I keep hearing he's gunning for the Kurds in the northeast of Syria. Is this just bald racism or is there some stated reason

  • AcidSmiley [she/her]
    ·
    10 days ago

    Institutional racism against Kurds has been a problem in Turkey for ages, Erdogan has extended it into military campaigns in the north of Iraq ever since the US bombed it into state collapse, and has repeated that in northern Syria ever since the civil war started. This has always been accompanied by repression against Kurdish political organizations in NATO ally states, it was one of Turkey's conditions for letting Sweden and Finland join NATO. This leads to all kinds of weird, contradictory situations, like the German government at the same time arming the YPG and making public support of it completely illegal.