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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Not Syria, the Kurds in Syria. US allies, that were fighting ISIS alongside US armed forces (and before that, assisted them in the Iraq war). Turkey is doing this in coordination with Iran and Russia. The US president agreed to this for nothing in return to the US.

edit: It is shameful to HN that this is flagged. This is an act of genocide.

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For people not familiar with the Kurds, they're a large, effectively stateless ethnic group that was arbitrarily split up after WWI and has been oppressed in both Iraq and Turkey ever since. The Kurds have always wanted independence in some form, but nobody is going to just give them a state. They exist as large percentages of the population of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. They make up between 18-25% of the population of Turkey, so when they threaten revolt, it's a pretty existential threat to the nation, hence Erdogan trying to wipe the Kurdish militia (and really, the entire ethnicity, including its language, dress, and even their name itself) off the map.

I hope the Kurds and other such groups remember this in the future. You can't count on the US as an ally.

People hardly remember the Bay of Pig...CIA armed/trained/funded Cuban dissidents to overthrow the Castro regime and promised air support, the US let the go in and reneged in the support and the CIA backed Cuban's got slaughtered. The only difference is imagine if JFK had taken to twitter to mock the deaths.

You don't have to go back that far. Check the 2008 Russo-Georgian War: https://www.history.com/news/russia-georgia-war-military-nat...

"...nothing in return to the US."

Cui bono?

It's almost like Russia has some sort of influence over the President of the USA.

The Kurds in Syria are not allies, they are an enemy of an enemy acting as a temporary friend.

Against ISIS, the US and Russia cooperated as well, but this does not make them allies either who should rush to each other’s defense.

New York Times is deliberately avoiding mentioning the Kurds by name but that's the typical New York Times MO. The NYT's foreign policy position has always been low-key pro-imperialist. They'll never flat out explain that the US will never do anything to protect Rojava from Turkey because Turkey is a more valuable strategic ally.

Maybe in 5-10 years they'll leverage guilt of our inaction in Rojava to justify invading some other country.

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