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At times of hardship and difficulty, the mountains are your best friend, or your refuge, but also, you know, the other sort of bitter side of this story is that the Kurds have been really, you know, betrayed by both the international powers and also the regional powers.

I usually like to refer to the situation or the circumstances of the Kurds as some sort of a double

colonial bind. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines.

Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to war college. I'm Matthew Gault. And I'm Derek Cannon. The Kurds are a people without a country.

They occupy large swaths of lands in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran, but have no central government.

Kurdish fighters have been constant allies in America's fight against ISIS

and Peshmerga troops fighting on behalf of the semi-autonomous Kurdish

regional government in Iraq fought against the militants after they stormed

Mosul. Without the help of Kurdish forces said

Mosul, Raka, and across the Levant, America couldn't have defeated ISIS so

handedly. In December, after a conversation with Turkey's president, President Donald Trump announced

U.S. troops will be leaving Syria on grounds that ISIS was defeated.

Then things got complicated. It's unclear if the withdrawal will actually take place.

Turkey thinks the Kurds are terrorists and the Kurds are caught between

regional powers and one of the most complicated conflicts in the world.

Here to help us sort this out and get the Kurdish perspective is Mohammed

Sali. Mohammed spent years working as a journalist for international media in

Kurdistan. He's currently a doctoral student at University of Pennsylvania's

...