I have a headache from reading this
Wait until you get back to the States my friend and are required to produce six-point ID.
Nice piece. Thanks.
1
It would be easy for me to imagine that small gifts / bribes are also a part of the paperwork that were purposely left out of the story?
2
I love the irony and sarcasm put forward by the author. In a how do you describe anymore and never ending catastrophe that is (what is left of) Syria, a simple presentation of the facts reveals the absurdity of this situation within the context of the entire situation.
3
Control of oil or oil distribution has to be at the root of this horrific holocaust of the Syrian people.
Who is getting rich clearing the debris and rebuilding in places like Syria?
It would be great if we could hear from NYT what is going on in Afrin, too. NATO's second largest army and a country which is one-hundred-and-ninety-four times the size of Afrin (and almost one hundred times of its population) in cooperation with various jihadi factions, is attacking that hitherto peaceful region. Why, because the Kurds have self-rule! Hundreds of thousands are being displaced, Turkish authorities do not hide their plans of chaining the demographics and resettling the Kurdish regions with Arabs, (just as Assad and Saddam did), and yet all we hear is what the journalists are going through (fun to read the wonderful tongue in cheek reporting, though). If we solely depend on NYT we might think nothing is going on in Afrin region since January 21. Hopefully, R. Nordland, as he wonderfully did since he arrived in Syria, add some reports on Afrin region as well.
2
It sounds as if the fifty years of Assad father and son penetrated the culture, to shape the very idea of what government must be in order to be government. Even the Kurds' new statelet acts like they "should" act to be a government. This does not bode well for reforms. It is all too human and natural, but a problem all the same.
This article, written from the Kurds' side, gets backward the concerns of the Turks. The Turks' first concern is the forty-year war with their own Kurds, that started in 1978, and has killed tens of thousands steadily for years. The US has been on their side in that struggle from the beginning.
The Kurds' organization inside Syria was an on-and-off issue over those years. Assad the father used it as a threat to bargain with the Turks over other issues. Sometimes he made the Kurds more autonomous as a threat of support to the terrorists, and sometimes he took that back. It was always a tool, leverage working off the larger issue.
When the current war started, Assad made yet another deal with the Kurds for their autonomy. The deal was they stand aside, keep out the enemies of Syria, and Syria would leave them to themselves. They all kept that deal, until the US offered more. That did not cause a problem with Turkey, which also left the Kurds alone.
What changed? The US offered more, outbid Assad. It offered enough to get the Kurds to come out and fight outside their own autonomous region. THAT is what alarmed the Turks -- what the US offered.
6
This article says so much- inc why Syria is another failed state. Can stop blaming outsiders.
I believe the Kurds have been struggling for self-rule for at least 100 years. Also a complex issue because therre are Kurds in [western] Turkey, [northern] Syria, and in Iraq, all failed nation states which have economic/geographic reasons to hold oil-rich Kurdish territory.