The Guardian Longreads: Who killed the prime minister? The unsolved murder that still haunts Sweden

The mystery of Palme’s death has become a national obsession. “One of my earliest memories is of my parents discussing who killed Palme,” a friend I met while living in Sweden for the past couple of years told me. “I can’t describe to you how deep this is in the Swedish soul.” The murder has inspired films, plays and music, and has even been cited as a factor in the worldwide explosion of Scandinavian crime fiction. A number of Swedish amateur detectives have devoted much of their lives to solving the case. Investigating it has led some of them to break the law and driven others to something approaching madness. [...]

On Sveavägen, where the shooting occurred, shock seemed to have taken over. Police failed to cordon off the crime scene properly, covering too small an area. One of the bullets was not found until two days later, when it was picked up from the pavement by a passerby. Mourners arriving in the hours after Palme’s death slipped past the tape to place flowers near the pool of blood; by trampling the crime scene, they rendered future searches for the killer’s footprints useless. Key witnesses were allowed to leave the scene without being interviewed. Löfgren, the broadcast journalist, was out in the area that night and hailed a cab to take him home. The driver had witnessed the killing but had not been questioned, Löfgren recalled with disbelief. “I phoned the police and said: ‘This guy here claims that he was a witness to the murder, and he’s still out driving a cab?!’” [...]

By the start of the 1990s, so much time and money had been spent fruitlessly pursuing Pettersson and the PKK that basic questions about the night of the murder remained unanswered. Where was the murder weapon, which was believed to be a Smith & Wesson .357 magnum revolver? Why were witness reports of men with walkie talkies near the site of the killing not taken seriously? Was the police incompetence too extreme to be accidental? [...]

The first group was made up of pro-apartheid members of South Africa’s security and intelligence services. Palme was an outspoken opponent of the apartheid regime, and his government had given millions in humanitarian aid to Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Theories about South African involvement in his murder have circulated since the earliest days of the case. They became particularly popular in 1996, when a former commander of a South African police hit squad alleged that Palme’s killing was part of Operation Long Reach, a top-secret programme to neutralise opposition to the apartheid government at home and abroad. In 1982, members of this operation had killed the anti-apartheid activist Ruth First in Mozambique and bombed the ANC’s London office.

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Vox: How America’s relationship with Turkey fell apart

The US, Sloat added, worries about Turkey’s growing friendship with Russia and acceleration away from democracy. That’s been exacerbated by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, an authoritarian who has dismantled secular liberal politics in favor of Islamist political values, harbors anti-Western views, and has widened the US-Turkey gap. [...]

“This is no longer anything that can accurately be called a strategic partnership,” Lisel Hintz, a Turkey expert at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “I wouldn’t even call Turkey an ally. An ally doesn’t behave the way in which Turkey has been behaving.” [...]

A faction of the Turkish military, claiming to speak for the entire Turkish Armed Forces, aimed to oust Erdoğan in the name of democracy — despite the fact that Erdoğan and his party were democratically elected. But the attempt failed, mainly because large portions of the military sided with their president. [...]

And Erdoğan’s rhetoric during local elections last week stoked anti-American sentiment among his base throughout the campaign. There has long been anti-US feeling within the Turkish government and public — partly because of rampant conspiracy theories about America secretly plotting to crush Turkey, and Washington’s much-disliked Middle East policies — but the autocrat ratcheted up the language to a whole new level.

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Reuters: Explainer: Where do the Kurds fit into Syria's war?

The main Syrian Kurdish faction, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), began to establish a foothold in the north early in the war as government forces withdrew to put down the anti-Assad uprising elsewhere. An affiliated militia, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), secured the region. [...]

SDF influence widened to Manbij and Raqqa as IS was defeated in both. It has also reached deep into Deir al-Zor, where the SDF is still fighting IS. The SDF, which also includes Arab and other groups, says it has more than 70,000 fighters. [...]

