People's Defense Units

Well, you know, it's interesting because it was surprising to many people that the new government was even able to establish nominal sovereignty over the entirety of Syrian territory when the previous government fell.

And obviously there was a big, the major issue I think was with the Kurdish groups, the YPG and SDF in northern Syria.

We helped with that though.

Exactly, helped broker the talk between them and reintegration.

So there are a lot of people they can call upon and friends they can call upon, or if not friends, certainly pragmatic partners they can call upon to shore themselves up.

At the same time, it's also a really difficult country to govern.

If you leave Amman, you go to some of the smaller towns, you know the level of sovereignty that the jordanian government exercised over some of these towns sometimes questionable there's a lot of discontent and anger economic deprivation extremism ecological pressures you know arid climate lack of water things like that uh so i think these are all real pressures and it's also a lot of poverty in jordan too so you know i don't know it's people can always uh there's always reason to be concerned about this i would i would think that there's a major stressor right now would be the downstream implications of the iran war and also the conduct of the israeli government because jordan obviously has a good relationship with israel in the way But the more extreme the Israeli government gets and the more it does things which makes people in Jordan upset, the more it creates a space between the Jordanian rulers and the people, which could be exploited by extremists or opportunists or opposition groups in general who may want to change the monarchy for many different reasons.

And what about Israel, this election? What's happening in Israel right now politically? Has Netanyahu secured his future? Is this temporary? What's happening? Because I think a lot of Americans, they don't understand the different iterations of Israeli democracy.

We've talked about Rojava and Turkey and things like that.

I don't have the time to... go over the entire geopolitical situation there again, but, um, essentially the Kurds complex ethnic group that have formed sort of an anarchist, like autonomous militia called the PKK, the YPG and the YPJ and, um, fought against ISIS, but also fought in multi fronted sort of situations in Syria and Turkey and sometimes fight along the United States.

And, uh, the Kurds have historically fought along the United States and fought against certain factions in situations like Syria, where there's just no good guy.

There's no winner for, out of survival in a lot of ways.

And Bashar al-Assad, I mean, in the last few years of Bashar al-Assad, he never publicly threatened the Kurdish autonomy, right? Even during the civil war, there was some kind of an understanding between the Kurds and Assad.

And the Americans supported the Kurds because the Americans created the State of City and Democratic Forces in which the YPG, which is the Kurdish militia, which was a prominent factor, and they played a major role in the fight against the Islamic State.

But Bashar al-Assad is gone.

And now Alshara is in power.

And Iraqi Kurdistan have accepted and then they have been living with the idea of autonomy, not with sovereignty.

And then you go to Turkey, which was the hotbed of the Kurdish militancy, where Abdullah Ocalan, who's the leader, who's been in prison for almost 20 years, I think, Abdullah Ocalan himself is talking about a confederation of peaceful Kurdish regions, not about Kurdistan and independence over in Kurdistan.

In Syria, the YPG or their political party, the Syrian Democratic, the Kurdish Democratic Party, They are talking about, again, they are talking about protecting their autonomy, not about turning Syria and Kurdistan into an independent country.

So the Kurds themselves have accepted the hard reality of nation states.

Yeah.

Uh, like YPG and PKK only got them like towards the end of their fighting.

They both are semi, in semi-retirement at the moment.

Um, but yeah, like it does- it's not hard to get an FP3 drone, and you know, getting like a mo- a mortar round or getting a grenade round is a bit harder, but it's not that hard.

In 2014, the Islamic State launched a massive, heavily armored offensive against the city of Kobani in northern Syria.

And the YPG and the all female YPJ were defending the city.

The operational pressure was just absolute.

They were catastrophically outgunned under siege and facing an adversary known for extreme brutality, particularly toward women.