- The Western media have ignored the fate of the Kurds, the people who defeated ISIS for us.
- UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson tweeted, "Turkey is right to want to keep its borders secure". The West gave the Turks a green light to massacre the Kurds.
- The Kurds today, like the Czechs in 1938, were sacrificed in vain. The West has betrayed the Kurds three times in the last three years. They were our ideal allies. They opened their cities, such as Erbil, to tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians expelled by ISIS from Mosul. Iraqi Kurdistan is today the only place in the Middle East, along with the State of Israel, that harbors and protects all religions and minorities.
- A new "Munich Syndrome" is now looming over the West. The Kurds, if they did not deserve a state, were at least worthy of our protection, especially after helping us to stop those who slit our throats on the boulevards of Paris.
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Pictured: Women fighters of the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) near the town of Kobane, Syria, on June 20, 2015. (Photo by Ahmet Sik/Getty Images)
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"the Turkish attack on Afrin was entirely unprovoked. In fact, Afrin was so peaceful for most of the Syrian war that it became a safe haven for tens of thousands of refugees — some of whom are now refugees for a second time. In the cantons they controlled, the Kurdish-led forces had established an oasis, unique in Syria, of local self-government, women's rights, and secular rule".
"Two days before ceding the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany in Munich in September 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain dismissed the issue as 'a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing'. Pretty much the same can be said of the attitude of the West towards Turkey's attack on the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in northwestern Syria".
"The tragedy that the Kurds are experiencing is the sign of an unprecedented weakening of the West. Is it the equivalent of the battle of Adrianople, which precedes the fall of Rome? I hope not. But the resignation has been such a great disgrace... one of those seemingly aberrant micro-events that signal a change in the world. This is not the first time that the West has disappointed its allies or sister nations. It was the case during the rise of Nazism. Then, with the abandonment of half of Europe to communism".
"Abandoning them would be an unforgivable moral error. The Kurds of Syria defeated the Islamists who have caused the worst attacks in our history. The Turkish-Islamist atrocities in Afrin do not promise anything good. When young Kurdish fighters with admirable courage are captured by the jihadists, they are tortured, gutted and cut into pieces. This barbarism is unsustainable. The Kurds are also our only allies in the region and have demonstrated their effectiveness in the field. If we abandon them, there will be no one to help us contain new terrorist explosions against us. Finally, the Kurds of Syria are building a democratic society that respects ethnic and confessional pluralism and equality between men and women. This will have a profound influence in a region torn apart by tyranny".A new "Munich Syndrome" is now looming over the West. The Kurds, if they did not deserve a state, were at least worthy of our protection, especially after helping us to stop those who slit our throats on the boulevards of Paris.
Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.