Kurds betrayed by the West will find a way to survive

Turkey’s offensive into northern Syria, operation ‘Peace Spring’ is to go on, at least for the time being, according to President Erdogan. But time is against it, progress slow, and the ultimate aim in realistic military terms as elusive as ever.

The key town on the edge of the buffer zone the Turkish forces hoped to create, Manbij, is now occupied by Russian and Syrian government troops. More are on their way, at the behest of the beleaguered YPG Kurdish popular militias, whom the Turks came to attack.

The aim of the offensive, in a word, is Rojava, the autonomous entity the Kurdish forces of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance have been running in a great slice of land across the northern border of Syria with Turkey. They have done so not prettily, but quite successfully, for the past four years or so.

It has been maintained by a campaign of more than two dozen battles, mostly against the forces of Islamic State (ISIL), whose capital, Raqqa, the Kurdish YPG forces seized last year after massive Anglo-American aerial bombardment. The Kurdish fighters proved adept ground controllers for air attacks by half a dozen Nato air forces or more.

But after fighting shoulder to shoulder with the likes of the British SAS, and the US Delta Force, as well as French and Canadian special forces, the Kurds of Rojava have been revealed to be after all the enemies of Nato – and the principal regional Nato ally, Turkey, knew this all along.

Turkey sees the YPG as a front for the radical PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) guerrillas whom they have been fighting on and off since 1984, inside Turkey itself, and just beyond its borders.

Erdogan is in trouble at home. The economy is sagging and with it, his own political fortunes. He lost Istanbul, his personal base and that of his AK party, earlier this year and several big municipalities besides. Ever adept at playing the security card, he has turned on the old enemy, the radical Kurds – always a popular cause.

“It looks a pretty desperate throw,” says Hannah Smith, who has just published the most penetrating biography of Erdogan to date, and who reports from Istanbul. “It’s very high risk, and you’re right, it will be difficult to take and hold such a large area – it’s much bigger than the other parts of the border they’ve taken. But it has a logic. Imagine that the radical wing of the IRA set up a statelet in Scotland at the height of the Northern Ireland troubles.

“It seemed that he was hoping for a quick victory in Syria before calling early elections. It isn’t going to be easy.”

To take and hold ground across a 100 mile front, and to a depth of 25 to 30 miles, looks like mission impossible for the Turkish forces now in the field. They are relying heavily on ragtag Syrian-Arab militias, not known for discipline and adherence to human rights – a number of atrocities have already been laid at their door. The Turks have been relying on indiscriminate air and artillery bombardment, which have hit civilians more than soldiers, and driven out well over 100,000 refugees.

Turkey appears to have warned Nato allies with troops on the border well in advance, which includes Britain, America, France and Canada. They all pulled out their soldiers and air controllers at the weekend. Yet all have feigned astonishment at the timing and scale of the Turkish attack. There is belated talk now of sanctions, suspending arms, sales, referrals to the UN on human rights violations.

Even President Trump, who appeared to have given Erdogan the green light in a fateful weekend phone call, has joined the chorus of condemnation.

Turkey said it needed to create a buffer zone to stop the threat from the Kurdish militias of the PKK masquerading as the ‘popular militias’ of the PYD – the ‘democratic Kurdish federation.’ These are the formations of the YPG, and its highly effective women’s brigades of the YPJ. Altogether these groups have lost up to 11,000 fighters in the campaign against ISIL and al-Qaeda affiliates such as the al-Nusra front, which now goes under many different names.

The dysfunction of diplomacy and military deployment between Turkey, the US and other Nato allies has meant the Kurds of Rojava throwing in their lot with their former enemies the Assad regime and its allies Iran and Hezbollah, and Putin’s Russia. With Kurd connivance the Assad junta and the Russians now dominate the northern battlescape of Syria as they haven’t for nearly eight years hitherto. Turkey’s dream of slicing out a chunk of the Syrian border in which they eventually plan to dump as many of the 3.5 million refugees currently sitting in squalid camps in Turkey itself, now seems as elusive as a desert mirage.

And still the Kurds remain, bloodied, bowed but hanging on. A crowning Turkish victory in Rojava, or what is left of it, looks a long way off.

The Kurds are one of the biggest challenges for any ethnographically inclined commentator today. Almost any fact a journalist can adduce about their origins, profile and prospects, is disputed. Their story of the last two centuries is a summary of betrayal and bargains.

The Kurds are distinct by ethnicity and language, though the dialects vary so much that many groups can’t communicate between themselves in the vernacular. They emerged from western Asia, between the great rivers of Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent to the west, and the mountains to the north and the steppe. They have produced prodigious horse warriors. The most famous in the Middle Ages was Saladin, known as Saladin the Kurd, owing to the ethnicity of his mother, though he became one of the greatest unifiers of the Arab Islamic world.

