Mini-Cast #9 - A Brief History of the Kurds - Beginning

It's much too soon to know anything definitive about the atrocities transpiring between Turkey and the Kurds, except that it's most definitely an atrocity, and one perpetrated by Trump's withdrawal of all forces from Northern Syria, and all it took for unfathomable atrocities to happen is a day or two!

There are all kinds of rabbit holes I could jump us down into, dear listener, rabbit holes about the unfortunate and continued necessity of American military involvement in a number of overseas conflicts, about mismanagement of the Northern Middle East from both Republican and Democratic administrations: both the horrific fallout from Operation Desert Storm and the almost direct responsibility of George H. W. Bush  for one of the worst genocides in recent decades when he invited the Kurdish people to rise up against Saddam Hussein yet looked on from the sidelines while Saddam butchered anywhere from 90,000-230,000 Kurds without moving so much a finger in support of this ethnicity so key to the success of Operation Desert Storm; or about how George W. Bush's Iraqi invasion now obscures the historical fact that Saddam Hussein was one of the bloodiest despots of modern times. or about how Obama may or may not have ruined the only opportunity we'll ever get to rid Turkey and the world of the perhaps now genocide-stained President Erdogan when Obama publicly opposed the Turkish military's coup d'etat in July, 2016, or about how Obama not only ruined the last chance for the Arab Spring to take hold permanently by not taking Syrian rebels seriously, or that by doing so he may have taken the Syrian refugee crisis from a likelihood to an eventuality, or that he almost certainly emboldened Vladimir Putin to make a successful gamble that Obama would similarly not interfere directly if Russia meddled in American affairs as it meddled in Syria.

We're not jumping down any of those rabbitholes today. Today, we should only talk about who's dying right now, and give some history to the almost faceless people that we read are dying in today's news. Here, with grotesquely truncated brevity, is a history of the Kurds: