The Kurds had always had a bad time. They were oppressed by the Ottoman empire. Then, at the end of the First World War, they were promised a homeland, but the new Turkish state refused to give them any land, while the British went and created the new state of Iraq and sent aircraft to bomb the Kurds there into submission.
The Kurds are an ancient, democratic, peace-loving people that have never attacked any country.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had and used significant weapons of mass destruction on his own people, both the Kurds and the Iranians.
The allies we formerly relied on - the Kurds and the Syrian Democratic Forces - will have little interest in helping us after we abandon them to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers - for instance, women with headscarves - but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, and secularist readers. Next to those are mystics, agnostics, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, gays, housewives, and businesswomen.
In the 20th century, the Muslim world created a vision of religious nationalism. Turkey, for example, had to be ethnically Turkish. Kurds, Armenians, other minorities didn't have a place in such a vision of a nation-state.
Erdogan's persecution of his people is not simply a domestic matter. The ongoing pursuit of civil society, journalists, academics and Kurds in Turkey is threatening the long-term stability of the country.
We respect the will of our citizens, whether they are Kurds or Arabs or Turkmen, but will not allow an illegal and unconstitutional procedure done under the threat of weapons to yield results.
America sold VX nerve gas and anthrax to Iraq for years, even after the Halabja gas attack, which killed thousands of Kurds.
The country of Iraq is somewhat of an artificial creation going back to colonial days. And so you have the Kurds and then the Sunnis in the north predominantly and Shias in the south.
