Kurdish forces, facing a well-armed and aggressive Turkey, appear to have turned to the Syrian government — meaning its sponsors in Iran and Russia — for rescue. It makes sense in historical terms, although it is likely to be bloody in current ones. Historical, in this case, means before the U.S. military presence in the northern part of the country.
The Syrian government is a minority Alawite (heterodox Shiite) one that had maintained control by allying with other minority groups in the country — such as Kurds and Christians — and with the Shiite rulers of Iran in order to keep a boot on the neck of the majority Sunni population. The war criminal Bashar al-Assad was simply following in his war criminal father’s footsteps — in 1982, Hafez al-Assad massacred tens of thousands of Sunnis in the town of Hama, ensuring general quiet until 2011. Young Bashar, being a less efficient criminal, has killed more than half a million people (the U.N. stopped counting in 2016) and creating what the U.N. estimated in 2018 to be more than 13 million displaced people — more than six million internally plus more than three million in Turkey and one million more in Lebanon.
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