Like many of us, I have been following the aftermath of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria with dismay — there’s no real way to comprehend the scale of destruction and loss of life in the region. To make matters worse, reporting in US media has been limited, and the information coming out of the region has been limited by the obstacles of the chaos and the responses of the regional governments. We all know that the situation in the region is bad; what we understand less is that this is a generational devastation and the political structures are likely making it worse.