The PYD is heavily influenced by the ideas of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a 34-year insurgency in Turkey for Kurdish political and cultural rights. Ocalan has been in jail since 1999 in Turkey. He is convicted of treason.[...]

Syria’s Baathist state systematically oppressed the Kurds before the war. Yet the YPG and Damascus have broadly stayed out of each other’s way during the conflict, despite occasional clashes. They also have been seen to cooperate against shared foes, notably in and around Aleppo.  

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Al Jazeera: Who will Kurds vote for in key Turkey elections?

For the first time, voters in Turkey will cast ballots on Sunday in simultaneous presidential and parliamentary polls. The process is in line with last year's constitutional changes that will transform the country's parliamentary system to an executive presidential one by granting the top office increased powers. [...]

Demirtas, along with several other former HDP members of parliament, has been in jail since November 2016, accused of having links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). His trial began in December last year and, if convicted, he faces up to 142 years in prison. Demirtas denies the charges. [...]

Opinion polls have suggested that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party might not achieve a parliamentary majority if the HDP manages to gain more than 10 percent of votes on Sunday, which is the unusually high threshold required for a party to enter the 600-seat assembly. [...]

Etyen Mahcupyan, a columnist and former adviser to the AK Party leader, said that secular voters might back the HDP at the ballot box to make sure that AK Party loses its majority in parliament - as it did in June 2015. [...]

"There is an increasingly widespread view that the HDP will surpass 10 percent of the votes. And this might decrease the number of the CHP voters changing their votes for the HDP," added Mahcupyan, who added that Kurds represent about 15 percent of the electorate in Turkey.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Kurdish Dilemma

Unsurprisingly, not everyone in elite circles agrees that the US military should be allying with the Kurdish revolutionaries. When the partnership first began to take shape, the Wall Street Journal warned about “America’s Marxist Allies Against ISIS.”  [...]

In Washington, a big concern is that the Kurdish revolutionaries are carving out an anticapitalist space that firmly rejects the basic premises of the US-led global order. Another major reservation is that the Kurdish revolutionaries have historic ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which the US government has classified as a terrorist organization. While US military officials repeatedly deny any ongoing connection between the Kurdish-led forces and the PKK, it’s widely presumed in Washington that the YPG is a PKK affiliate. [...]

When the Syrian Kurds took a major step in March 2016, announcing the formation of a new autonomous region inside Syria, US officials declared their opposition. “We don’t support self-rule, semi-autonomous zones inside Syria,” State Department spokesperson John Kirby said. “We just don’t.” [...]

The defeat of ISIS has left the US-led coalition well-positioned to play a more direct role in the war. As then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson pointed out earlier this year, “The United States and the coalition forces that are working with us to defeat ISIS today control 30 percent of the Syrian territory, and control a large amount of population, and control a large amount of Syria’s oil fields.” [...]

As tensions mounted between the US and Turkish governments, the Trump administration then faced another major challenge. In February, pro-regime Syrian forces backed by Russian operatives launched an attack on Kurdish-led forces in eastern Syria. US officials, who were aware of potential Russian involvement, decided to respond with airstrikes, killing hundreds of people, including dozens of Russians.

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The Atlantic: The Kurds Keep Remaking the Middle East

That moment was believed to mark the first time a modern Iraqi leader has spoken in Kurdish, which, along with Arabic, is an official language of Iraq. And he accompanied that with a more substantive overture, agreeing to transfer more than $250 million to the Kurdish Regional Government to help pay the salaries Kurdish government workers and security forces. [...]

Although the Iraqi Kurds made some progress this week, their brethren across the border in Syria aren’t having a good week. Here, too, the Kurds were a long neglected and long oppressed minority. Here, too, they were among the most effective fighting forces against ISIS. Here, too, they carved out their own enclave—this time in northern Syria. But last weekend, Turkish forces succeeded in retaking Afrin, the Kurdish-controlled Syrian town near the border with Turkey. The Turks, who have their own restive Kurdish population, want the Syrian Kurds to withdraw to the east of the Euphrates River—and are now threatening the town of Manbij, also west of the Euphrates and under Kurdish control. Some Syrian Kurds have links to the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, a separatist Kurdish group that operates inside Turkey, and which Ankara (as well as Washington) regards as a terrorist organization. Some are also supported by the U.S. (For more on the many overlapping alliances and conflicts inside Syria, go here.) [...]

