Isegoria

John Derbyshire reports that his friend the Z-man (ZMAN, @TheRealZBlog) died Wednesday night or Thursday morning, apparently of natural causes:

As well as being a fellow dissident, Chris was a keen & very helpful supporter of my own efforts. He edited and hosted Radio Derb at his website from the destruction of VDare last July to June 6th this year, when I retired. Rest in peace, Z.

Addendum: Z-Man had this blog listed in his sidebar — under “Bad Thoughts”:

At first it was known by the outside world as ISIL, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, but as the Arabic word for the Levant is al-Sham, gradually it became ISIS:

In the summer of 2014 the group began calling itself the Islamic State, having proclaimed such an entity in large parts of Iraq and Syria.

[…]

By the summer of 2015 many Arabs across the Middle East, including most of the regional media, were calling the Islamic State by another name, one which encapsulated how repulsive many ordinary people felt the organization to be—DAESH.

It is an acronym of sorts for the Arabic Dawlat al-Islamiya f’al-Iraq wa al-Shams, but the reason people came up with the name is because the Islamic State members hate the term. It sounds similar to the word daes—one who is underhanded and sows dissent. More important, it rhymes with negative words such as fahish—“ sinner”—and best of all, for those who despise the organization’s particular brand of Islam, is that it rhymes with and sounds a bit like jahesh—“stupid ass.” This is worse than being called a donkey, because in Arab culture one of the few things more stupid than a donkey is an ass.

[…]

In the battle for Tikrit the US Air Force found itself in the odd position of flying reconnaissance missions and limited air strikes, which assisted Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders who had been brought in to oversee the Iraqi assault on the town.

[…]

The US pilots, who flew the majority of the missions, suffered from not having American Special Forces forward air controllers calling in the coordinates for the strikes. As targets were frequently in the urban areas, the “rules of engagement” meant many planes returned to their bases without firing their weapons.

[…]

History bequeathed oil to “Iraq,” but the de facto division of the country means the oil is mostly in the Kurdish and Shia areas; and if there is no strong, unified Iraq then the oil money flows back to where the oil is found.

[…]

In the event of a split, the Shia are geographically best placed to take advantage. The region they dominate has oil fields; thirty-five miles of coastline; the Shatt al-Arab waterway; ports; access to the outside world; and a religious, economic, and military ally next door in the form of Iran.

[…]

The Ottomans had regarded the area west of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean coast as a part of the region of Syria. They called it Filistina. After the First World War, under the British Mandate, this became Palestine.

For millennia the Jews had lived in what used to be called Israel, but the ravages of history had dispersed them across the globe. Israel remained for them the “promised land,” and Jerusalem, in particular, was sacred ground. However, by 1948 Arab Muslims and Christians had been a clear majority in the land for more than a thousand years.

[…]

The British looked favorably on the creation of a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine and allowed Jews to move there and buy land from the Arabs. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, Jews tried to get to Palestine in even greater numbers. Tensions between Jews and non-Jews reached the boiling point, and an exhausted Britain handed over the problem to the United Nations in 1948, which voted to partition the region into two countries. The Jews agreed, the Arabs said no. The outcome was war, which created the first wave of Palestinian refugees fleeing the area and Jewish refugees coming in from across the Middle East.

Jordan occupied the West Bank region, including East Jerusalem. Egypt occupied Gaza, considering it to be an extension of its territory. Neither was minded to give the people living there citizenship or statehood as Palestinians, nor was there any significant movement by the inhabitants calling for the creation of a Palestinian state. Syria meanwhile considered the whole area to be part of greater Syria and the people living there Syrians. To this day Egypt, Syria, and Jordan are suspicious of Palestinian independence, and if Israel vanished and were replaced by Palestine, all three might make claims to parts of the territory. In this century, however, there is a fierce sense of nationhood among the Palestinians, and any Arab dictatorship seeking to take a chunk out of a Palestinian state of whatever shape or size would be met with massive opposition. The Palestinians are very aware that most of the Arab countries, to which some of them fled in the twentieth century, refuse to give them citizenship; they insist that the status of their children and grandchildren remains “refugee,” and work to ensure that they do not integrate into the country.

