There's nothing on Earth as messy as the Syrian mess

One needs to have a head for numbers to be able to count accurately the number of  political parties and the number of  terrorists groups major,  the number of terrorists group minor, the number of ethnic groups, the number of the ethnic groups' political parties, the number of ethnic groups political parties pro-Assad, the number of ethnic groups' political parties anti-Assad, the number of goats pro-Assad, the number of goats anti-Assad,  the number of dogs pro-Assad, the number of dogs anti-Assad .... yeah you're getting it.

And, into this most terrible mess of messes the arrogant  USA actually thinks they can wade into and ... presto ...everything will come up smelling roses?  

Cale Salih writing at WorldCrunch:
Syrian Kurds And The Divisions That Plague Damascus' Enemies   The mainstream Syrian political opposition failed for nearly two years to draw in the Kurdish National Council (KNC), a muddled coalition of 16 Syrian Kurdish political parties. In what was hailed as a breakthrough, the KNC finally decided to join the Syrian National Coalition (NC) last month.

Yet the decision will have little practical impact on Arab-Kurdish relations in Syria. Its impact will primarily play out abroad, giving both the KNC and the NC a boost in international credibility, rather than inside Syria. The NC was eager for the Kurdish bloc to join its ranks in order to address a common criticism that it has not sufficiently reached out to minorities. The KNC, desperately looking for a way to stay relevant as a rival Kurdish party establishes dominance inside Syria, hopes to use the NC as a platform to boost its international credentials....

Guillaume Perrier at WorldCrunch:
....Instantly, spoons stop stirring in teacups and conversations freeze mid-sentence. A mortar has just been heard a few hundred meters from the main street of Ceylanpinar, a small Turkish town on the border with Syria. Through the window, everybody can see a cloud of black smoke rising up from Ras al-Ayn, the Syrian town that lies just across the nearby railway tracks.
"It's become too dangerous. Sometimes, bullets and mortars are hitting our houses. The al-Nusra fighters fire blindly," scowled Kurdish farmer Mehmet Demir.

He was speaking about the al Nusra Front, a Syrian Islamist rebel group with ties to al Qaeda that is fighting the Damascus regime. And here, we find out, al-Nusra is also coming up against another armed group: the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the rebel group that has fought its own decades-long battle with Ankara, until a negotiated ceasefire was signed earlier this year. 
Some 70% of Ceylanpinar's inhabitants are Kurdish, the other 30% Arabs. For more than a year, the town has been living in the face of flare-ups of violence between Kurdish militants loyal to jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and jihadists from al-Nusra.
Four Turkish civilians have been killed since July, hit by stray bullets or shells that had missed their targets. "They put old train wagons in front of the official buildings to protect them but that's about all they can do," says Demir, a sympathiser of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), the legal Kurdish party affiliated with the long outlawed PKK.......