Europe has left Syria to a distinctly Ottoman fate
On Syria there's a moral case for intervention – but with the west reluctant, Turkey and other powers will be the ones to decide
The day I arrived in Istanbul, they buried the last Ottoman. Her Imperial Highness Fatma Neslisah Sultan had been born in a royal palace overlooking the Bosphorus when her grandfather still notionally reigned over the remnants of a vast, intercontinental realm. The day after I left, gunfire from Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's troops killed several people inside Turkey. Their shots crossed a frontier that did not exist until the demise of the Ottoman empire.
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