LThe hunt for the Kurds is on. On a piece of Syria, along the border with Iraq, Arab militias serving Turkey are expelling the local Kurdish populations. A vast ethnic cleansing movement is underway. Columns of thousands of miserable refugees are fleeing the bombings of the Turkish air force and the advance of a jihadist army who intend to eradicate the border zone of a millennia-old Kurdish presence.
The powerful neighbors of a Syria just liberated from the predatory dictatorship of the Al-Assad clan are taking advantage of the moment. Israel seizes the opportunity to wipe out what remains of the country’s military infrastructure, including its navy and air force; Turkey intends to crush a Syrian Kurdish autonomist movement which it suspects of helping the Turkish Kurdish PKK party with which Ankara is at war. A predominantly Sunni Arab country (the majority branch of Islam), Syria has a number of ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds and the Druze, or religious ones, such as the Christians and the Alawites.
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But Europe owes a particular debt to the Syrian Kurds. Without them, the danger of Islamist terrorism, particularly that embodied by the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” group, ISIS, would not have been neutralized.
ISIS could now raise its head, which does not seem to worry Turkey, our NATO ally. Grouped within the group known as the Syrian National Army (ANS, not to be confused with the regular army), the Arab Islamist bands under the orders of Ankara are on the offensive. They resume the policy of expulsion of Kurds from the western part of the border region, a policy initiated by the Turkish army by intervening in Syria in 2018 and 2019. After the localities of Manbij and Tall Rifaat, it is the turn of Kobané to be today surrounded by the ANS – as described in a report by Marie-Charlotte Roupie, RFI’s special correspondent.
Knights of the Apocalypse
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