In their latest deal to fight ISIS, Washington and Turkey are treating the Middle East's largest stateless minority like pawns. That's a huge mistake.
As part of a series on the devastating civil war in Syria, Jacobin spoke to Rabie Nasser, a Syrian economic analyst who works with the Syrian Center for Policy Research. We discussed the social and economic disaster in the country, the role global and regional powers have played in the war, and how Syria may one day be rebuilt.
Backdrop to Turkey's elections: Turkish workers have seen their unions dismantled under the AKP government, and many have lost collective bargaining rights. The percentage of unionized workers fell from 57.5 in 2003 to just 9.68 percent today. The Syrian war is not popular with the average Turk. The Army opposes any involvement in Syria, because it sees nothing ahead but a quagmire that would ally Turkey with the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.
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Gathering in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh were Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, newly crowned Saudi King Salman, and the organizer of the get-together, the emir of Qatar. The meeting was an opportunity for Turkey and Saudi Arabia to bury a hatchet over Ankara’s support — which Riyadh’s opposes — to the Muslim Brotherhood, and to agree to cooperate in overthrowing the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
While the Syrian opposition is understandably bitter that the YPG and YPJ withdrew most of their energy from the war with Assad, leftists worldwide should be watching the remarkable efforts being made by Syrian Kurds and their allies to build a liberated area where they can develop their ideas about socialism, democracy, women, and ecology in practice.
As soon as the fighting started in the spring of 2011, the genebank’s staff switched gears from collecting and distributing seed samples to devising a rescue plan. People there became very familiar with northern Syria’s back roads as they drove the seeds out of the country.
In both resistances, women took up arms to fight alongside their male counterparts showing both willingness and capacity to fight as soldiers. However their principal objective in the mountains is not military. Rather, their most important task is to form new persons: men and women in a more equitable relationship to each other--a relationship that is also anti-capitalist. Theirs is a commitment to building democracy, socialism, ecology and feminism.
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There are myriad ways that a peaceful resolution of the Syrian civil war can be derailed, but the pieces for an agreement are on the table. Failure to put them together will accelerate the destabilizing effects of the war in neighboring countries and deepen the misery of the Syrian people.
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