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How the Lights Have Gone Out For the People of Syria (bbc.co.uk)
dryriver shares an excerpt from a report via the BBC that shows what the impact of the Syrian war looks like from space: Six years of war in Syria have had a devastating effect on millions of its people. One of the most catastrophic impacts has been on the country's electricity network. Images from NASA, obtained by BBC Arabic, show clearly how the lights have gone out during the course of the conflict, leaving people to survive with little to no power. Each timelapse frame shows an average of the light emitted at night every month from 2012, one year after the war began. They show that the areas where Syrians can turn lights on at night, power their daily lives and get access to life-saving medical equipment, have shrunk dramatically. The city of Aleppo was Syria's powerhouse and home to over two million people. But the country's industrial hub became a battleground and remained so for more than four years. Russian airstrikes against Syrian rebels began in October 2015 and the timelapse shows the city in almost complete darkness at night throughout 2016, when the battle for Aleppo was at its peak. As mains power supplies dropped off, ordinary people had to be creative in finding alternative sources for light and power.
Reliable electricity may not be absolutely essential, but it does make it a heck of a lot easier to put edible food on the table.
Think refrigeration. Cooking. Boiling water. If you can't do these things, then the "put food on the table" task becomes fully an order of magnitude harder. (Where "hardness" is defined as a measure of how much time you have to put into it.)
Why does Turkey seem to have such an active, long-standing dislike for the Kurds?
The Kurds were the one "other" that they couldn't get rid of, as they did the Armenians and Anatolian Greeks.
Too many to ignore, too similar to drive out, it's like the damn Irish.
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert. This is a layman's understanding of the situation
The short version: Another example of ethnic tensions in west Asia. Segments of the Kurdish population consider Turkey an occupying power. Segments of the Turkish population view Kurds as terrorists. Both feel justified in inflicting pain on the other.
A slightly longer version: The Kurds haven't done well in the grand game of empires. To my knowledge, while the Kurds have traditional homelands, known as Kurdistan,, they've never been their own nation. Kurdistan encompasses portions of northern Syria, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and, you guessed it, southeastern Turkey. Kurds haven't been particularly well treated by any of the aforementioned nations (Saddam Hussein infamously used chemical weapons on the Kurds during the Gulf War) but Turkey generally deals with Kurdish uprisings more harshly.
Kurds have been rebelling against the Turkish government since around 1920. As I understand it, they placed a lot of hope in the Wilsonian ideal of ethnic self-determination, but the Turkish government had other ideas in the wake of WWI. The Turkish government routinely cracks down on the Kurds, going so far as to ban the use of the Kurdish language. In response, there have been a handful of Kurdish uprisings or sustain terrorist campaigns by Kurdish nationalists against the Turkish government. In response, the Turkish government routinely cracks down on the Kurds. And so the cycle goes.
For their part, nationalist Turks don't recognize Kurds as a separate ethnic group. They refer to Kurds as "mountain Turks", considering a subset of the Turkish ethnicity who somehow lost the Turkish language. The Turkish government is adamant about maintaining territorial integrity and views any sort of Kurdish political autonomy as a threat to the sovereignty of the Turkish government.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
WWI started because Austro-Hungary, being backed by an alliance with Germany, imposed conditions on Serbia regarding the assassination investigation that pretty much made it a suzerain state, so they refused (btw, these were no mere diplomatic faux pas - the conditions were made excessively onerous so that they would be rejected, in order to have a casus belli). That led to both Austro-Hungary and Germany declaring war on Serbia. Since Serbia was backed by Russia, Russia declared war on the Central Powers, and so did France and the UK (because of a web of treaties).
Germany, by the way, had to pull Austro-Hungary out of the fire several times (foreshadowing what would happen in WWII with their allies) because the Austro-Hungarian army was a logistical nightmare with split loyalties.
Had the Austro-Hungarian Empire not been backed by Germany (like so many chihuahuas that are backed by the US these days and so bark and bite thinking that there will be no consequences), Gavrilo Princip and the rest of the Black Hand would have ended in the clink and that would have been it.
So no, the war did not start because of an assassination - it started because of a tangled web of alliances and because the chihuahua's master had ulterior motives and backed its antics.