“The red line is independence—or even having a referendum on independence,” said Joost Hiltermann, an expert on the Kurds who directs the Middle East and North Africa program at the International Crisis Group. Referring to the situation in Iraq, he said the regional powers such as Turkey, not to mention Iran and Iraq itself, had made their peace with Kurdish self-governance within the Iraqi state. But Masoud Barzani, the Kurdish president at the time (who remains influential in Kurdish politics), wanted more.  

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Jacobin Magazine: Defending Afrin

But Kurds in Turkey have mounted considerable resistance to this process since the foundation of the Turkish nation state — be it in form of regional rebellions in the early years of the republic, attempts at participating in civil politics after the introduction of the multi-party system, or with the formation of an armed liberation movement, the PKK. Finally, the emergence of the HDP, an umbrella for anti-establishment left-wing parties and organizations with a focus on women’s liberation and the Kurdish question, marked a significant shift in combating state-led Kurdophobia in Turkey. Not only was 2015 a year where the HDP’s vision of a radically democratized Turkey found an electorate and denied Erdoğan the absolute majority he needed for his attempts to establish authoritarianism through constitutional amendments. But also, on the other side of the Syrian-Turkish border, the resistance of Kobanê against the darkness of the so-called Islamic State (IS) echoed across the world. This resistance explicitly exposed the foreign policy of the Erdoğan government, forcing its alliance with jihadist militias to become public. [...]

After the two-day meeting, a declaration was made that expressed the Rojavan and Northern Syrian people’s will to not engage in the establishment of national independence in the classical sense. The declaration proposed a federative system as part of the wider conflict resolution. Grassroots democracy, women’s liberation, and a full representation of all groups in society organized in a council system were determined as the constitutive principles of the new social contract. In September 2017 the first federal elections were held in the Democratic Federation Northern Syria-Rojava, with co-chairs of 3,700 communes across the three cantons being elected, followed by local councils in November and an assembly in January. Grassroots democracy was developed out of the ashes of war. [...]

Russia was also prepared to authorize Turkey’s military intervention because there is a Russian-Western competition for good relations with Turkey. Russia has an interest in breaking Turkey out of the Western bloc, and in the long term, placing it in its sphere of interest. Western countries want to keep Turkey a member of the NATO family, hence its strategic rapprochement with Russia, which Erdoğan repeatedly references, does not sit well with the United States.

No wonder then that the West has decided to tolerate Turkish aggression in northern Syria. With the exception of France, although perhaps here only in the role of a fig-leaf, no government has explicitly taken a stance against Turkey’s breach of international law and crimes against humanity. Not to mention against Turkey’s outspoken cooperation with the ideological inheritors of Al-Qaeda. The United States tried to disassociate itself from the Canton of Afrin in attributing influence over the region to the Russians. However, they continue to find themselves in a difficult situation, as Erdoğan has already announced he will pursue an attack on Menbic, an area where US soldiers are stationed, once Afrin is “done.”

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The Atlantic: The Entirely Rational Basis For Turkey's Move Into Syria

Through 94 years of independence, Turkish leaders have made clear that the nightmare of post-World-War-I dismemberment can never repeat itself. But it has, despite their best efforts—albeit in an updated form, involving the United States and Syrian territory that the Kurds call Rojava, or Western Kurdistan. This explains why, last weekend, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered his army to attack a district in northwestern Syria called Afrin. The area is under the control of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its affiliated fighting force, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). This force has been an effective partner of the United States in the fight against the self-declared Islamic State, but it is also a creature of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)—a Turkish Kurdish group that both the United States and Turkey identify as a terrorist organization. [...]

