Turkey plans assault on Kurdish enclave in Syria

[jpak]

Source: The Guardian

Turkey’s president has said the country will launch a military assault on a Kurdish enclave in northern Syria “in the coming days” and urged the US to support its efforts.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the operation against the Afrin enclave aimed to “purge terror” from his country’s southern border.

Afrin is controlled by a Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. Turkey considers the YPG to be a terrorist group linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) that has waged a bloody insurgency within its borders.

A YPG spokesman in Afrin said there had been clashes on Sunday between his unit and Turkish troops near the border. Rojhat Roj said shelling of areas in Afrin district, in Aleppo province, had killed one YPG fighter and injured two civilians.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/14/turkey-plans-assault-on-kurdish-enclave-in-syria

[Old Vet]

1. Good Grief its complicated over there............

[OKNancy]

2. The US better NOT support their efforts

The Kurds have been one of the bright spots in that quagmire.. .such a brave and resourceful people

[Igel]

3. It's complicated over there.

I support the Kurds' attempt at establishing a country.

At the same time, for good reason, the PKK is listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the US. They've done some truly bad things, always with the "we don't want to do these bad things, and as soon as we gain power we'll be sure to grow some morals." I find that very few terrorist groups when they gain power produce anything like a moral system that I can stomach. If the world is kto kogo, one man oppresses another, all they do is swap roles. (Note that many countries have designated them as terrorists. Russia, though, has not.)

The Kurdish Worker's Party was originally a "workers' party", one of those leftist Soviet-supported groups that people sort of have a difficult time evaluating these days. On paper it had lofty goals, but in practice its models were crappy. I doubt much of that ideology survives. But the drug running and terrorist attacks have lost them any sympathy I may have developed for the PKK. They were part and parcel of all the "workers' party" movements that were around in the early '70s. Most were distinctly unpalatable.

Like the first poster said, it's complicated over there.