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Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu blamed a Syrian Kurdish militia fighter working with Kurdish militants inside Turkey for a suicide car bombing that killed 28 people in the capital Ankara, and he vowed retaliation in both Syria and Iraq.

A car laden with explosives detonated next to military buses as they waited at traffic lights near Turkey's armed forces' headquarters, parliament and government buildings in the administrative heart of Ankara late on Wednesday.

Davutoglu said the attack was clear evidence that the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia that has been supported by the United States in the fight against Islamic State in northern Syria, was a terrorist organization and that Turkey, a NATO member, expected cooperation from its allies in combating the group.

The letter damningly confirms many of the traits that the president’s critics have long assumed: It shows Trump to be uninformed, narcissistic and naive. It shows him as obsessed with process and uninterested in substance, craving the applause of a multitude whose identities he does not know.

It is the sort of note one could imagine coming from a clique leader in a movie about high-school angst, such as “Mean Girls” or “Heathers,” not a man who has access to the nuclear button.

Political leaders always have some aim in mind beyond the deal itself. For some, it is keeping or extending power. For others, it is the accomplishment of some task consistent with a set of articulated principles. But for all, any deal must be seen as consistent with those larger aims. Trump’s letter ignores this basic political instinct.

Turkey has now established a de facto buffer zone inside of Syria without having to cross the border or fire a single shot. By changing its rules of engagement with Syria and announcing that it will consider all Syrian military forces approaching the border to be a threat, and then deploying its own tanks and artillery to the border, Turkey has accomplished its goal of a few months ago. Syria is going to be far more cautious going forward about what goes on near the Turkish border, and Turkey now gets its buffer zone and possibly a temporary solution to its refugee problem. This will also help stop PKK fighters from crossing over into Turkey as there is a much larger military presence than there was previously.

Erdoğan today revealed that Turkish airspace was violated 114 times this year with every violation resolved without incident, and that Syrian helicopters crossed into Turkish airspace 5 times and each time were warned to turn around without being fired upon

By doing a masterful job of highlighting Syria’s reckless overreaction against another state and by painstakingly marshaling the resources to tighten the noose around Damascus, Erdoğan is making the possibility of Assad eventually being forced from power more likely.

Turkey's Erdogan denounces US support for Syrian Kurds

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has lashed out at the US over its support for Syria's main Kurdish group.

sea of blood", he said.

. Something about the Trump style appeals to an Israeli sense of machismo, an appreciation for direct, gut-level expressions of toughness, such a contrast from the more analytical Obama.

The problem for Israel today, though, goes beyond the surprise. If Obama was too cautious for many Israelis, Trump has now shown them how his approach to foreign policy—impulsive, isolationist, transactional, turning on a dime with no alternative in place—can work against their interests. And Netanyahu—who praised Trump in almost messianic terms and who knows how poorly he responds to criticism—now has few tools at his disposal to object to this policy. Israelis can only shake their heads at the absence of any strategy as they survey the regional fallout.

The first victims of Erdogan’s empowerment, of course, will not be Israelis. They will be Kurds. Kurdish fighters—who make up the Syrian Democratic Forces (including, it must be acknowledged, some affiliated with the anti-Turkish terrorist group the PKK)—have led the battle on the ground against ISIS, liberating city after city in northeastern Syria. With no U.S. troops to coordinate with and protect them, they will be left to Erdogan’s tender mercies.

Four years ago, she joined the war against Islamic State—part of a Kurdish militia allied with the U.S. She has been wounded twice and has shrapnel lodged in her head. During the battle for Raqqa last year, she braved land mines near the front lines. Now, Ms. Ali is done fighting. “I’m tired,” she says, curled up on a sofa in her parents’ home in northeastern Syria, intently chipping away at her pink fingernail polish.

Ms. Ali’s mother, Ahin Ali, winces at the details. “It hurts a lot, that she witnessed all this pain,” she said. But even as she mourns the cost to her daughter, she doesn’t regret the sacrifice she made in allowing her to figh

Amid the chaos of the war, the Kurds have been fighting for self-rule in Syria. But their aspirations are increasingly under threat. Turkey is determined to reverse Kurdish gains and the U.S., which armed the Kurds’ YPG militia for years so it could fight Islamic State, hasn’t come to the group’s defense.

After 13 Turkish hostages were found dead in Northern Iraq on Feb. 14, Turkey arrested hundreds of people, including prominent members of the pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP). The government even opened investigations into HDP members of parliament and human rights activists Hüda Kaya and Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, who had actively fought alongside the victims' families to bring the hostages home safely.

According to the Turkish Association of Journalists' Annual Media Monitoring Report, one in six journalists are currently on trial in Turkey. Since 2016, at least 160 media outlets have been closed. The Turkey representative of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Erol Önderoğlu, responsible for monitoring and advocating for press freedom in the country, is currently on trial and facing up to 14 years in prison on charges of "propagandizing for a terrorist organization," "openly inciting to commit crimes" and "praising the crime and the criminal."

His organization says Önderoğlu and his co-defendants face these "spurious charges" solely for guest editing a newspaper that was forced to close after the attempted coup. Can Dündar, another prominent veteran journalist and editor of a paper that has seen nearly half of its staff imprisoned, was sentenced in December to more than 27 years in prison on terrorism charges. In November, an appeals court upheld a life sentence against Hidayet Karaca, a journalist and president of a now-closed TV broadcasting group. On Feb. 15, three former staffers of a shuttered newspaper, along with co-chief editor and human rights lawyer Eren Keskin, were sentenced to a combined 20 years and 10 months in prison on terrorism charges.

Not the people who, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Death to Jews,” according to a witness, assaulted Jewish diners at a Los Angeles sushi restaurant. Not the people who threw fireworks in New York’s diamond district. Not the people who brutally beat up a man wearing a yarmulke in Times Square. Not the people who drove through London slurring Jews and yelling, “Rape their daughters.” Not the people who gathered outside a synagogue in Germany shouting slurs. Not the people who, at a protest in Brussels, chanted, “Jews, remember Khaybar. The army of Muhammad is returning.”

Apparently, these hashtags count as legitimate political speech at Twitter, a company whose objections to bigotry are otherwise so strong that it once banned a Canadian feminist for the sin of tweeting remarks about transgender women like “men aren’t women.”

It’s a curious silence. In the land of inclusiveness, Jews are denied inclusion.

The Syrian Kurds, however, were both disciplined and pragmatic. But they could not be harnessed as a purely Kurdish force, plowing into Sunni Arab areas held by ISIS. So a fig leaf was created -- a new name for the Syrian Kurdish fighting units, normally called the Kurdish People's Protection Units, or YPG.

Reflecting how little the Trump administration cared for the details as it rushed to clean up its self-inflicted mess, Vice President Mike Pence mistakenly referred to the SDF as the "Syrian Defence Forces" several times as he announced a ceasefire that further betrayed them. And, earlier, President Donald Trump blurted out the poorly-kept secret that the PKK were in their ranksAmerica's imperfect pact with the Kurds was always going to fall apart one day. But nobody could have imagined the SDF's 10,000-plus dead sons and daughters would have been betrayed by overwhelming ignorance, fealty to Turkish and Russian interests, and the toxic aversion to details that the Trump administration displayed.

Moscow is unlikely to be too fussed. Their key goal is becoming the new power in the region, and this settlement, almost directly replacing US forces with their own police and political clout, does that.