And yet the Turkish operation is entirely rational—not only in terms of how the Turks view the war in Syria and its impact on their own security, but also in terms of Turkey’s geography, identity, and problematic history with great powers. Policymakers in Washington often justify Turkey’s strategic importance based on location. The country’s capital, Ankara, sits roughly at the geographic center of many U.S. foreign policy concerns in the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. This geography also has its disadvantages for Turks. As a rump state of the Ottoman Empire, it shares long borders with threatening, unstable, or warring countries, a fact the Turks recognize. It is hard to have, in Atatürk’s famous words, “peace at home, peace in the world” when the fragmentation of countries on one’s borders threatens one’s own unity. Observers were shocked when, in October 2016, Erdogan questioned the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that defined the Republic of Turkey’s borders. At the time, the Turks were facing the possibility that Iraq’s Kurds would declare their independence at the same time their Syrian cousins were leveraging battlefield success and American support to do the same. [...]

The twists and turns in the Syrian civil war and the American determination not to get sucked into it, but to still defeat the Islamic State, have created a slew of inconsistencies in Washington’s approach to those two goals. Being the friend of your friend’s enemy contributes to outcomes like Turkey’s Afrin incursion, which both the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Trump administration oppose. It is true that Afrin is located in the northwest, far from the area east of the Euphrates that is of most concern to the Pentagon, but Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s declaration in response to Operation Olive Branch that “we’ll work this out” with the Turks are the words of a man—no matter how smart and learned—with little in the way of leverage. The United States is likely to accommodate itself to Turkey’s 20-mile security zone in Afrin, but the Turks do not trust (perhaps irreparably) the United States. Washington plays a central role in their century-old nightmare. 

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Haaretz; Netanyahu, Sole Leader to Endorse Independent Kurdistan, Hits Back at Erdogan for Supporting Hamas

Israel’s support for Kurdish independence is not new; Netanyahu has made similar declarations as far back as 2014. But the timing, less than two weeks before a September 25 referendum slated to be held in Iraqi Kurdistan, makes the Israeli message more than just moral support for the Kurdish people’s desire for an independent state. The statement, the first of its kind to be made by any world leader, is a dagger right in the eyes of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is ideologically and strategically opposed to the establishment of a Kurdish state. [...]

What the Kurdish official means is that Israel’s public statements could portray the Kurds as collaborating with a country defined as an enemy by Iran while they are trying to gain international legitimacy for their cause. “If Israel really wanted to help, it could promote the issue in the White House and get the administration to declare its support for an independent state,” the official said. The White House opposes the referendum as being badly timed. [...]

The war against ISIS has reordered the Kurds’ priorities. If after the second Gulf War their great achievements were joining the Iraqi government, the naming of a Kurdish president for the entire country and a fair share of government budgets, the war against ISIS has fed and nurtured the opposite process – that of separating from the mother country. The Kurds would see independence as worthy historic and national compensation for its large contribution to the war against a terror group that threatens the West.

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Al Jazeera: Is there really a Turkey-Iran rapprochement?

Turkey and Iran both opposed the Saudi-led block's moves against Qatar. In fact, during the initial phase of the crisis, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif paid a rare visit to Turkey to discuss, among other issues, what was happening in the Gulf. [...]

Two issues cause particular concern in Turkey and Iran: the perceived opacity of US policy and the political ambitions of the Kurds. Iran is anxiously awaiting whether the US will switch its regional policy from ISIL-first to Iran-first policy in the near future. Turkey, on the other hand, is disturbed by the fact that it can't figure out the durability of US for the Kurds in Syria and the end goal of this partnership in Syria.  [...]

Iran, too, is concerned with Kurdish political ambitions, particularly those of the Iraqi Kurds. The independence of Iraqi Kurdistan would diminish the status of Iraq - a Shia-majority country over which Iran has a significant level of influence - in terms of population, geography, hydrocarbon wealth, and water resources. An independent Iraqi Kurdistan is also likely to be closer to the West, Turkey, Israel, and arguably Gulf states than to Iran. [...]

