“At a cost of over 11,000 dead fighters and uncounted civilians, the predominantly Kurdish SDF defeated ISIS and prevented its re-emergence as a worldwide threat. Yet despite this incalculable service, the SDF and its homeland in northeast Syria came under assault by former ISIS fighters, effectively abandoned by its US ally . “A decade after partnering with the US and following the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the Kurdish sacrifices in hopes of regional self-determination feel painfully distant.”
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51