[…]

Israel regards Jerusalem as its eternal, indivisible capital. The Jewish religion says the rock upon which Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac is there, and that it stands directly above the Holy of Holies, King Solomon’s Temple. For the Palestinians, Jerusalem has a religious resonance that runs deep throughout the Muslim world: the city is regarded as the third most holy place in Islam because the prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven from that same rock, which is on the site of what is now the “Farthest Mosque” (Al-Aqsa). Militarily, the city is of only moderate strategic geographical importance—it has no real industry to speak of, no river, and no airport—but it is of overwhelming significance in cultural and religious terms: the ideological need for the place is of more importance than its location. Control of, and access to, Jerusalem is not an issue upon which a compromise solution can be easily achieved.

[…]

Iran is a non-Arabic, majority Farsi-speaking giant. It is bigger than France, Germany, and the UK combined, but while the populations of those countries amount to 200 million people, Iran has only 78 million. With limited habitable space, most live in the mountains; the great deserts and salt plains of the interior of Iran are no place for human habitation.

[…]

There are two huge mountain ranges in Iran: the Zagros and the Elburz. The Zagros runs from the north, nine hundred miles down along Iran’s borders with Turkey and Iraq, ending almost at the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf. In the southern half of the range there is a plain to the west where the Shatt al-Arab divides Iran and Iraq. This is also where the major Iranian oil fields are, the others being in the north and center. Together they are thought to comprise the world’s third-largest reserves. Despite this, Iran remains relatively poor due to mismanagement, corruption, mountainous topography that hinders transport connections, and economic sanctions that have, in part, prevented certain sections of industry from modernizing.

The Elburz range also begins in the north, but along the border with Armenia. It runs the whole length of the Caspian Sea’s south shore and on to the border with Turkmenistan before descending as it reaches Afghanistan. This is the mountain range you can see from the capital, Tehran, towering above the city to its north. It provides spectacular views, and also a better-kept secret than the Iranian nuclear project: the skiing conditions are excellent for several months each year.

Iran is defended by this geography, with mountains on three sides, swampland and water on the fourth. The Mongols were the last force to make any progress through the territory, in 1219–21, and since then attackers have ground themselves into dust trying to make headway across the mountains.

[…]

In fact, the US military had a catchphrase at the time: “We do deserts, not mountains.”

In 1980, when the Iran-Iraq War broke out, the Iraqis used six divisions to cross the Shatt al-Arab in an attempt to annex the Iranian province of Khuzestan. They never even made it off the swamp-ridden plains, let alone entered the foothills of the Zagros. The war dragged on for eight years, taking at least a million lives.

The mountainous terrain of Iran means that it is difficult to create an interconnected economy and that it has many minority groups each with keenly defined characteristics. Khuzestan, for example, is ethnically majority Arab, and elsewhere there are Kurds, Azeri, Turkmen, and Georgians, among others. At most, 60 percent of the country speaks Farsi, the language of the dominant Persian majority. As a result of this diversity, Iran has traditionally centralized power and used force and a fearsome intelligence network to maintain internal stability. Tehran knows that no one is about to invade Iran, but also that hostile powers can use its minorities to try and stir dissent and thus endanger its Islamic revolution.

Iran also has a nuclear industry that many countries, particularly Israel, believe is being used to prepare for the construction of nuclear weapons, increasing tensions in the region. The Israelis feel threatened by the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons. It is not just Iran’s potential to rival their own arsenal and wipe out Israel with just one bomb: if Iran were to get the bomb, then the Arab countries would probably panic and attempt to get their own as well. The Saudis, for example, fear that the ayatollahs want to dominate the region, bring all the Shia Arabs under their guidance, and even have designs on controlling the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. A nuclear-armed Iran would be the regional superpower par excellence, and to counter this danger the Saudis would probably try to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan (with whom they have close ties). Egypt and Turkey might follow suit.

