nearer the Turkish border was located and which Erdogan promised Trump not to attack. Despite this promise, the US forces had to bid a hasty retreat under air support, and had to blow up a base that was also an arms/ammunition dump. That base was neither Manbij or Kobani but had been established in a cement factory southeast of Manbij (It’s even google maps). So there’s two other bases at least besides the one that was blown up, even though most media reported it as “they blew up the base.” In fairness, though, learning all the place names in three languages each is a nasty task.
With respect to the detention facilities, the whole way thing is a nightmare. First, there are non-detention refugee camps for IDP (Internally Displaced People) from, well, the wars. This appears to be in he six figures. Then there are the thousands of ISIS prisoners. But THEN there are the TENS of thousands of ISIS family members and supporters, mostly women in children. Apparently one of these camps is like 70k people which I can’t fathom. They are hard as hell to manage too, with the limited resources and attempting to wage war at the same time. At one camp they tried to install lights to help prevent escapes (TFSA militia sometimes attempt jail breaks.) and the women destroyed them all by throwing rocks at them. They’ve captured some escapees, but I’m not sure they even really know how many have escaped, to say nothing of in the future.
In this vein, their new future doesn’t involve US troops in the area to dissuade even the most aggressive SNA/TFSA units from firing upon some of the cities… although that respect seemed to falter when they announced their withdrawal, as per the above mentioned withdrawal from Kobani. Assad’s troops are now mixed in to the front line defenses including heavy weaponry. Turkey has a much larger armed forces, though, Syria has obviously been weakened by years of war and continues to fight on the eastern front, and the US wouldn’t give the SDF anything more than small arms (e.g. AK-47s, some mortors, stuff like that) and even convinced the Kurds to dismantle their ground fortifications to appease Turkey. And then they found out that the US was pulling out. Do the math. Of course, there’s one more variable (besides fucking Iran…)
The Russians seem to have the “respect” of the SNA and do not get fired upon when they patrol, as Russian media gleefully reports. Russia has been operating more in the northeast and east, leaving most of the border to Syria/SDF. Russia is of course, meeting with Erdogan, so it remains to see what they do.
That’s a lot of fine detail, but yeah, your post was basically on point. If anything, these addendums intensify the yuck.
absintheofmalaise
It will also be much more difficult from a tactical and logistical POV to keep an eye on ISIS and to do anything to about them should the situation warrant taking action, as it undoubtedly will.
Reverend
Ayup. Europe has been expressing concern about this; they had no idea “the west” would not have a presence in the ground there, and they are not happy about it.
So yeah, that’s a huge, huge problem.
And keep in mind nobody in the region will trust the US again, even if they accept arms or something, they won’t count on us. But it’s a bit more complicated than most people initially realize…
I mean, even if there were another group besides SDF we could in good conscience support—
Nota Bene: ISIS is believed to have widely contaminated the Syrian opposition militias; the more punk rock sorts probably would just join Rojava as the jihadis moved in for Armageddon. ISIS spent much of 2016, I believe, attempting to goad “Rome” into battle at Dabiq to let the End of Times roll. Seriously.
—even if we could find one that was at least acceptable to us, we have to realize that Rojava was super progressive and welcomed our help. You know what the rest of the region saw?
“We will come to your country and give your women guns.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. 🙂
Check it:
<DAMMIT IT’S BEEN LOCKED>
[Edit: Well that sucks. That was a great hype video.]
At least one ex US base is now allegedly being used for torture, at least according to a Turkish think tank.*
After #Manbij shops strike sources from inside the city confirmed that the #Regime arrested today men in their 20’s, & took them to #Arima base the Ex #US base in the western side of the city Ex-Us bases are being used by the Regime now for detaining civilians and torturing them pic.twitter.com/jrsT7HzyO8
tl;dr:Calling them “the Kurds” comes about in the mental gymnastics, which may be unintentional, to attempt to avoid taking any political position that adhere to names that have political implications for political recognition.
What’s been interesting is how much our government officials have been increasingly using the nomenclature of SDF, etc., but not Rojava, which remains unrecognized by any other state in the world and now, perhaps, will remain unrealized.[/spoiler]
Big day for Syria and the assorted cast of players in the Syrian Civil War: Erdogan meets with Putin in Sochi and the not-a-cease fire agreement ends at 19:00 GMT (22:00 local time, 3 pm EST).
To understand what we hear coming out of this, it becomes critical to understand who “the Kurds” are. Actually, that’s easy. What is more important and orders of magnitude more complicated is:
What is meant by the media and/or government officials when they refer to “the Kurds”?
which is not the same thing. And the reason it’s complicated is because of politics. (Shocker, I know.)
