Amateur hour in the Middle East

The Syrian war is in its seventh year now, but the commitment of Turkish and American troops to the conflict raises the odds that it might make it to a decade. And down on the ground there is an orgy of betrayals as the local players lose old foreign patrons and find new ones.

Gwynne Dyer writes that while the United States doesn’t want Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, pictured, to emerge victorious in the country's brutal civil war, beyond that, they 'don’t know what they want.'Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

February 20, 2018

On Sunday it was revealed that the Syrian army has made a deal to help the Syrian Kurds (who are technically rebels) fight off the Turkish invasion of Afrin, a chunk of Syrian territory on the north-western border with Turkey that has been held by the Kurds since 2012, And the Russians are allegedl...

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