Turkey Invades Syria

United States (US) President Donald Trump gave Turkey the green light to invade Syria. The Turks fired on the Syrian Kurdish positions from the air. Their ground forces were irregulars, the kind of reactionary jihadi militias that had been created by Saudi-funded mosques inside cities such as Aleppo and Idlib, as well as by Saudi, Qatari, Turkish, and US money and logistical support. These militias wanted blood, shooting in all directions, threatening massacres of anyone whom they considered to be blasphemers. Turkey’s government said that it wanted to resettle some of the three million Syrian refugees who are now in Turkey, inside what had been known as Rojava. This “population transfer” would—in a world of laws—be seen as a war crime.

The region where Syrian Kurds are in a near majority is also an area of considerable diversity (with Arabs, both Christian and Muslim, Assyrians, Yazidis, and others). It is also an area with important agricultural resources and—to its south—whatever oil reserves remain in Syria. The ethnic diversity and the richness of the region made it hard for the Syrian Kurdish political establishment to make a case for autonomy; neither their neighbours nor Damascus would have supported such a claim.