I’ll try to explain by explaining the “players” in terms of how they developed over time.
Kurds:
The Kurds are an ethnic population in the Middle East with roots in antiquity. Whatever. Media are really fixated on the name without a lot of background. We’ll try to learn a bit more.
Kurdistan:
There is no state of Kurdistan. Kurdistan refers to a region in the Middle East where there is a concentrated population of Kurds. It’s very specifically NOT a state in that the population is spread across four different countries (southeast Turkey, northeast Syria, northern Iraq, and northwest Iran) in a de facto kind of post-colonial gerrymandering that drew the new nation state lines right across where they lived.
So instead of getting their own home state, they end up being an ethnic minority in four other states which have high levels of religio-ethnic nationalism. So the Kurds get fucked. A lot. (The careful observer will note the choice rocky terrain they’d been driven to even before the modern nation state system; many of them the same areas populations of other persecuted minorities ended up in, such as the Armenians and the Assyrians.)
Google has removed a map outlining the geographical extent of the Greater Kurdistan after the Turkish state asked it to do so, a simple inquiry on the Internet giant’s search engine from Wednesday on can show. “Unavailable. This map is no longer available due to a violation of our Terms of Service and/or policies,” a note on the page that the map was previously on read. Google did not provide further details on how the Kurdistan map violated its rules.
The map in question, available for years, used to be on Google’s My Maps service, a feature of Google Maps that enables users to create custom maps for personal use or sharing through search. Maps drawn by ancient Greeks, Islamic historians, Ottomans, and Westerners showing Kurdistan with alternative names such as “Corduene” or “Karduchi” have existed since antiquity. The use of the name “Kurdistan” was banned by the administration of Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the immediate aftermath of the crushed Sheikh Said uprising for Kurdish statehood in 1925.
Further reading: Local media report. “Turkish officials outraged by Google map showing the unofficial border of Kurdistan. Turkey demands the removal of the map. There are around 40 million Kurds divided between 4 main countries,” Jiyar Gol, a BBC correspondent tweeted.
Posted by msmash December 28th, 2018 9:01AM [Archived]
PKK/HPG: Kurdish Politics in Turkey
The PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) is a Kurdish militant opposition political party in Turkey that is designated a terrorist group by Turkey and NATO; the HPG (People’s Defense Forces) is their military wing. The PKK was led by Abdullah Öcalan and developed out of student groups in 1978-1979 in response to ethnic oppression/cultural cleansing by the Turkish government including practices such as banning the Kurdish language, Kurdish place names, Kurdish style of dress, etc. These practices intensified with the military coup in Turkey in 1980.
The PKK is (or was back then; I’m not as up on their contemporary operations) your standard left wing Marxist revolutionary party (yawn.) dedicated to independence from Turkey (ok…) to form its own ethno-nationalist state (ew.). They skirmished with the Turkish government from the beginning, but became a full scale insurgency in 1984.
Due to this insurgency, they are designated as a terrorist group by Turkey and therefore NATO. The PKK claims that the terrorist designation ought not apply to them because they attack government and military targets and not civil ones with the intent of sowing fear as do terrorists. Without trying to resolve the important philosophical distinction, in today’s world, if you are a non-state actor and you attack a NATO state, you’re going to be designated a terrorist. (And, I mean, Timothy McVeigh attacked a federal government building, right?)
So the key here is that the PKK, in the eyes of Turkey (and probably not without some truth), is a Kurdish terrorist organization bent on the overthrow of the Turkish government and/or an independent state for the Kurds carved out of Turkey, and the HPG is its military.
Öcalan: Where shit gets interesting.
So Öcalan a.k.a. “Apo” (“uncle” in Kurdish) is the one time leader and still spiritual leader of the PKK, and also the PYD/Rojava of northeast Syria which came later (See below.). Öcalan rapidly became Turkey’s public enemy number one. He led the PKK from exile in Syria until shit got bad with Turkey in the late ‘90s. Syria didn’t hand him over, but they kicked him out and he was nabbed in Kenya in ‘99.
In a truly profound plot twist, Turkey couldn’t black bag him because he was too famous, and they couldn’t kill him because Turkey had abolished the death penalty as a condition of their application to the EU. So what do they do? I’ll tell you what they do.
What they do was is him in his very own fuck off Cobra Commander island prison where he was the sole occupant guarded by a garrison of 1,000 soldiers. No shit. I think they eventually moved him; the whole thing was very silly.
