Dr Karaman Heddo breezed into the office in surgical kit, a plastic covering for his hair, a big grin on his bearded face.

“Ask me anything about Afrin – ask me anything political,” he said.

It was an odd meeting. Dr Heddo – trained as a doctor at the Aleppo medical school, he confided –  wouldn’t exactly confirm he was an official of the YPG, the local Kurdish “protection units”, although he certainly sounded like it. He insisted we were in a medical facility. It had marble floors. It was spotless. It was guarded by two armed men. But it seemed to have no patients. It certainly had no ambulances or worried families at the door or busy nurses.

Like the Kurdish Afrin enclave itself, it was neither one thing nor the other, a bit like a scene from Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. Dr Heddo himself, with a mischievous smile and remarkably good English (when he chose to use it), might have emerged from a Joseph Conrad novel, an ex-policeman, perhaps, with an interest in human folly.

READ MORE HERE:    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-front-line-robert-fisk-war-ypg-kurdish-syrian-army-russia-putin-a8191381.html