Cheap lives and shifting alliances – Aleks Farrugia

Just a year ago, the British newspaper The Guardian published an interview with Zeynab Serekaniye, a Kurdish woman who joined the militia to fight the Islamic Caliphate, or IS as it is better known.

The then 26-year-old was hailed, alongside the other Kurdish women fighting IS, as a hero whose relentless resistance to the Caliphate helped to keep this fundamentalist organisation in check.

Less than a year after this interview, Serekaniye and her fellow fighters were sold off to Turkey, their historical enemy, by the Western Alliance that had so much feted them. Such a treacherous move was the price paid to buy Turkey’s assent for Sweden and Finland to join NATO.

Not only were the Kurds thrown to the dogs by an agreement signed behind their backs but the United States even committed itself to equip the Turkish air force with more warplanes, without imposing any restriction on their use, particularly on the Kurdish population. Turkey’s assent to Sweden and Finland joining NATO was definitely a victory for the ideology of liberal democracy. It also marked the bankruptcy of its morality.

As we are writing, the Turkish government – certainly not a beacon of democracy or the upholding...