Radio War Nerd EP #203 — End of Syria War, End of Rojava

Turkey is in NATO just as a means of holding territory. It is US property as long as it's in NATO. And if not, it's lost real estate

Much health to yo, your family, and your kids!

Great episode! You guys make art out of war and that's always given me hope. Seriously guys, you rock.

Hi Mark, a friend of mine swears that a chiropractor was able to help with their kids colic. If you google colic chiropractic you’ll find studies that say that “while their is no clinical evidence that physical manipulation effects the source of colics, which is unknown, parents who take their children to chiropractors note a reduction in frequency and severity”. In my experience as a premed student I’ve found docs are often reluctant to prescribe any form of treatment that doesn’t line up with their current biomedical understanding or fall within current biomedical treatment styles. Ie when they nearly killed off mid wife’s as profession back in the 90,s because it competes with OYBGN. Or earlier when they tried to get rid of chiros. It may also help to know you and your wife took him to get a treatment and not just a diagnosis. There are also DO’s which are physicians that can work in any specialty who are taught methods of physical non surgical manipulation which might also help if you don’t trust chiro’s That scream must be excruciating to hear as a parent. Hope your baby feels better soon!

I've definitely experienced Turkish nationalists on Twitter, though I don't tweet enough about Turkey to get on a blog (I hope). But they swarm. Fortunately, all their handles are obviously Turkish, so it's easy to know their perspective. I often just block as soon as it's obvious they're trolling. Unfortunately, I often can't figure out what they're trying to argue, so I've probably blocked people who were trying to argue in good faith. I made a comment that I don't trust the Turkish army or their proxies to distinguish between PKK and civilian and the person replied that Turks deal with Kurds more than anyone so are better than anyone at distinguishing and I'm racist for saying that PKK look like civilians. Or something like that. I couldn't figure it out. I'm sure all nationalists are bad on Twitter. The Chinese and Turkish are the ones that jump out to me.

Mark first few minutes were harrowing, was hoping we could move on from babies to something less traumatic like... Syria? Hope Gerry feels better soon.

Great episode. It's a difficult topic and I can always rely on RWN to bring the nuance all too often missing from online discourse. I'm not sure why, but the link to Narin Briar's site in the description links to a home improvement website. It's odd because the URL looks identical to the one I find on google, but the site is different.

Can I get your podcast directly to my podcast app? I use apple podcast.

I couple of years ago in college I was fortunate enough to be in a class on Syria that included a lecture by Mathew Barber, an American academic who studies the Yazidi and was in the region by coincidence when ISIS took Sinjar, and thus was able to interview fleeing refugees. His story was actually way worse that what you've heard about what the KRG and the Peshmerga, he described how the Peshmerga not only left the Yazidi after they begged for protection they shot into crowds of Yazidi villagers and killed several of them when they tried to take weapons to defend themselves from the stockpiles the Peshmerga had looted from Iraqi army storehouses after the Iraqi army fled. They've been carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing ever since, systematically attempting to prevent Yazidi refugees from returning to their homes and preventing them from bringing back things like farming equipment they need to restart their lives as part of a campaign to expand the territory of Iraqi Kurdistan. They've also repeatedly shelled the positions of the YBS, the PKK-backed Yazidi self defense force established after the PKK's rescue in 2014 and ruthlessly repress anyone trying to spread Democratic Confederalism. The whole thing is absolutely heartbreaking and the KRG is downright evil. Barber is kind of anti-PKK but he wrote a good article about the KRG and the Yazidi on Syria Comment https://www.joshualandis.com/blog/krgs-relationship-yazidi-minority-future-yazidis-shingal-sinjar/

I love your show, but I don't see how a self-identified Irish patriot can call himself "anti-(left) antiimperialist". Who are these "left" anti-imperialists, anyway? And is there a distinction between imperialism and colonialism? Don't the needs of the empire always trump those of the locals? I certainly can't figure it out. Like yourselves, I hope that the ideology of Rojava will survive and spread, but haven't you yourselves implied that an archipelago of bases is not really sustainable, not to say defensible? And it's not as if the people in charge or that we are sending out there are exactly a purpose-driven cadre of idealists. http://internationalrelations.org/colonialism-vs-imperialism/

Elijah Magnier is bloody fantastic. So knowledgeable, informative and eloquent. I wish you could have him on more often!

I'm usually not into esoterical stuff, but I heard that Cranio-sacral therapy can relieve the colics. Theory being that the cranial plates sometimes don't move smoothly into position, leading to tensions in the fontanelle. CST claims it can alleviate that and a friend told me it helped his kid. No guarantee though.

The war nerd travel book sounds awesome imo, I'd get one in a second

bien mal acquis ne profite jamais. it was all too predictable.

This episode is gonna be tough i think. Luckily I have plenty of booze, drugs and cigarettes. Fuck Turkey, fuck America, fuck Russia.