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The Kurds Rise From the Ashes
by Michael J. Totten

[WorldAffairsJournal] Syria no longer exists.
News for you Mike: Lebanon and Libya also no longer exist, and for the same reasons Syria no longer exists. Iraq is trying really, really hard to follow Syria down that sewer pipe, and Egypt is taking notes...
The tyrannical regime of Bashar al-Assad governs parts of what’s left of it. The psychopathic Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) controls another large swath. Small scraps of territory are ruled by sundry other militias which, more likely than not, will eventually be absorbed by Assad or ISIS.

Up north the Kurds have carved out a proto state of their own which they call Rojava. It is being violently squeezed by ISIS from the south, and it’s jammed up against the wall of the Turkish border to the north. It is split into three besieged non-contiguous cantons, the most endangered of which is based around the city of Kobani.

Yet Syrian Kurdistan, spliced and diced though it may be, stubbornly continues existing...

Saving or fixing all of Syria is impossible, but a partial victory is better than nothing. If you doubt this, consider how Seoul would look today if North Korea had swallowed the south at the end of the Korean War.

What’s happening in Syria is an echo of what happened in Iraq during the 1990s and 2000s. The Kurds first broke away from Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian rule, then shored up their defenses against Al Qaeda in Iraq, the precursor to ISIS that the Kurds in Syria are facing today.

What the Kurds achieved in Iraq is permanent. Never again will that region be lorded over by Baghdad. Its independence from Iraq has been achieved in all but name. It’s a fait accompli. Nor will ISIS ever control it. The Kurds will fight ISIS with kitchen knives and even their own teeth if they have to...

There is nothing holy about borders in the Middle East or anywhere else. Kosovo recently broke off from Serbia. Scotland nearly split from the United Kingdom earlier this year. Abkhazia told Georgia to sod off. Almost everyone on earth thinks the Palestinians will have their own state in the West Bank and Gaza at some point.
The Czechs and the Slovaks managed to get an amiable divorce and even worked out the alimony. It doesn't always have to be bloody...
The only plausible things standing in the way of a permanent de-facto independent Kurdish state called Rojava at this point are ISIS, the Assad regime, and the Turks. Two of those three will eventually cease to exist.

There can be no peace in the Eastern Mediterranean until the Assad regime and the ISIS are both erased from the face of the earth, but the Kurdish regions can be saved and strengthened right now and used as beachheads—or at the very least buffer zones—in the future.
And then -- the Turks? Tell the Kurds how you're (more correctly, they're) going to manage that one...

Posted by: Beavis 2014-11-19
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=404566