Apart from the Kurdish issue in Iraq, Iran and Turkey have other diverging interests. Ankara has been disturbed by the twin processes of the centralisation and sectarianisation of the Iraqi state. In principle, Ankara supports the strengthening of the central government in order to curb the irredentist aspirations of Iraqi Kurdistan, but this could mean the domination of sectarian politics as the Shia groups retain more state power - a trend already in place in the country's security architecture.

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Al Jazeera: UN: Yazidi genocide in Iraq still ongoing, unaddressed

ISIL's genocide against Iraq's Yazidis is still "ongoing" and remains "unaddressed" by the international community, the UN has said, marking three years since ISIL began killing and capturing thousands of members of the religious minority group.

The UN human rights Commission of Inquiry, which declared the killings of thousands of Yazidis by ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group, to be a genocide, said on Thursday that the atrocity had not ended and that the international community was not doing enough to stop it. [...]

However, most Yazidis have yet to return to villages they fled when the group overran Sinjar in the summer of 2014, killing and capturing thousands because of their faith.

Nearly 3,000 Yazidi women and children remain in ISIL captivity, and control over Sinjar is disputed by rival armed groups and their regional patrons. [...]

About 3,100 Yazidis were killed - with more than half shot, beheaded or burned alive - and about 6,800 kidnapped to become sex slaves or fighters, according to a report published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.

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Foreign Policy: The Kremlin’s Newest Hybrid Warfare Asset: Gangsters

There’s no doubt that North Korea has led the way in turning organized crime toward state ends. Its infamous Bureau 39 is essentially the government’s mafia office, dedicated to generating resources by illegal means to support the state (especially its nuclear program) and keep the Kims in imported luxuries. It arranges for methamphetamines to be brewed inside government chemical works, the state mint helps produce some of the highest-quality counterfeit bank notes in the world, and the state-owned Korea National Insurance Corp. (KNIC) runs systematic insurance frauds abroad.

Thae Yong-ho, a former diplomat who was the highest-ranking defector in 20 years, claimed in 2017 that these schemes earn Pyongyang “tens of millions of dollars” annually. (In 2009, KNIC managers in Singapore reportedly sent then-leader Kim Jong Il $20 million in cash as a birthday present.) Turning to cybercrime has been a logical step. Cheap, potentially lucrative, and not relying on physical contact, cybercrime is the ideal operation for an impoverished and isolated pariah. Other states committed to challenging the international order are learning from Pyongyang’s example, though — if with a little more subtlety. Unlike the North Koreans, they are typically cutting deals with the underworld rather than simply moving into it themselves. Gangsters, after all, have all kinds of skills and capacities that can be of value to intelligence agencies and covert operations in the modern world, whether moving goods or people untraceably across borders, raising funds for political purposes, or simply putting a bullet into an inconvenient enemy of the state. [...]

Increasingly, though, states are turning to this on a more regular basis. The Turkish security forces have used rival heroin-smuggling gangs as weapons against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party to penetrate Turkish expatriate communities, for example. Chinese triads are being used by Beijing’s Public Security Bureau to intimidate protesters and gather intelligence abroad. And when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard wanted to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States in 2011, they used someone they thought was a Mexican drug cartel hit man. (He was actually an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration.) [...]

But most of this state-sponsored organized crime is more low-profile. We are seeing more and more cases, especially in Europe, where local counterintelligence services believe gangsters are acting as occasional Russian assets. Some work on behalf of the Russia state willingly. In other cases, these criminals have been turned into assets without their knowledge, thinking they are simply doing a service for a Russian gang. And yet for others, they are made an offer they can’t refuse. In a recent report for the European Council on Foreign Relations, I call these “Russian-based organized crime” — whether ethnically Russian or not (because many are Georgians or the like), they are criminals with business or personal interests back in Russia, a fact the Kremlin can use as leverage.

