Yes, the likes of Cameron and Obama could talk big on IS; they could call it an ‘imminent threat to every interest we have’; they could deem it the most ‘serious threat we face’. But, while railing against IS allows Western leaders to evoke what they lack domestically – authority, moral purpose, cojones – that very same lack stopped them from following through on the rhetoric, stopped them from acting on the grand phrasemaking, stopped them lending the postures substance. And so it has been left to others to do the fighting, and the dying – to do, that is, the very thing Western leaders seem incapable of doing: risking lives for something.

Because this is exactly what the Kurds have done – in Iraqi Kurdistan with the Peshmerga fighters prominent, and especially in Syria with the People’s Protection Units (YPG) to the fore. They and their affiliates have risked their lives to resist and even roll back the tide of black-clad nihilism, and the US and its Western allies have supported them and even praised them. As well they would. They did what the West could only gesture towards with high-altitude bombing missions and drone attacks: they took on and, at points, defeated IS. Foreign Affairs magazine estimates that since international airstrikes started in September 2014, the Kurds have regained about 25 to 30 per cent of territories lost to IS in Iraq and have retaken the city of Kobane, plus many more villages, in Syria, forcing IS to retreat to its strongholds of Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor and Al-Hasakah.

But, now that a hitherto quiescent Turkey has responded to the IS bomb attack that killed 32 in the south-eastern town of Suruc by launching airstrikes not only against IS in Syria, but also against Kurdish positions in Iraq, all that has changed. The US has sided with fellow NATO member Turkey against IS, and, as a result, against the Kurds, too. The West is betraying the Kurds, once again: a familiar historical occurrence. The White House went so far as to reiterate its classification of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as a ‘terrorist organisation’ and to state that Turkey had the right to defend itself against attacks by Kurdish rebels – this despite the fact that in Syria the US has been relying on the PKK’s sister party, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and its People’s Protection Units, to be its ‘boots on the ground’.

This US-led volte-face, in which the Kurds, so long used by the West as a bulwark against IS, have been blithely, callously cast to the Turkish wind, is typical of the blundering, moral and political incoherence of contemporary Western intervention. Once again, shallow posturing and clueless meddling combine to barbaric effect. Today’s allies are tomorrow’s enemies, and vice versa. Two years ago, Syrian president Bashar al Assad was bad guy numero uno, and the assorted army renegades and Islamists operating under the catch-all title of ‘the Syrian rebels’ were to be supported with arms and big statements. A year later, and Assad is himself fighting against the West’s current bad guy numero uno, IS, which, alongside assorted al-Qaeda franchises, were the principal recipients of Western anti-Assad largesse – as IS’s numerous US Humvees and rocket launchers testify.