”It’s a dirty old war. The city of Afrin, supposedly threatened with cataclysmic assault by the Turkish army, is open as usual, its shops doing apparently good business, its restaurants welcoming customers, its taxis lined up for customers, its Kurdish fighters manning the occasional checkpoint with weary obedience.
As for the Russians who, we have been told by news agencies and many others, have left – well, they are still here, at least during the day. I myself watched a Russian armoured personnel carrier – marked “military police” in Russian and Arabic but with the two-headed Russian eagle on the front – negotiate the checkpoint from the Syrian military line on the edge of Aleppo province into the Kurdish controlled Syrian province of Afrin.
Indeed, there is something curiously barren about the whole war in Afrin. A YPG official – as much military as political – agreed with me when I said that if the Turkish President really threw his entire army, along with their largely mythical “Syrian” FSA militia, into the province of Afrin, they would have got into the city in half an hour. Always supposing they have enough officers still unarrested for anti-Erdogan subversion. We Westerners, of course, like to see the YPG and its associated chums in neighbouring bits of which should have been Kurdistan – if the Americans had not ratted out of their League of Nations commitments after the First World War – as heroic and turbaned warriors.
I was thus a little shaken in one small village to see a pick-up load of black-uniformed gentlemen, all holding automatic weapons and with black bandanas around their faces – the words “no photos” were uttered immediately – driving at speed towards the Kurdish-Turkish front line. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have the right to fight Turkish aggression. They just weren’t the kind of chaps you are used to seeing in friendly television reports. So, too, the “wallpaper”, if that is how we must call the graffiti of war.”
ukgovernmentwatch 