Portside

According to the back of Meredith Tax's A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State, a 'democratic society' with 'women on the front lines as fierce warriors and leaders' is growing in the midst of Syria's destruction. This new society - Rojava - was founded by the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian-Kurdish offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). How does the PKK function internally, how will it deal with class divisions or regional differences?

The Turks don't want a Kurdish mini-state on their frontier any more than the Syrians want to lose territory to the Kurds (and neither do the Iranians, nor do the Russians want a Kurdish state on their border). And, Turkey is warming up to Russia and Iran in a bid to exit before a total rout of its proxies in Syria. Here Robert Fisk and Vijay Prashad present two nuanced perspectives.

Parliament cannot really play an important role because, since the coup, the government can make laws without parliament. We need a mobilization of civil society, its representatives and also of all MPs who believe that out of this crisis must come the restoration of democracy and peace.

A new book puts recent bombings in a larger context.

The attempted military coup in Turkey and the possibility of a President Trump may have more Americans considering the military option. It's tempting to conclude that the same folks who approve of a military intervention into politics support Donald Trump's intervention into politics. Trump is, in a way, a one-man coup. He is an outsider. He has contempt for the normal workings of democracy.

The finally tally is almost everything Erdogan wanted, although he fell short of his dream of a supermajority that would let him change the nature of the Turkish political system from a parliamentary government to one ruled by a powerful and centralized executive—himself. And while the AKP now has a majority, it is at the expense of re-igniting the war with the Kurds, a conflict that has cost Turkey $1.2 trillion and some 40,000 lives.

The Middle-East map is being redrawn in Syria and Iraq by Moscow and Washington. The Obama Administration is co-leading with the Kremlin to help slice the Syria-Iraq area into five or more political states so as to deconflict this region and hopefully reduce the attractiveness of ISIL.

In the June 7 election, Erdogan’s AKP lost its absolute majority in the legislature. The defeat was mainly due to a breakthrough by the Kurdish-led, leftist, People’s Democratic Party (HDP) that took 13.1 percent of the vote and won 80 seats, seats that in the past usually went to the AKP. Almost before the final tallies were announced, Erdogan moved to prevent the formation of a government and force another election.

The “plan” will also toss the Kurds, one of Washington’s most reliable allies in the fight against the Islamic State, under a bus. “The Americans are not very clever in calculating this sort of thing,” Kamran Karadaghi, former chief of staff to Iraqi President and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, told the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn. “Maybe they calculate that with Turkey on their side, they don’t need the Kurds.”