woah.

listen.....

what the russians want is clear enough: they want to return territorial sovereignty to syria, to recreate the sykes-picot lines and return the map to what it was before the mess started. the americans are obviously arming the kurds because they don't want to do that, they want the map erased and redrawn, to reflect what their arab allies believe is a better understanding of demography and history. for, the sykes-picot lines were clearly arbitrary.

lets try a thought experiment: what if the americans had succeeded in using these extremists to overthrow assad? the kurds would have been abandoned immediately, or at least expelled to an enclave in the north. the whole point of this was to back saudi ambitions for a pan-arabic, fundamentalist state; the kurds would not be welcome in such a hypothetical society. it's not the middle ages, any more. the end result would have been the abolition of national boundaries in the region, and perhaps a kurdish state centred around mosul. certainly, the americans never planned for the kurds to move into syria, it's just something that kind of happened, largely in reaction to the russians setting up. the americans found themselves in a race to occupy as much of the country as possible.

so, when the russians told the kurdish militants "hand the region back to assad or be driven out.", it was done with the intent to re-establish the international rule of law, and reconstruct the nation state of syria, with a capital in damascus.

the russians are up against a wall in terms of what they can actually do. if the status quo persists, there is a real threat of syria fracturing like korea and vietnam did in the cold war, and the kurdish enclave becoming an american military base, like south korea is. notwithstanding the fact that this would be bad for syria, it is not in russian interests to split syria down the middle like this. but, they can't act directly against america, either.

the turks are in charge of doing this precisely because it won't set off a world war, due to the close alliance with washington; ankara can get away with things that moscow cannot. and, their task appears to be to set up a buffer zone separating russian and american forces, thereby allowing the regime to consolidate the regions behind the buffer zone, and ultimately prepare to reunite the country.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard