I thought Turkey considered the Kurd group, the PKK, to be terrorist (which they are) but ABC doesn’t mention them.
Gonna have to research the Syrian Democratic Forces. This is the first I heard Turkey said they were the terrorist.
The SDF is an umbrella name for a number of ethnic groups, not all of them Kurdish, but the largest group in the SDF the Kurdish YPG ... they are secular, as communists generally are, which makes them useful for fighting islamists [in the same way it was useful to pit Iranians against Baathists in Iraq to weaken each other] but as many are communists, one should not think they are good guys just because they kill bad guys. Those that are communists will be every bit as dangerous if they ever get power.
Signatory groups
The following groups signed the founding document:
People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG)
Women’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Jin, YPJ)
Al-Sanadid Forces
Syriac Military Council (Mawtbo Fulhoyo Suryoyo, MFS)
Liwa Thuwwar al-Raqqa
Euphrates Volcano
Army of Revolutionaries (Jaysh al-Thuwar, JAT)
99th Infantry Brigade
Brigade Groups of al-Jazira
On 10 December 2015, after a two-day conference, The Syrian Democratic Council was established as a political platform of the SDF. Human rights activist Haytham Manna was co-chairman at its founding.[95] The Assembly that established the Syrian Democratic Council was made up of 13 members from specific ethnic, economic and political backgrounds.
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According to U.S. Special Forces Commander General Raymond A. Thomas at the Aspen Security Forum in July 2017, the SDF is a PR-friendly name for the YPG, which Thomas personally suggested because the YPG is considered an arm of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. government.[8] [9] American Defense Secretary Ashton Carter confirmed “substantial ties” between the PYD/YPG and the PKK.[10] Testifying to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Congress, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, the top U.S. intelligence official, explicitly defined the YPG as the “PKK’s militia force in Syria”.[11] [12] Turkey has designated the YPG as a terrorist organization,[7] and in 2018 Turkey captured most of Afrin Canton from the YPG.
The YPG is communist- but they have forced other groups to join their forces and some may have joined not because they agree with the communists or because they aren’t religious but because it was the only way to procure a share of the military aid coming from other countries and to enjoy air support. I would not be surprised if the previous administration deliberately allowed the communist group to be the sole recipient of aid so it could then insure anticommunists or tribally organized groups could not assume leadership. Whatever the case, it was a unify or die situation... so there are some decent people caught up in it at least as long as they have a common enemy, but once ISIS is gone with no common enemy they will start to part ways :
While the YPG protected the Kurdish communities it was able to extract a price: it prevented the emergence of new, rival militias and forced existing ones to cooperate with or join the YPG forces on its terms.[22] This was how the Islamist attacks enabled the YPG to unite the Syrian Kurds under its banner[23] and caused[24] it to become the de facto army of the Syrian Kurds.