This means that the threat of an Israeli air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is a constant presence, but there are many restraining factors. One is that, in a straight line, it is one thousand miles from Israel to Iran. The Israeli air force would need to cross two sovereign borders, those of Jordan and Iraq; the latter would certainly tell Iran that the attack was coming. Another is that any other route requires refueling capabilities that may be beyond Israel, and that (if flying the northern route) also overfly sovereign territory. A final reason is that Iran holds what might be a trump card—the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf through which passes each day, depending on sales, about 20 percent of the world’s oil needs. At its narrowest point, the Strait, which is regarded as the most strategic in the world, is only twenty-one miles across. The industrialized world fears the effect of Hormuz being closed possibly for months on end, with ensuing spiraling prices. This is one reason why so many countries pressure Israel not to act.

[…]

In the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE the Persian Empire stretched all the way from Egypt to India. Modern-day Iran has no such imperial designs, but it does seek to expand its influence, and the obvious direction is across the flatlands to its west—the Arab world and its Shia minorities. It has made ground in Iraq since the US invasion delivered a Shia-majority government. This has alarmed Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and helped fuel the Middle East’s version of the Cold War with the Saudi–Iranian relationship at its core. Saudi Arabia may be bigger than Iran, and it may be many times richer than Iran due to its well-developed oil and gas industries, but its population is much smaller (28 million Saudis as opposed to 78 million Iranians) and militarily it is not confident about its ability to take on its Persian neighbor if this cold war ever turns hot and their forces confront each other directly. Each side has ambitions to be the dominant power in the region, and each regards themselves as the champions of their respective versions of Islam. When Iraq was under the heel of Saddam, a powerful buffer separated Saudi Arabia and Iran; with that buffer gone, the two countries now glare at each other across the Gulf.

[…]

This was the background to the shocking events of early 2016 when Saudi Arabia (a majority Sunni country) executed forty-seven prisoners in a single day, among them the country’s most senior Shia sheikh—Nimr al-Nimr. This was a calculated move by the ruling Sunni royal family to show the world, including America, that nuclear deal or no nuclear deal—the Saudis were going to face down Iran. Demonstrations broke out across the Shia Muslim world, the Saudi embassy in Tehran was duly ransacked and set on fire, diplomatic relations were broken between the two countries, and the scene was set for the continuation of the bitter Sunni/ Shia civil war.

Northwest of Iran is a country that is both European and Asian. Turkey lies on the borders of the Arab lands but is not Arabic, and although most of its landmass is part of the wider Middle East region, it tries to distance itself from the conflicts taking place there.

[…]

Its population is 75 million, and European countries fear that given the disparity in living standards, EU membership would result in a mass influx of labor. What may also be a factor, albeit unspoken within the EU, is that Turkey is a majority Muslim country (98 percent). The EU is neither a secular nor a Christian organization, but there has been a difficult debate about “values.”

In the 1920s, for one man at least, there was no choice. His name was Mustafa Kemal and he was the only Turkish general to emerge from the First World War with an enhanced reputation. After the victorious powers carved up Turkey, he rose to become president on a platform of resisting the terms imposed by the Allies, but at the same time modernizing Turkey and making it part of Europe. Western legal codes and the Gregorian calendar were introduced and Islamic public institutions banned. The wearing of the fez was forbidden, the Latin alphabet replaced Arabic script, and he even granted the vote to women (two years ahead of Spain and fifteen years ahead of France). In 1934, when Turks embraced legally binding surnames, Kemal was given the name Atatürk—“ Father of the Turks.” He died in 1938, but subsequent Turkish leaders continued working to bring Turkey into the West European fold, and those who didn’t found themselves on the wrong end of a coup d’état by a military determined to complete Atatürk’s legacy.

By the late 1980s, however, the continued rejection by Europe and the stubborn refusal of many ordinary Turks to become less religious resulted in a generation of politicians who began to think the unthinkable—that perhaps Turkey needed a plan B. President Turgut Özal, a religious man, came to office in 1989 and began the change. He encouraged Turks to again see Turkey as the great land bridge between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and a country that could again be a great power in all three regions. The current president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, has similar ambitions, perhaps even greater ones, but has faced similar hurdles in achieving them. These are in part geographical.

