Kurds—a beacon of hope or harbinger of more chaos?

A female member of the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS), a militia affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), carries a sniper and an AK-47 rifle in the village of Umm al-Dhiban, northern Iraq, April 29, 2016. They share little more than an enemy and struggle to communicate on the battlefield, but together two relatively obscure groups have opened up a new front against Islamic State militants in a remote corner of Iraq. The unlikely alliance between the Sinjar Resistance Units, an offshoot of a leftist Kurdish organisation, and Abdulkhaleq al-Jarba, a Arab tribal militia is a measure of the extent to which Islamic State has upended the regional order. Across Iraq and Syria, new groups have emerged where old powers have waned, competing to claim fragments of territory from Islamic State and complicating the outlook when they win. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic

For the United States, Syrian Kurds are reliable boots on the ground in the fight against the Islamic State. Their agenda for autonomy and self-rule in northern Syria, however, is a source of vexation for Turkey. Ankara is worried about the emergence of a Kurdish state along its borders, which could bolster the demands of … Continue reading Kurds—a beacon of hope or harbinger of more chaos?