10/11/2019, 4:33 pm
PROG OFF
People often tend to confuse our operations alongside the Iraqi Kurds with those alongside the Syrian Kurds. Those are two different conflicts, different stories, and different wars.
In Iraq, the Kurds had sided with us to defeat Saddam. In Syria, it was the U.S. that sided with the Kurds to help them defeat ISIS, whom they were fighting anyway. Now ISIS has been defeated and the Kurds are back to fighting Turkey, resuming their multi-generation hostilities with our, albeit formal, NATO ally.
The pullout of 50 to 100 U.S. special operations forces out of Kurd-held northern Syria is described in the media as a biblical-scale catastrophe, and it is affecting some of the anti-Trump conservatives like Ben Shapiro. I repeat: the number is between 50 and 100, and they are being relocated to spare them the crossfire in a purely ethnic Turk/Kurd conflict. Such a creation of mountains out of molehills is very similar to what happens when Rachael Maddow puts on a padded brassiere.
Additionally, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a Kurdish far-left militant and political organization, is getting enough help from the American and European members of Antifa, who are coming there for combat experience, which they're expecting to use back at home. The Rolling Stonewrote about this last year, and Mother Jones just now. A simple search will produce plenty of MSM stories that glorify Antifa joining the Kurdistan Workers' Party.
OANN summed it up best in this video: Kurdish militia trained Antifa fighters in Northern Syria.
I've known about the ongoing Kurdish communist terrorism in Turkey for years. Having little sympathy for either of the sides, I don't mind using one or the other to gain a strategic advantage. But I wouldn't lose any more Americans in those ethnic/sectarian conflicts that have been festering for centuries and can't be solved just by taking sides.
Memo to Ben Shapiro: Kurds have done plenty of ethnic cleansings themselves, mass-murdering and enslaving Jews, Christians, and Yazidis. They took an active role in what's known as Armenian genocide in Turkey, also killing thousands of Greeks and Assyrians into the bargain.
I don't believe in anyone's collective guilt for what happened a century ago, but the fact is that little has changed in those territories and it can easily happen again.
In conclusion, I second the sentiment in the title from Robert Spencer's JihadWatch: Don't Romanticize the Kurds.
Mystery item No. 1
Hide it back