[…]

In NATO terms, Turkey is a key country because it controls the entrance to and exit from the Black Sea through the narrow gap of the Bosporus Strait. If it closes the strait, which is less than a mile across at its narrowest point, the Russian Black Sea Fleet cannot break out into the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic. Even getting through the Bosporus takes you only into the Sea of Marmara; you still have to navigate through the Dardanelles Strait to get to the Aegean Sea en route to the Mediterranean.

[…]

Until a few years ago, Turkey was held up as an example of how a Middle Eastern country, other than Israel, could embrace democracy. That example has taken a few knocks recently with the ongoing Kurdish problem, the difficulties facing some of the tiny Christian communities, and the tacit support for Islamist groups in their fight against the Syrian government. President Erdo?an’s remarks on Jews, race, and gender equality, taken with the creeping Islamization of Turkey, have set alarm bells ringing. However, compared with the majority of Arab states, Turkey is far more developed and recognizable as a democracy. Erdo?a may be undoing some of Atatürk’s work, but the grandchildren of the Father of the Turks live more freely than anyone in the Arab Middle East.

[…]

The Arab Spring is a misnomer, invented by the media; it clouds our understanding of what is happening. Too many reporters rushed to interview the young liberals who were standing in city squares with placards written in English, and mistook them for the voice of the people and the direction of history. Some journalists had done the same during the Green Revolution, describing the young students of north Tehran as the “Youth of Iran,” thus ignoring the other young Iranians who were joining the reactionary Basij militia and Revolutionary Guard.

[…]

The second phase of the Arab uprising is well into its stride. This is the complex internal struggle within societies where religious beliefs, social mores, tribal links, and guns are currently far more powerful forces than “Western” ideals of equality, freedom of expression, and universal suffrage. The Arab countries are beset by prejudices, indeed hatreds, of which average Westerners know so little that they tend not to believe them even if they are laid out in print before their eyes.

[…]

When Hosni Mubarak was ousted as president of Egypt, it was indeed people power that toppled him, but what the outside world failed to see was that the military had been waiting for years for an opportunity to be rid of him and his son Gamal, and that the theater of the street provided the cover they needed. It was only when the Muslim Brotherhood called its supporters out that there was enough cover. There were only three institutions in Egypt: Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, the military, and the Brotherhood. The latter two destroyed the former, the Brotherhood then won an election, began turning Egypt into an Islamist state, and paid the price by itself being overthrown by the real power in the land—the military.

Ideology, Kulak argues, is first and foremost an organizing principle for violence:

The history of modernity is the history of new ideological constructs arising to create ever more effective war waging coalitions of beneficiaries, ever larger groups of enforcers, and ever larger charnel houses of the losers.

[…]

The various spiritual, moral, and political evolutions and revolutions in the medieval and later absolutist systems allowed larger military forces, and more coherent better trained men, the Protestant reformation itself was a massive catalyst for new ideological coalitions and the confiscation of the property of wealthy monasteries and institutions.

But the real Revolution in ideological warfighting begins with the enlightenment revolutions, and the role radical printers, daily publications, and ideological pamphleteers played to revolutionize the memetic space.

The siren cry of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (Brotherhood)) set off by the enlightenment was their slogan, and their organizing principle, which allowed the immediate overthrow of the Ancien Regime in France and the aging decayed fuedal aristocracy and its bizzare bureaucracy.

Of course almost imediately the ideologies changed upon attaining power.

Out of the cry of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, came three world changing national revolutions.

Like the Judgement of Paris, the Peoples of the west each chose a Goddess.

The American Revolution, Corresponding to the idea of Liberty. Obviously.

The French Revolution, which despite its tri-color flag and tri-value slogan very quickly devolved into egalitarian terror.

And finally Otto Von Bismarck’s unification of Germany was the final Fraternal “revolution” in the western world.

President Joe Biden’s inner circle was running the White House like a “politburo,” and they were the “ultimate decision-makers” as Biden’s health and cognitive function continued to decline, according to Jake Tapper and Alex Thompso’s new book Original Sin:

This group, dubbed the “politburo,” included a coterie of seasoned political veterans, including Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed — but also family members such as first lady Jill Biden and the president’s son Hunter, the authors of “Original Sin” claim.