But here’s the thing: Because of said human rights stuff that Turkey has to abide by if they want a shot at the EU, they had to give him access to lawyers, books, papers and writing tools. At this point, he began reading fucking everything. This becomes important to understanding today’s conflict as it’s molded by this education Öcalan undertook. He read beyond the older revolutionary literature on which he had made his bones and read deeply into 20th century political science and political philosophy. And he wrote.
And in this process he had a kind of Nelson Mandela turn. He came to reject his older philosophical views and politics in favor of a VERY progressive vision that he termed, “democratic confederalism.” Its fairly termed things like radical libertarian cosmopolitan eco-feminist democracy, or something equally pretentious and complicated.
But it’s cool. Basically, he rapidly came to reject ethno-separatist/nationalist states because they suck. Moreover, he realized that the experiences of the Kurdish people, in getting fucked by this system on the regular, present a powerful vehicle for understanding how and why they suck. And, he hoped, for many of the same reasons, that the Kurds could become both lens for understanding, and the incubator for, a new kind of state, one founded on the tenets of democratic confederalism.
Democratic confederalism, to oversimplify, has both a philosophical and an institutional approach:
Institutionally, democratic confederalism is predicated on keeping political power decentralized and as close to the people as possible to avoid the alienation, democratic unresponsiveness, and general predations attendant strong central governments.
Philosophically, democratic confederalism is not only dedicated to human rights, but also to feminism and environmental justice. It’s key to note, though, that these are not pursued only as goods in themselves. Rather, they are also used as a lens to evaluate a society or civilization based on the notion that, to best understand how free and just a people is, you look to how it treats its women and the world around it.
Now, he didn’t invent all these ideas, but he did expound upon them and put them together in novel ways. And they were published. He also had significant political influence with the Kurdish people which makes these writings more than just a philosophical treatise, but an actual blueprint for a government.
This project was attempted in Rojava.
Rojava: PYD/YPG/YPJ/SDF/&tc
Rojava was, until a few days ago, the name for an autonomous region in north east Syria organized by Öcalan’s Kurdish followers in Syria; the PYD (Democratic Union Party) is its dominant political party, and the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces [Note, for later, that this acronym indicates it’s in English.]) is it’s self-defense force. This proto-state began around 2013 and joined the different whatevers into confederation in 2015, during the chaos and weakened power of Assad’s government attendant the Syrian Civil War, itself an outgrowth of 2011’s Arab Spring.
Here’s a map from before the Turkish incursions beginning Oct. 9 when Assad learned the US was withdrawing, and as described in previous posts:
It was (I may fuck up my tenses in this, so please, bear with me; things are moving fast these days.) a cosmopolitan internationalist state open to anyone who was willing and able to volunteer for the work of building what they intended to be a new state carved out of Syria. And to protect it. Although the population was majority Kurd, it was not a Kurdish state.
Now things get squirrelly. In the beginning, the military wing of the project was called the YPG (People’s Protection Units) and YPJ (Women’s Protection Units, all women units who fight).
They are now internationally known as total bad asses.
Google them. They rock.
All of this was, of course, associated with Öcalan and therefore also the PKK; Turkey still considers all these parties to be terrorists. And they’ve been fighting with PKK in Turkey this whole time too.
The squirrelly part comes in 2015 when the US decides to support the Kurds in the fight against ISIS. The self-defense Forces were, at this time, fighting against Assad’s forces, the occasional alleged Turkish backed militia (TFSA) that may or may not exist you can’t prove anything, and fighting ISIS forces that had poured into eastern Syria to take advantage of the civil war and the cracks that creates in the nation state system to set up shop and bring about Armageddon and the Apocalypse, including the Islamic equivalent of the Christian anti-Christ who comes from the east, probably from around Iran or Turkmenistan. And Jesus. And someone named “Gog from Magog.”
(In fairness, the Kurds were doing the same thing in the eastern part of Syria. [The proto-state stuff, not the ending the world stuff.] It’s not an accident that both Rojava and ISIS arose in Syria at the same time. Same reason terrorist organizations operated out of Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, etc. i.e. the weakness of the state makes it possible.
The problem was that their acronym salad contained all organizations that Turkey had designated as terrorist. Now, the US decided to back the Kurds in their fight against ISIS because they are really, really fucking good at it, and also because they were the group on the ground in Syria that both fought ISIS and shared our western values; SDF supported by US Special Forces and limited air strikes rapidly became dollar for dollar, pound for pound, perhaps the best fighters of ISIS we’ve seen yet except for the US Special Forces themselves… and an instructive tale, as @Gunfighter 09 and others periodically remind us, of how much shit a dedicated opposition can fuck up with just small arms and what that means for the validity of the theory of Defense from Government 2A justifications, but I digress.