The great political betrayal of Kurds in modern times was the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, in the wake of the Versailles treaties at the end of the First World War. At Sèvres, they were promised their own state, Kurdistan, only to have it cancelled three years later at Lausanne, and then firmly squashed by the new Turkish republic under Ataturk. This triggered a string of uprisings in Turkey and Iraq for the next two decades. However, in the Second World War, Kurds helped thwart a potential Axis puppet regime in Baghdad – so much for Trump’s charge that they did nothing for the allies in that war.

Today there are anything between 35 and 45 million Kurds. The total is hard to establish because statistics in host countries such as Turkey and Iran are fudged. The notional geographical area of ‘Kurdistan’ covers Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. They claim to be that ethnic group or nationality with no state to their name. They also cover a large diaspora, with more than one million in Germany alone.

They are divided by geography – often one group in one valley cannot find a common argot with those in the next valley – by clan and tribe, and political loyalty. The two principal groupings, the KDP (Kurdish Democratic Party) and the PUK (Kurdish Patriotic Union) in Iraq are split by clan and ideology, with the KDP being the preserve of the powerful Barzani clan. They have fought each other at times. They have even turned to their oppressors in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein included, for help and mediation, thus continuing the cycle of betrayal and bargains.

Saddam was responsible for a number of notoriously crude and cruel reprisals against the restive Kurds of northern Iraq, in the so-called Anfal campaigns. In March 1988, he dropped gas on the village of Halabja and its neighbours, killing between 3,500 to 5,000 people.

His helicopters are reported to have tried the same tactics when the Kurds rose in northern Iraq, as did the Shiites in the south, after the American alliance prised Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the spring of 1991. This time the USA, Britain and France assisted the fleeing Kurds. The plight of Kurdish families fleeing barefoot through icy streams and snowy fields seen on live television – this was the first CNN war – persuaded them to act and provide a safe haven. This in turn produced the autonomous Kurdish entity in Iraq, with its capital Irbil, which endures to this day.

The Kurds of Iraq have their own militia, the Peshmerga. A generic from Ottoman times, it means “those who face death”, and is also given to Kurdish levies elsewhere. Their fame as fighters was somewhat tarnished by their inability to withstand the onslaught of IS forces after the Caliphate was declared in Mosul in June 2014. This contrasts somewhat with the ingenuity and flare of the YPG and YPJ Kurdish militias in Syria.

The largest concentration of Kurds is in Turkey, where numbers are estimated to range between 14.5 million at the very low end to over 20 million at higher estimates. They are spread throughout society and across the country. Some even support Erdogan’s AKP. The greatest urban population of Kurds is located Istanbul, which could rightfully be called the greatest Kurdish city.

The story of the Kurds in Turkey from Ottoman time is one of coercion and cooperation, repression and insurrection. One of Erdogan’s predecessors as a prime minister and president with a firm Islamic belief, Turgut Ozal, introduced a programme of cultural tolerance, allowing the public use of Kurdish language, ethnic schools and media – especially round the provincial capital of Diyarbakir in eastern Anatolia, in the late eighties.

But by then the armed levies of the PKK, the Kurdish Workers Party, were in an on-off insurgency of ambush and attack, which persists today. The PKK was founded by the charismatic Abdullah Ocalan, now serving life in a Turkish prison after his death sentence in 1999 was commuted. He stands accused of drilling his PKK youth militias with sadistic discipline and recruiting methods, including kidnapping young girls. Erdogan believes that the PKK is virtually the same thing as the YPG, another Kurdish subject to hot dispute.

The YPG shares some of the reputation of the PKK under Ocalan. In Rojava, it is accused of ethnic cleansing, purging minorities such as the Turkmen and Yazidis. Some 500,000 Syrian Kurds have fled into Turkey and have said they don’t want to be ruled by the socialist republic of the YPG in Rojava. In the Rojava entity and its militias, women have unusual prominence. They are particularly good snipers and have proved astute field commanders. A British general, who had commanded in the SAS, was astonished how the women’s brigades of the YPJ very nearly took the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa on their own, before it fell to a combined allied and YPG ground and air assault. The culture of women in Rojava is known as ‘Jineology’, which is the title of Abdullah Ocalan’s latest book written in his prison cell.

No doubt they are adapting already on the battlefield shaped by the changes of fortune of the past ten days. They will swallow betrayal and cut new bargains with the Assad Syrian forces and the Russians, and whoever suits them – leaving their former allies of America, Britain, France and Canada in embarrassing retreat and going nowhere fast. The Kurds know the terrain, not least the human landscape of friend and foe in northern Syria, in a way the legions of President Erdogan may not.