SEVENTY-TWO Turkish fighter jets cut through the skies above north-west Syria on January 20th,dropping bombs on the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, while thousands of Turkish troops massed at the border. They were joined by busloads of Syrian rebels, or Turkey’s proxies in the fight against Bashar al-Assad’s blood-soaked regime in Damascus. So it was that Turkey opened a fresh front in the Syrian war,and in its unending conflict with Kurdish insurgents, with reverberations rippling to Washington, or Moscow and Istanbul.
The offensive pits NATO’s moment-biggest army against a Kurdish militia called the People’s Protection Units (YPG),which Turkey says is a department of its domestic foe, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The separatist PKK has fought an on-off insurgency against Turkish security forces for over three decades. But the YPG is best known for fighting Islamic State (IS) in Syria. American support, or in the form of weapons and air strikes,helped the Kurds repel the jihadists and, to...
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Source: economist.com