Now here’s the thing: The US could only support them when they fight against ISIS units, and when they fight other Syrian oppositon units (some backed by Turkey, some not). They could not support them in fighting Turkey itself, because they are a NATO ally. And they couldn’t be a designated terrorist group. So US Army General Raymond Thomas, head of Special Operations Command, told them they had to rebrand, and so they came back the next day with “Syrian Democratic Forces”; Gen. Thomas mentioned in public remarks how cool he thought it was that they threw “Democratic” in there.
And those comments really, really pissed Turkish supporters off, Gen. Thomas’s fine use of humor notwithstanding.
In fact, Turkish supporters use the comments and video as evidence that SDF/Rojava is bullshit, really, proving that SDF=YPG=PKK=terrorist as part of their “Kurds are terrorists” syllogism. This is the government’s justification for invading Syrian territory (whatever that means in a civil war) and setting up the “safe zone” buffer to protect themselves.
So that lays out all the players today and the politics around their formation, orientations, and how they are situated toward each other. Where things stand is that Rojava (This is the easiest term to denote all the militia units, political parties, etc.) and it’s SDF (which is an umbrella group of not just Kurdish units, but also international units, Assyrian Christian units, etc.), once the US started to pull out, had to cut a deal with Assad and Russia, and now SAA (Assad’s Syrian Arab Army) are deployed along the Turkish border arm in arm with the Kurds in defense against Turkish encroachment. In this way, “the Kurds” have established a military relationship with Assad, but whatever political solution will occur between them has not yet been agreed to and will be the subject of future negotiation… once they find out what Turkey is going to do subsequent to the meeting with Putin and the end of the cease-fire-not-cease-fire.
And that’s why the nomenclature in America is so fucked up when dealing with this. The problem is that the US wanted to back the Kurds in fighting ISIS, but they had to distance themselves from the PKK to do so because of the NATO alliance with Turkey. (European countries, despite some statements, are especially wary of rebuking or otherwise pissing Turkey off because Turkey holds over their heads the prospect of releasing 3 million refugees into Europe, which they sincerely do not want.) To this day, Turkish supporters refer to Rojava as PKK and SDF as YPG to emphasize the alleged terrorist roots of the whole project due to its shared genealogy through Öcalan. Rojava supporters use the Rojavan terms like SDF.
So, in a kind of lame-ass effort to wash their hands of all this, the media just throws their arms up in the air and calls them “the Kurds,” even though it should now be clear that’s quite a misnomer.
But at least then they don’t have to pick sides.
Note: I welcome correction on this. If, for example, I actually got all the acronyms right it’ll be a minor miracle.
tl;dr: Calling them “the Kurds” comes about in the mental gymnastics, which may be unintentional, to attempt to avoid taking any political position that adhere to names that have political implications for political recognition.
What’s been interesting is how much our government officials have been increasingly using the nomenclature of SDF, etc., but not Rojava, which remains unrecognized by any other state in the world and now, perhaps, will remain unrealized.
There are also reports now of Russians not only being in the east but deploying all along the border and, very importantly, Russians are in the Kurdish capital, Qamishli for whatever talks may be necessary.
More:
As per terms of the agreement between SDF and Damascus, this will only be a deployment directly to the border in response to Turkish threats and not affect cities, checkpoints, or the Semalka border crossing.
And so it has been reported: a ruinous betrayal of an ally that has made unimaginable sacrifices in the Ameican wars against Sadaam Hussein and ISIS. But lost in that narrative is another story: the equally unimaginable sacrifice of an equitable model of governance in a region where other models have stifled freedom for centuries. First, Bob speaks with Jenna Krajeski, a journalist with the Fuller Project for International Reporting who has reported on the Kurds. Then, he speaks with Rapareen abd Elhameed Hasn, a 27-year-old activist and co-president of her local health authority in Rojava, about what it’s been like on the ground.
This is a segment from our October 18th, 2019 program, Hanging In The Balance.
And finally, the RIC put out a brief summary of what they are facing with the SDF-Damascus agreement and also a report.
Summary Tweets:
The Syrian Democratic Forces-Damascus agreement and Ankara-Washington ‘ceasefire’ have been poorly understood.
Our new report explains the actual impact of both agreements on the ground, and the wider ramifications for all parties to the conflict:https://t.co/gcR6v205AN
I can’t believe nobody’s made a mint making a movie about these people yet. I mean, how much did that silly Benghazi movie with Jim from The Office* rake in? Shit, YPJ make Wonder Woman** look like My Little Pony.
Rojava to Rock 