The Kurdish Mood After Rojava
For negotiations between the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement to progress, the emotional aftershock of Rojava’s contraction must be recognised.
In politically charged communities, the interpretive charity, yani the willingness to read what someone actually wrote rather than to verify which side they are on, has largely collapsed. When people are sufficiently certain of who their enemies are, they no longer read. They search for confirmation if you are among them. It is as old as the polis. So we move on. With those who listen, and for them.
I spent a tiresome week battling the label 'jihadi-lover' (meaning, apparently, a sympathiser of Ahmad al-Sharaa or his HTS, I don’t know) after publishing my field observations from Damascus and appearing on a YouTube politics programme to discuss them. A group who claim to follow my work on the Kurdish issue were deeply disappointed. Apparently my reporting from Syria had made me look like one.
How so? I asked with a genuine, if fleeting, hope that perhaps I had said something intellectually interesting. But n…
