On a green hillside in Afrin in northern Syria, Arab militiamen allied to the Turkish army which invaded this Kurdish enclave seven weeks ago have captured a group of terrified looking Kurdish civilians. The unformed and heavily armed militiamen are shouting “pigs”, “pimp” and “PKK – Kurdistan Workers Party – pigs” all the while chanting…
A Russian An-26 military transport plane crashed March 6 while approaching Khmeimim air base in Syria, killing everyone on board — six crew members and 33 passengers. A few hours after the catastrophe, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported to President Vladimir Putin the preliminary findings: The crash was believed to be caused either by pilot error or technical malfunction. The plane was built in…
In a field beside an abandoned railway station close to the Turkish border in northern Syria, Kurdish fighters are retraining to withstand Turkish air strikes. “We acted like a regular army when we were fighting Daesh [Isis] with US air support,” says Rojva, a veteran Kurdish commander of the People’s Protection Units (YPG). “But now…
I’d like to begin with a disclaimer. This piece is one part thought exercise and one part speculative. It it is no way to be understood as an assertion of any single or group of claims, but rather it is a means of speculating on how recent and current events relate to the grand US…
The independent convergence of American and Syrian interests against Turkey’s anti-terrorist campaign is coincidental and doesn’t imply a “conspiracy”, but it’s also instructive in the sense that it proves that it’s possible for the most unlikely pair of countries to tacitly agree on a subject of shared interest, despite this allegedly being impossible according to…
The Kurdish region of Afrin in northern Syria has become a new geopolitical pivot point in the conflict. With so many actors’ interests overlapping, whose positions will be weakened and whose solidified if hostilities escalate? With so many different agendas now converging along the borderlands, many fear that Turkey’s latest military masterplan and march towards…
