This is a pretty interesting article featuring a lot of comments from General Raymond Thomas, Commander of the U.S. Special Forces Command.
http://aranews.net/2017/07/us-specia...ds-iraq-syria/
When he gets to Rovaja he says things like this a couple times:
Quote:
However, the US general says the Kurds could ‘help themselves’. “They still have branding challenge going forward, and the Turks remind us every day. The first time Brett McGurk and I went out to this very old, cold guildhall in Kobani, right on the Turk border, we went in there, a bunch of somber technocrats and military people, and whose beaming face is looking down on us from the front of the guildhall but Ocalan,” he said.
“We said, ‘hey, that’s got to go. You cannot hold on to Ocalan and have any chance of legitimacy in the construct we’re in. So, you either something different, or. And something that has a legitimacy” he said.
Sounding like he/our military is very interested in working with the SDF, but they have the political problems we know about vis-a-vis Turkey and the PKK.
Again with branding in this quote, but note how unique he considers this system. They are leaving a representative government in their wake and they are winning. Not surprisingly he is not giving a full-throated endorsement of socialism. I'm not sure if he would see that the socialism, in this case, is related to leaving a representative government in their wake and the empowering of women.
Quote:
“And you saw part of it. So, Interesting part, we are to close to the problem, you got out there to give different perspective. They are doing something unique to every other surrogate we worked in last decade and their half. They are governing in their wake, they are providing a representative governance,” he said.
Although he admitted it is not perfect, and that it tends to socialism, it at least provides a model. “But socialist [in terms of] when their women are in power, as well as their men.
Actively [women are] fighting, and actively leading throughout their leadership there, but they are governing in their wake. So there is something, McGurk and I discussed this at length, there is something special about this, that whether we can embrace going forward, whether or not can be part of future fabric of Syria, lets see,” he said.
“But luckily they are on table and at least having opportunity to represent themselves. But they have to work on their own branding. If they continue to keep linkage to past product, or PKK linkage specifically, the relationship [with the U.S.] is fraught with challenges,” he concluded.