“In terms of who was running the White House, it’s a small group of people that have been around,” “Original Sin” author Alex Thompson told PBS’ “Washington Week” on Friday. “Some people within the administration called them the Politburo. That’s the term we used in the book.”

Former White House chief of staff Ron Klain was at times part of the “politburo,” as was former senior adviser to the president Annie Tomasini. Also on the “politburo” was the first lady’s former top adviser and “work husband,” Anthony Bernal, whom The Post previously reported created a toxic workplace environment.

The Greater Middle East extends across one thousand miles, west to east, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), from the Mediterranean Sea to the mountains of Iran:

From north to south, if we start at the Black Sea and end on the shores of the Arabian Sea off Oman, it is two thousand miles long. The region includes vast deserts, oases, snow-covered mountains, long rivers, great cities, and coastal plains. And it has a great deal of natural wealth in the form that every industrialized and industrializing country around the world needs—oil and gas.

It also contains the fertile region known as Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers” (Euphrates and Tigris). However, the most dominant feature is the vast Arabian Desert and scrubland in its center, which touches parts of Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, and most of Saudi Arabia, including the Rub al Khali or “Empty Quarter.” This is the largest continuous sand desert in the world, incorporating an area the size of France. It is due to this feature that not only the majority of the inhabitants of the region live on its periphery, but also that, until European colonization, most of the people within it did not think in terms of nation states and legally fixed borders.

The notion that a man from a certain area could not travel across a region to see a relative from the same tribe unless he had a document, granted to him by a third man he didn’t know in a faraway town, made little sense. The idea that the document was issued because a foreigner had said the area was now two regions and had made up names for them made no sense at all and was contrary to the way in which life had been lived for centuries.

The Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) was ruled from Istanbul. At its height, it stretched from the gates of Vienna, across Anatolia, and down through Arabia to the Indian Ocean. From west to east it took in what are now Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Israel/ Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and parts of Iran. It had never bothered to make up names for most of these regions; in 1867 it simply divided them into administrative areas known as Vilayets, which were usually based on where certain tribes lived, be they the Kurds in present-day northern Iraq, or the tribal federations in what is now part of Syria and part of Iraq.

When the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, the British and French had a different idea. In 1916, the British diplomat Colonel Sir Mark Sykes took a grease pencil and drew a crude line across a map of the Middle East. It ran from Haifa on the Mediterranean in what is now Israel to Kirkuk (now in Iraq) in the northeast. It became the basis of his secret agreement with his French counterpart François Georges-Picot to divide the region into two spheres of influence should the Triple Entente defeat the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. North of the line was to be under French control, south of it under British hegemony.

The term Sykes-Picot has become shorthand for the various decisions made in the first third of the twentieth century, which betrayed promises given to tribal leaders and which partially explains the unrest and extremism of today. This explanation can be overstated, though: there was violence and extremism before the Europeans arrived.

[…]

The legacy of European colonialism left the Arabs grouped into nation states and ruled by leaders who tended to favor whichever branch of Islam (and tribe) from which they themselves came. These dictators then used the machinery of state to ensure their writ ruled over the entire area within the artificial lines drawn by the Europeans, regardless of whether this was historically appropriate and fair to the different tribes and religions that had been thrown together.

[…]

As rulers of the Ottoman Empire the Turks saw a rugged, mountainous area dominated by Kurds, then, as the mountains fell away into the flatlands leading toward Baghdad and west to what is now Syria, they saw a place where the majority of people were Sunni Arabs. Finally, after the two great rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates merged and ran down to the Shatt al-Arab waterway, the marshlands, and the city of Basra, they saw more Arabs, most of whom were Shia. They ruled this space accordingly, dividing it into three administrative regions: Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra.

In antiquity, the regions very roughly corresponding to the above were known as Assyria, Babylonia, and Sumer. When the Persians controlled the space they divided it in a similar way, as did Alexander the Great, and later the Umayyad dynasty.

[…]

Iraqi Kurdistan has long been divided between two rival families. Syria’s Kurds are trying to create a statelet they call Rojava. They see it as part of a future, greater Kurdistan, but in the event of its creation, questions would arise as to who would have how much power, and where. If Kurdistan does become an internationally recognized state, then the shape of Iraq will change.

