A2.1. The Story of a Kurdish General

• The Trump administration has ordered a full evacuation of the 1,000 American troops that still remain in northern Syria as Turkey intensifies its bombardment of the Kurdish forces there.
• The Kurdish forces came to be seen as allies to the U.S. and terrorists to Turkey after the U.S. helped them to overthrow the Syrian government in 2013.
• Mazlum Kobani is the most powerful person in the northeastern corner of Syria and is the head of the Syrian Democratic Forces, an umbrella group of militias that the U.S. is partnered with.
• Trump wants to leave the troops in Syria, but Turkish officials are demanding that they be pulled out immediately.
• Ben Hubbard, a Middle East correspondent for The New York Times, is in northern Iraq waiting for permission to cross the border into Syria to cover the Turkish military incursion.
• Hubbard has been to Syria seven times since the start of the civil war and has met Mazlum Kobani on four of those occasions.
• The Kurds are one of the largest ethnic groups in the world that does not have its own nation.
• The Kurds were promised their own state by Western powers after World War I, but they never got it.
• In Turkey, there was a very strong effort by the state to try to quash Kurdish identity.
• There were a number of Kurdish activists who got together and founded something called the Kurdistan Workers' Party (P.K.K.), which became a military organization.
• They were basically an underground guerrilla organization that went to war with the Turkish state.
• In 2014, the Kurdish militants found themselves in a difficult situation: ISIS was expanding, and they wanted to fight against the Islamic State, but they didn't want to put people on the ground.
• So they turned to the United States, who started launching airstrikes against ISIS with them.

The text discusses the history of Kurdish militants in Turkey and their relationship with the United States. The P.K.K. is a militant Kurdish organization that has been fighting the Turkish government for years. In 2014, the situation for the Kurds became very dire: ISIS was expanding, and the Turkish government was not doing enough to stop them. Seeing this as an opportunity, the U.S. began to work with the P.K.K. to fight ISIS.

• The U.S. partnered with the Kurdish fighters in order to contain ISIS.
• This partnership was born out of necessity due to the Iraq War and the reluctance of the U.S. to send American troops onto the ground.
• The relationship between the U.S. and the Kurdish fighters was a key factor in their success against ISIS.

This quiz consists of five questions about the history of the Kurds. The first two questions are about the Kurdish people and their history. The next three questions are about the Kurdish conflict with the Turkish government. The final two questions are about the U.S. and their relationship with the Kurds.