This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 16th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Turks and Kurds were not always enemies, and the Kurds, a common term used as the US military departs northern

Syria are not a mere monolithic group of people. Cato's Mustafa

Akyol comments. How long has anti-U.S. sentiment this sort of conspiratorial thinking within

Turkey with regard to the United States? How long has that been going on and what do you

think caused it?

It certainly has roots in the earlier decades,

but it was among the Marxist left or the Islamists. It just became more mainstream in the past several years

since 2015 I should say and because the United States allied with the Kurdish militia in Syria against ISIS.

And it was a decision which has its own reasons ISIS is obviously the greatest threat to anybody in the world and these people were fighting ISIS.

But from the Turkish point of view, these were the extensions of the PKK which is Turkey's own Kurdish

Separatist Problem and Terrorist group since 1984.

So since then Turkey has been boiling with this conspiracy theory that America has now become the supporter of the PKK. PKK is going to divide us,

American imperialism and all that, without understanding why this decision was exactly made, people just build conspiracy theories on top of that.

And it brought us, I think, to this point.

So when did Turks and Kurds get along? The Kurds and Turks got along

during the Ottoman Empire, which was not a nationalist country. The Ottoman Empire, like the Habsburg's empire, like many

multi-ethnic, multi-religious empires, it was a mosaic. So you could be an

Ottoman curd and Ottoman Turk or Arab or Jew or Greek or Armenian.

But the empire collapsed because of nationalism.

There were nationalists revuls and the Turks got more nationalists and that led to a lot of tragedies, including the deportation and killing of almost a million

...