Merkel’s Open Door to Germany Encourages Ethnic Cleansing in Syria
16th February 2016
Something that hasn’t been widely recognized is how Germany’s willingness to accept vast numbers of military age youths from Syria is facilitating the various leaderships in Syria to push toward their maximalist ethnic-cleansing goals.
Syria’s long-term problem is that it is highly diverse, with different groups that hate each other (often for good reasons).
Fighting in such situations can go on for a long time, but usually military ambitions run into diminishing returns: e.g., If our tribal enemies hold three watersheds, we can push them out of their most peripheral one fairly easily, their next-most marginal one with more difficulty, but they’ll die in the last ditch to defend their ultimate redoubt because they have nowhere else to go. And that’s a discouraging prospect for militaries on the offensive.