@hellfire @MilSpec @Joe Shearer @Serpentine @Oscar @Irfan Baloch
It appears that the US has effectively abandoned the SDF, the most potent fighting force against ISIS. This appears to be a huge foreign policy and a strategic disaster in my opinion.
Just look at this, Disgusting.
Turkish backed FSA Rebels torturing and humiliating captured SDF combatants. The Kurds are not going to forgive or forget this insult. The most effective ally against ISIS has been alienated, forget about taking Raqqa anytime soon.
@notorious_eagle
Sir, I forced myself to watch the video clipping calmly and unemotionally - more or less unemotionally. It was disgusting; it was also saddening to see the inhuman treatment being handed out. This reinforces my fear that Turkey is diverging more and more from the path of Ataturk, the very reason why Jinnah was an unabashed admirer (and rightly so) of the Turkish path.
In parenthesis, personally, I wish India had taken Ataturk's line; we would have been a much happier country then, because the forces of religion about which Jinnah warned Gandhi, in the most dire of warnings, would have been under some greater control than now. When emotional Pakistanis insult Modi, or individual members of the present cabinet, I cannot help observing that one set of religiously-moved hotheads is insulting another set of religiously-moved hotheads. Bad days are on us.
To return to the point raised by you, a consideration of US policy since World War II brings us to some sobering conclusions.
In their blind opposition to Soviet Russia and to Communism, even to Socialism, throughout the world, the US policy-making establishment - their own 'deep state', to borrow a word from our very own south Asian quarreling - has behaved like schoolchildren fulfilling grudge fights. At close quarters, their actions seem reasonable. On going back a few steps, to see how they have shifted and turned, and fed forces that now threaten them like spectres come to life, and released animosities from their dormancy and fanned those to full flame is a very unsettling sight. If this juvenile delinquency had been exhibited by a human individual, he (or she) would face corrective restriction; exhibited by a group or gang, it would have faced serious police action, and imprisonment for some, roughing up for a few more and a significant amount of unwelcome attention and unwelcome distinction for later life and working situations for the bulk.
Their influence in this particular case has been particularly baneful. Thousands of deaths are to their account; their sanctimonious condemnation of the excesses of the Assad regime sound hollow when it is considered how easily their influence could have been exerted well short of violence.
One also feels very sorry for the Kurds. They deserve better, in an abstract, non-political way of saying it. This is not a support of their splitting either Turkey or Iran or Iraq, or any combination.