As the people filling the large hall of the European Parliament building for a conference on the Middle East listened to responses by the panel featuring British writers Jonathan Steele and Carne Ross, I thought about what their co-panelist, Salih Muslim, the leader of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), would say.
It had been only a few weeks before that I had met Muslim, whose party administers swaths of territory in northern Syria and two Kurdish-inhabited neighborhoods in Aleppo, Sheikh Maksoud and Ashrafieh. Since our meeting, there had been two significant developments involving him and actors involved in the Syrian conflict: Turkish authorities had issued an arrest warrant for Muslim, and Syrian regime forces had defeated Turkish-backed opposition groups in eastern Aleppo.
