When you handle cases you advise clients of possible best & worst outcomes. Then you advise of your best guess for the likely outcome. Turkey has had 40 years of war with the PKK in the east. Now war in the south with the YPG. How long in a worst case scenario could the southern war last? We know 40 years has past and the east is still at war. My middle estimate for the southern war is no fewer than 10 years. In the best case scenario I can’t see an outcome that does not include at least 4 years of the southern war. 40+ is more likely.
Moody’s just down graded Turkey on many financial fronts including foreign currency reserves. Turkey has set off on a war that will soon likely cost the lives of more Turkish forces than were lost by the US in all the modern US Mideast wars. Turkey’s Vietnam. But Vietnam was 7,000 miles from the US. Syria is Turkey’s next-door neighbor.
Today there was documentary evidence on Twitter of Turkey funding foreign jihadists, just like ISIS did, with amounts of cash offered for specific services. Link to the Afrin price list. Payments to families of martyrs, etc. It proves Turkey’s own citizens don’t support this war. Erdogan can fill a room with war widows but where are the college students? No fresh dictator lasts where the students don’t rally to them. Especially where he’s already locked up his army.
Finally, Turkey’s birthrate is falling. By continuing the Kurdish wars, Turkey impacts the local economies of the Kurdish regions that will necessarily cause increase poverty with corresponding increases in Kurdish birth rates. Turkey’s own quest for empire inches it ever closer to irrelevance.
This is a good time to start talking seriously about Kurdistan.
Tim
TimInHonolulu 