Tensions are rising on the northern Iraqi-Syrian border between Kurdish factions belonging to the YPG/PKK and the Peshmergas of the Kurdish Democratic Party (though split itself, the main party in the Kurdish Regional Government which also has strong ties with Ankara. It's only skirmishes that have broken out at the moment between the two well-armed forces but Turkish air-strikes continue on the former. This is part of fratricidal history of Kurdish infighting under the aegis of wider imperialist powers which continues to spiral downwards from one generation to the next in the same bloody cycle of cannon-fodder. It is ridiculous to imagine that forces worthy of proletarian support or "revolutionary" forces could ever emerge from such imperialist confrontations.

The tensions are a further example of the centrifugal tendencies from the war in Syria spilling over into larger areas - into an already destabilised Iraq in this case, with the predictable results of more instability and devastation to come. Just in the small region around the recent Kurdish faction-fighting over 400 towns and villages have been emptied and thousands of civilians uprooted, displaced, wounded and killed.

This at a time when the war in the Middle East itself is spilling over into the Horn of Africa with some venom and a great deal of assistance from Turkish, Saudi, Israeli forces and those of the UAE, Iran and Syria with any number of different "considerations" coming into play. No doubt China and Russia are implicated and though the UK has sent troops to some "hot-spots", just like Syria and Iraq, the forces of the west, the US included, have mostly been sidelined. There seems little chance at the moment of this intensification of fighting coming under any sort of control with all the consequences of that.