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Foreign Policy: The United States and Turkey Are on a Collision Course in Syria

America’s relationship with Turkey has entered a period of deep crisis. At the heart of the matter is continued U.S. support for Syrian Kurds fighting the Islamic State. The partnership between the United States and a coalition of Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Syrian Arab militias, currently known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), began more than two years ago under President Barack Obama. President Donald Trump’s administration continues to back the 50,000-strong SDF as the most capable anti-Islamic State force in northern Syria. The SDF are now closing in on Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State’s self-described caliphate, and Trump has approved a plan to provide arms directly to the YPG for the final push. Yet Turkey sees the SDF as mortal enemies due to the YPG’s affiliation with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a designated terrorist organization which has fought a bloody insurgency inside Turkey for three decades. These clashing interests have put Washington and Ankara on a collision course just as the U.S.-led campaign to crush the caliphate enters its culminating phase. [...]

Erdogan has warned that Turkey will continue to strike the YPG unless the United States abandons its partnership with them, even as Turkey has thrown its support behind a Russian proposal to create “de-escalation zones” to freeze the conflict elsewhere in Syria. One Erdogan advisor even hinted that U.S. forces could be struck if they continue to back the Syrian Kurds. If Turkey follows through with these threats, it could trigger a Turkey-Kurd border war that derails the Raqqa campaign, undermining a core national security interest of the United States. And, if a military mistake by Turkey results in the death of U.S. forces, it could bring Washington and Ankara — two NATO allies — into direct conflict. [...]

Erdogan’s decision to play hardball stemmed from the priority he placed at the time on toppling Assad over combatting the Islamic State and other extremist groups. Indeed, for the first few years of the war, Ankara’s commitment to regime change led Turkey to impose few restrictions on the transit of anti-Assad fighters across the border into Syria. Even as the Islamic State spread in eastern Syria and the influence of al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate grew among the northern opposition — including groups Turkey worked with — toppling Assad remained the focus of Erdogan’s policy. [...]

Even as it takes steps to address legitimate Turkish concerns, however, Trump must insist that Erdogan take reciprocal actions to address the concerns of Syrian Kurds. If the SDF fully withdraws east of the Euphrates, for example, Turkey should facilitate the creation of a secure transportation corridor across its buffer zone to allow the movement of Kurdish civilians between disconnected Kurdish cantons. In exchange for greater participation of openly pro-Turkish political organizations in SDF-controlled areas, Turkey should also agree to tolerate a future Syrian government that provides a degree of local autonomy to SDF-controlled areas in northern Syria. And, in return for the YPG distancing itself from the PKK, the Trump administration should offer the SDF continued U.S. assistance.

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Foreign Policy: Is Turkey Still a Democracy?

The spat with Germany and the Netherlands is just one example. On a range of issues — from the state of Turkey’s democracy to the Turkish role in Syria to Turkey’s extradition request for the U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom it accuses of planning last summer’s coup attempt — Western countries have refused to adopt Ankara’s views.

Ankara is partially responsible for its own alienation. Consider last week’s trip to Turkey organized for more than a dozen American journalists from outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal by Ankara Mayor Melih Gokcek. The event was billed as a chance to meet with the country’s top officials, including President Erdogan, to hear their narrative of the coup attempt and why the United States should extradite Gulen.

The meetings, however, failed to materialize, and reporters were treated to a four-hour meeting with Gokcek himself. The majority of reporters left the meeting in protest. During the talk, Gokcek failed to present a single piece of evidence implicating Gulen in the coup and instead laid out his own conspiratorial worldview. [...]

Government officials, however, contend that the package would actually enhance the separation of powers in Turkey by dividing parliament’s existing powers with the office of the presidency. Parliament would maintain the power to approve the president’s budget, ratify international treaties and declarations of war, and overrule a presidential decree through legislation.

The legal merits of the constitutional changes aside, government officials also portray a “yes” vote as a victory against their domestic opponents — most prominently, the supporters of Gulen and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long insurgency against the state.

