Turkey, Syria and the Kurds

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

The Turkish military offensive seems to have achieved its major aim - to force the Syrian forces away from the border area they had once controlled. But what does this mean for the future of the Kurds? Jeremy Bowen takes a long view.

In Vienna last Saturday the Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge made history by becoming the first man ever to run a marathon in under two hours. In doing so, he brought Kenyans together, says Anne Soy in Nairobi, and made the whole country proud.

It's now 30 years since the momentous events of 1989 that changed the politics and geography of Europe and led to the demise of the Soviet Union two years later. Steve Rosenberg visits a bookshop in the Latvian capital, Riga, for a lesson in Baltic history.

They make beautiful cowboy boots in the Texan city of Fort Worth. But you'd better be well-heeled if you fancy a pair. Elizabeth Hotson eyes up the merchandise but is too shy to try any on.

And in France they’ve recently launched a lottery to raise money to save the country’s vast architectural heritage. Hugh Schofield visits an old coaching inn where they have had a skeleton in the back yard, if not in the cupboard.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:04.7	Hello, today Kenya holds its breath for the marathon man,
0:09.7	an entire country on the edge of its seat as he breaks the two-hour barrier.
0:15.9	We're in a bookshop in Latvia where one particular volume attracts a lot of attention
0:21.3	from the rats. Well-heeled cowboys at a store in Texas, and we visit
0:27.6	an old coaching in south of Paris with a skeleton in the cupboard, well actually in the backyard. But first it's nearly two weeks
0:36.4	since Turkey launched an assault across its southern border into Syria to take
0:41.4	control of a strip of territory 20 miles deep that was previously occupied
0:46.8	by Syrian Kurdish forces. Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes
0:52.0	since the fighting began and more than 500
0:55.4	are reported to have been killed. But Jeremy Bowen in Istanbul says the Turkish
1:01.2	president is cheerful about how things are going.
1:05.0	I was early for the briefing with President Red Chip Taib Erdogan.
1:09.0	He presides over a divided country.
1:12.0	His supporters love him, The other half of Turkey does not.
1:16.4	But loud approval of the military operation against the Kurdish-led forces in Syria crosses
1:22.1	Turkey's fault lines.
1:24.2	The operation is popular because it's directed at Syrian Kurds who have close relations
1:29.2	with Kurdish rebels in Turkey.
1:31.6	The Erdogan consensus is that there're two sides of the same
1:35.0	organization, terrorists who are getting what they deserve. The briefing was
1:40.2	in an historic building from Ottoman times on the European side of the Bosphorus.
	...

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