The Syrian entanglement of Turkey, Russia and the Kurds
The Syrian crisis remains a kind of bleeding wound in the Middle East. Syria, which was artificially created by the French after the First World War on parts of the Ottoman Empire, today has split into three hostile enclaves: Arab-Sunni, Arab-Alawite and Kurdish. Bashar al-Assad, with the military support of Iran and the Russian Federation, controls two-thirds of the country's territory, where only a third of its pre-war population lives. Most Syrians were not with Assad. About eight million live in neighboring countries in refugee camps, four to five million in territories occupied by Turkey and four million in the northeast of the country, in the Kurdish region of Rojava and the Euphrates basin.