#2 Long editorial. You have been warned.
Full Disclosure: I have friends, former trainees, and former fellow service members who I know are involved in supporting various Kurdish aid and medical activities in the region. I also know and know of people who are working to support Kurdish military efforts in the region. I have supported food & medical relief/supply efforts as well. So this is somewhat personal to me.
I wish the coup had actually been a coup and not a Reichstag fire set up by the government. I would have celebrated Erdogan's execution after a drumhead court martial.
From what I can see, Erdogan is on the path to criminalizing being Kurdish in Turkey as a means of cementing political power and Islamist behavior along side Turkish racialism. Yes, Turks even now are ever bit as racist as the Germans were about "being Aryan" 80 years ago. If Erdogan succeeds, he will be triggering more support for the PKK and more military and terror actions by the PKK's most radical elements. Unlike the Jews in pre-WW2 Germany, these people will not be scapegoats, they will fight viciously. The bloodshed will go up - and when it starts to happen in the non-Kurdish parts of Turkey it will be especially bloody.
If the Kurds were ever to manage to liberate their homeland part of Turkey, Turkey will cease to be able to extract mineral wealth while returning very little to the people who live there - while also repressing the liberty of the people who live in the region. The Turks would have to modernize their government and economy, or else become a poorer Islamic version of Greece. Their position would become untenable for anything other than a return to Ataturk style secularism.
I, for one, will applaud all the destruction of Edogan's fascisiti racist MB-style bastards that is done. I've seen their work, they deserve to be systemically reduced and then hunted to extinction for being SS-style racist bastards. The biggest mistake Bush made was not making Erdogan pay a hard price for his treachery during OIF - perhaps even a military coup would have been in order. The biggest mistake in this area Obama made is giving the Turks any leeway in their conduct during which they were tacitly allowing ISIS support to flow across their border into Syria. Like the mess in Libya, he knew, but chose to ignore it until it blew up on him. Also Obama ignored the Erdogan regime's lies about "striking ISIS" when all the Turks did was to use minor and ineffective strikes against ISIS as a fig leaf for large and coordinated strikes against Kurdish liberation forces in Syria, Iraq and the border area.
We should have supported the Kurds with artillery, ammunition and heavy arms, plus full on air campaign to close the Turkish rat lines for ISIS. We should also have provided CAP like we did during Operation Northern Watch (and Provide Comfort, as well as Operation Desert Fox), to protect their forces training areas and field operations from the Turks.
Instead we coddled this MB bastard and allowed him to strike cross-border against people who should be our allies.
All of Kurdistan, including the parts in Turkey and Iran, deserves liberation, and regardless of that, the Kurds deserve better support from the US. They also deserve better liberation organizations than the PKK: in Kirkuk and the Kurdish areas of Iraq there is solid secular leadership that is oriented toward Western values and they should be helped to organize civil resistance and movement for self-government inside Turkey and Iran. But Obama's inactions and the professional idiots at State are letting Erdogan push everything into those radicals of the PKK in order to coddle the Islamists in Turkey.
Trump can do better, and there are plenty of people and allies that can help. Oppose Salafists and Shias and pay attention (unlike Obama), and have the courage to support his "inconvenient" allies whom the Saudis and Wahabbis may not like (unlike Bush).
All Trump has to do is appoint the right people - and have them ask the right questions. The capabilities and possibilities are there, unused for nearly a decade. It would be nice to see someone actually pay attention to the end results, instead of looking for angles to exploit everything as a domestic political agenda opportunity
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[AlAhram] Turkish police on Monday detained a veteran Kurdish politician and a mayor in the southeastern province of Mardin, security sources said, the latest Kurds to be held as part of a wider crackdown on government opponents since a failed coup in July.