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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.
I think that an independent Kurdistan would make a great western ally in the Middle East as they tend to be far more progressive, probably because many of them put more stock in their Kurdish heritage than their religion, and as ethnic group they're quite diverse religiously. However, I don't think Kurdistan would happen because Turkey would be heavily opposed since it would mean massive instability for a large part of their country and probably an eventual war.
We'd pretty much have to kick them out of Nato and give Russia carte blanche to fight Turkey, which Russia would probably do in order to secure control of the Bosphorus if they knew that the west wouldn't get involved. After the shit Erdogan has pulled, I wouldn't even feel bad about throwing them under the bus like that, and it would probably be better for the country in the long term to have him deposed and the country broken up.