Quote:
Originally Posted by microbet
I hope aranews is really decent as they have the most and seemingly best info I've seen.
Yes, I agree. They seem sound so far as you can tell, and usually back their stories with quotes from sources in the US and Kurdish military. The think tank they quote above seems an entirely reputable source to use, though I'm sure chosen with care from the many somewhat reputable places you could quote from.
Quote:
Originally Posted by microbet
Turkey really seems to have developed a pretty close relationship with the KNC/Kurdish peshmurga/Iraqi Kurdistan. I guess it's just divide and conquer, but clearly Turkey feels less threatened by Kurdish Nationalism than by a revolutionary movement originating with Kurds by allying with other groups.
Internal Kurdish politics with regards Iraqi Kurdistan and the the Northern Syrian cantons I don't understand very well - not that they seem nonsensical, I just don't have a good understanding of the history, different factions and so on.
My impression is the KDP / Turkey alliance stems from the Kurdish civil war in the mid 90s. Very generally it was between KDP factions and Iraqi Kurds who were to some extent allied with the PKK (a Turkish Kurdish armed group). Turkey intervened on the KDP side, presumably because they feared a PKK allied group gaining power in Iraqi Kurdistan. How the various factions have played out since then I'm not totally sure.
As you posted earlier Turkey certainly alleges the Northern Syrian regime is heavily involved with internal Turkish Kurdish groups still. Groups that Turkey is currently violently repressing, and who are killing Turks as well. I don't know how deep those links are, but to some extent they exist for sure. The Iraqi Kurdish regime has more-or-less happily co-existed with Turkey for some time, so I'm sure some powerful individuals in the two states are very friendly by now.
Just looking at a map the Turkey/Iraq border is much more mountainous than the Turkey/Syria one, so is probably historically less porous. Which might suggest why Turkey doesn't generally see so much internal threat from the Iraqi Kurds, but that's very speculative.