[…]

Various Arabian tribes had helped the British against the Ottomans during the First World War, but there were two in particular that London promised to reward at the war’s end. Unfortunately, both were promised the same thing—control of the Arabian Peninsula. Given that the Saudi and Hashemite tribes frequently fought each other, this was a little awkward. So London dusted off the maps, drew some lines, and said the head of the Saudi family could rule over one region and the head of the Hashemites could rule the other, although each would “need” a British diplomat to keep an eye on things. The Saudi leader eventually landed on a name for his territory, calling it after himself, hence we know the area as Saudi Arabia—the rough equivalent would be calling the UK “Windsorland.”

The British, sticklers for administration, named the other area Transjordan, which was shorthand for “the other side of the Jordan River.” A dusty little town called Amman became the capital of Transjordan, and when the British went home in 1948 the country’s name changed to Jordan. But the Hashemites were not from the Amman area: they were originally part of the powerful Qureshi tribe from the Mecca region, and the original inhabitants were mostly Bedouin. The majority of the population is now Palestinian: when the Israelis occupied the West Bank in 1967, many Palestinians fled to Jordan, which was the only Arab state to grant them citizenship. We now have a situation where the majority of Jordan’s 6.5 million citizens are Palestinian, many of whom do not regard themselves as loyal subjects of the current Hashemite ruler, King Abdullah. Added to this problem are the one million Iraqi and Syrian refugees the country has also taken in who are putting a huge strain on its extremely limited resources.

[…]

Until the twentieth century, the Arabs in the region saw the area between the Lebanese mountains and the sea as simply a province of the region of Syria. The French, into whose grasp it fell after the First World War, saw things differently.

The French had long allied themselves with the region’s Arab Christians and by way of thanks made up a country for them in a place in which they appeared in the 1920s to be the dominant population. As there was no other obvious name for this country the French named it after the nearby mountains, and thus Lebanon was born. This geographical fancy held until the late 1950s. By then the birthrate among Lebanon’s Shia and Sunni Muslims was growing faster than that of the Christians, while the Muslim population had been swollen by Palestinians fleeing the 1948 Arab–Israeli War in neighboring Israel/ Palestine. There has been only one official census in Lebanon (in 1932), because demographics is such a sensitive issue and the political system is partially based on population sizes.

[…]

Some parts of the capital, Beirut, are exclusively Shia Muslim, as is most of the south of the country. This is where the Shia Hezbollah group (backed by Shia-dominated Iran) is dominant. Another Shia stronghold is the Bekaa Valley, which Hezbollah has used as a staging post for its forages into Syria to support government forces there. Other towns are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. For example, Tripoli, in the north, is thought to be 80 percent Sunni, but it also has a sizable Alawite minority, and given the Sunni-Alawite tensions next door in Syria, this has led to sporadic bouts of fighting.

Lebanon appears to be a unified state only from the perspective of seeing it on a map.

[…]

When the French ruled the region they followed the British example of divide and rule. At that time, the Alawites were known as Nusayris. Many Sunnis do not count them as Muslims, and such was the hostility toward them that they rebranded themselves as Alawites, as in “followers of Ali” to reinforce their Islamic credentials. They were a backward hill people, at the bottom of the social strata in Syrian society. The French took them and put them into the police force and military, from where, over the years, they established themselves as a major power in the land.

[…]

The Assad clan, from which President Bashar al-Assad comes, is Alawite, which comprises approximately 12 percent of the population. The family has ruled the country since Bashar’s father, Hafez, took power in a coup d’état in 1970. In 1982, Hafez crushed a Muslim Brotherhood Sunni uprising in Hama, killing perhaps thirty thousand people over several days. The Brotherhood never forgave or forgot, and when the nationwide uprising began in 2011 there were scores to be settled.

[…]

It is doubtful that whoever eventually “wins” would look kindly upon a Kurdish statelet within what are nominally the borders of Syria. Not only would the Syrian Sunni majority oppose losing territory, but the Turks would be horrified at having a Syrian Kurdish state on its borders. There would inevitably be moves to join it up to some of the Kurdish-dominated regions inside Turkey itself.