WORLD AFFAIRS JOURNAL
by Michael J. Totten
August 4, 2015

….Turkey just can’t stand to see an autonomous Kurdish region take shape along its border in Northern Syria. It’s understandable up to a point. The Syrian Kurdish militias are aligned with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a former Soviet proxy that has waged a thirty years-long war against the Turkish state. Turkey could make peace with the Kurds. They’re the easiest people in the entire Middle East to make friends with. Americans and even Israelis have pulled it off practically by default. But Erdogan, like every other Turkish leader before him, just can’t face up to the fact that they’ve been treating the Kurds—who make up as much as 25 percent of Turkey’s population—like second-class citizens or worse since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the modern republic in the ashes of World War I. He can’t face up to the fact that Ankara is as much to blame for this long-simmering conflict as the quasi-Marxist PKK. READ MORE