In a field beside a disused railway station on the plain just south of the Syrian-Turkish frontier, a brigade of Syrian Kurdish soldiers were retraining in order to resist an invasion by the Turkish army. “We acted like a regular army when we were fighting Daesh [Isis],” Rojvan, a veteran Kurdish commander of the YPG…
Turkey’s assault on Kurdish-held northeastern Syria began on Wednesday, as air strikes and artillery pounded areas along the Syrian-Turkish border. Ankara’s defence ministry also announced the start of a ground offensive east of the Euphrates later on Wednesday. The bombardment left two people dead and wounded two others in Mishrafa, local journalist Roj Mussa told Middle East…
Big powers, as with the greatest of gangsters, have always had a certain, indulgent luxury; their prerogative is to make promises they can choose to abide by or ignore. A vision is assured, guarantees made. Then comes the betrayal. The small powers, often pimped in the process, can only deal with the violent consequences. The…
US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out US troops from northern Syria has been met with bipartisan outrage, calling it a “betrayal” of the Kurds. Wait till the regime-changers hear the obvious solution to keep them safe. As some two dozen US troops stationed in northwestern Syria began to withdraw on Monday, reports began…
Over the weekend I asked whether Donald Trump had risen to the level of Grey Champion. A few days later Trump takes to Twitter and puts a big line item in his resume. There have been signs of change coming since Trump rightly refused to go to war with Iran over their shooting down an unmanned…
Being half an Irishman myself I feel entitled to refer to the probably apocryphal answer given by an Irishman asked by a lost, weary, traveler for directions to Dublin. “Oh, well now, I wouldn’t have started from here.” Turkey went from a foreign policy of “no quarrels with the neighbours” to near war with Iraq…
