Turkish military and allied Syrian rebels seize Afrin after offensive

The Syrian Kurd dream of creating an autonomous state stretching across the country’s north suffered a crushing blow Sunday when Turkey-backed rebel forces routed a militia from the city of Afrin after a nearly two-month offensive.

The enclave along the Syria-turkey border had been controlled by the People’s Protection Units, a U.s.backed Kurdish militia also known as YPG whose forces Turkey considers terrorists.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyep Erdogan, said in a televised address that the Turkish military and Syrian allies had taken control of the town’s center Sunday morning.

Erdogan said Turkey would take “the necessary steps to rebuild Afrin” and “wipe out traces of terrorists.”

The U.S. has provided air and arms support, funds and training to the YPG in a bid to make it the core of an Arabkurdish force against Islamic State extremists, even as it has worked to establish local governance councils and internal security cadres in their areas.

Those moves have infuriated Turkey, which views the YPG as little more than an extension of its nemesis the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a separatist faction in southeastern Turkey that has fought a decades-long guerrilla war against the government.

“We are not there to occupy but to wipe out terror groups and to achieve peace in Afrin,” Erdogan said during his speech. crippling traffic and creating massive headaches for commuters.

The drivers say they have no other choice: They’re simply not making enough money to survive. Many can’t even afford to make car payments.

“Drivers are in huge debt,” said Sanjay Naik, president of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena political party’s transportation union, which organized the strike.

It wasn’t always this way. When ride-sharing companies such as Uber first entered the Indian market in 2013, they offered great pay. Drivers told the Times of India that they’d been promised monthly incomes of about $1,500. (Per capita income in the country hovered around $1,600 a year in 2016, according to the World Bank.)

It was so appealing that some salaried workers quit their jobs to drive. Farmers sold their land and bought cars instead, often on credit.

But the promised rewards never materialized. The huge influx of willing drivers meant ride-sharing companies didn’t have to compete so hard to woo drivers. At the beginning, drivers said companies took a 10 percent commission from every ride. Now, drivers say, they’re forced to give back up to 30 percent.