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Foreign Policy: Putin and Erdogan’s Marriage of Convenience

It has been a remarkable turnabout. In November 2015, then-Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan proudly took credit for ordering the shooting down of a Russian warplane that had violated Turkish airspace for a grand total of 17 seconds. Russian retaliation in the form of stinging economic sanctions swiftly followed. Eventually, Erdogan was forced to apologize to Russia and concoct a new narrative assigning blame to the two hapless Turkish F-16 pilots who shot down the Russian jet. The rest of the job fell to the Turkish press, mostly controlled by Erdogan and his allies, which then propagated the notion that F-16 pilots had taken their orders from Fethullah Gulen, the controversial cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania. [...]

These episodes are emblematic of the changing nature of the Russian-Turkish relationship. Frustrated by the Syrian opposition’s loss of ground against President Bashar al-Assad, and fearing the empowerment of the Syrian Kurds, Erdogan began to tack toward Moscow and away from its Western alliance partners roughly a year after Ankara shot down the Russian warplane. Turkey is now one of the parties in the Syrian cease-fire negotiations, along with Russia and Iran; its equities are the armed Sunni opposition groups that depend on Ankara. By contrast, the United States, Turkey’s traditional ally, was excluded from the negotiations and the pending conference in Astana. [...]

The resulting chain reaction brought Turkey closer to Russia. Overnight, America had transformed the Syrian Kurds into a legitimate actor, enabling them to consolidate territorial gains adjoining Turkey. For Ankara, however, this was nothing short of a victory for the hated Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which had been instrumental in the creation of the YPG and waged a decades-long guerilla war against the Turkish state.

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Jacobin Magazine: Between Rojava and Washington

However, since his imprisonment, Öcalan appears to have mellowed and, in his writings, has reoriented the PKK away from Soviet-style Marxism towards an ideology that blends elements of feminism, environmentalism, and anarchism, inspired by the anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin. [...]

These observations are not meant to idealize the Rojava revolution. Like all revolutionary movements, the PYD has often failed to live up to its ideals. It has yet to shake off the authoritarian impulses inherited from the PKK, and has frequently been accused of suppressing other Kurdish political parties in Syria, including the Kurdish National Council (KNC), an organization with close links to the Iraqi Kurdish political leadership. It also faces allegations of ethnic cleansing in Arab villages and has, at times, used child soldiers. The organization also continues to promote the cult of Öcalan through its control of the education system and media. [...]

The roots of this contradiction lie in the fact that the United States has long regarded the PKK — the organization from which the PYD sprung — as a terrorist organization, and has provided both military and political support for Turkey’s fight against the PKK for decades. With the decision to support the Syrian Kurds US officials have thus been thrust into the comical position of pretending that the PYD and PKK are entirely separate organizations, a fiction that is almost impossible to sustain.

This state of affairs has been exacerbated by the fact that, while the United States is prioritizing the fight against the Islamic State, Ankara views the PKK-PYD axis and the Assad regime as the main enemy. Indeed, Turkey has been more than willing to tolerate the flow of fighters and weapons into Syria in order to undermine its enemies — a policy that has bolstered the position of the Islamic State.

On the morning of August 24, Turkish forces backed by local Islamist militias associated with the Free Syrian Army crossed the frontier, taking control of the ISIS stronghold of Jarabulus. Significantly, ISIS offered almost no resistance to the Turkish advance, sparking accusations that the entire operation had been staged for Western eyes and that ISIS forces had been informed of the operation beforehand. While Turkey entered under the banner of the anti-ISIS coalition, the true target of the action was the PYD which had been slowly advancing towards the city.

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Business Insider: An unlikely alliance against ISIS is forming in a remote corner of Iraq

The unlikely alliance between an offshoot of a leftist Kurdish organization and an Arab tribal militia in northern Iraq is a measure of the extent to which Islamic State has upended the regional order. [...]

While the Arab militia wants to restore Baghdad's authority over this arid hinterland, the YBS is on a mission to establish its own model of society based on the philosophy of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

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