The Syrian war, which has dragged on for eight years, causing two million casualties and many more refugees, was not fought to determine the plight of the Kurds living in Syria. Many more complicated issues were involved and various other interested parties collided in the process.
As the war winds down and the Syrian government brings much of its territory back under its control, the parties who had a stake in the conflict are about to collect their booties, before allowing the Syrian government and people to begin the recovery efforts.
As an outcome of the war and the ensuing diplomatic negotiations, the Kurdish issue has emerged and became an intractable problem getting in the way of a final settlement.
At the beginning of the war, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Turkey cooperated in infiltrating Syria with mercenaries and supplying them with arms, the goal being to topple the last secular regime in the Arab world.
As Iranians showed up on the scene, that changed the paradigm and rendered the crusade into a cause célèbre, as if a Sunni coalition was fighting Shiite expansionism in the region. This concept best suited US policy planners, since the attention of the Arab masses was diverted away from Israel and a bogeyman was discovered to justify the conflict.
On the one hand, advances by the Assad regime on the ground, with the help of Russians and Iranians, and on the other hand the splinter of the Sunni coalition with the fallout between the Saudis and the Qataris, altered the entire scenario.
