Washington Kurdish Institute
By: Bill Rice & Yousif Ismael
March 18, 2018
After more than a century of repression, genocide, and disastrous policies perpetrated by the government of Turkey against minorities both inside and outside of Turkey, the recent unprovoked, unilateral invasion of the Syrian region of Afrin stands as yet another testament to the anti-democratic, ethno-nationalist mindset of the Turkish state. Since this invasion of the mostly Kurdish region began on January 20, 2018, there have been 289 killed, including 43 children, and 600 wounded. In addition, hundreds of U.S.-backed fighters from the Kurdish-led People’s Defense Units (YPG) and their all-female counterpart the Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) have been killed. As the city fell to Turkey and its local proxy forces, some 150,000 civilians have fled the area.
Afrin has been a Kurdish-dominant area for thousands of years. Yet recently it has hosted another half million displaced people who fled from areas under attack from Bashar Al-Assad’s regime and pro-government militias. Afrin has been the most stable region in the whole of Syria, with the Kurds being able to establish a democratic, self-governing administration in 2012.
The United States and its allies have relied heavily on the YPG/J to drive the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) out of power in Syria. However, with ISIS now all but defeated, once Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan authorized his country’s invasion of Afrin, the U.S. stood mostly silent, merely tossing tepid criticisms over the invasion from time to time. Although the Afrin invasion has had a negative impact on the remaining fight against ISIS (as the YPG/J and the umbrella organization under which it fights Syrian Democratic Forces [SDF] weakens with fighters from other areas of Syria leaving the frontlines against ISIS to help their brethren in Afrin), there are still a number of reasons why the U.S. has failed to act against Turkey’s unprovoked aggression. For one, many in the U.S. foreign policy establishment (both in government and academia) still view Turkey as an indispensable ally. The U.S. also lacks leverage in Afrin and its surrounding areas in western Syria, as this has mainly been the purview of Russian influence, with Russia and the Assad regime controlling the airspace. Yet, much like the U.S. response, Russia remained mostly apathetic to Turkey’s invasion, ultimately allowing Erdogan to launch its invasion and airstrikes against the people of Afrin.
With the world powers doing nothing to stop it, Turkey’s invasion of Afrin will be a disaster for Kurdish and other minority existence in the region. It will decimate a budding experiment in local self-rule and democracy. But for Russia and the Assad regime the invasion is a win-win: now the SDF and YPG/J are losing ground, resources, and lives while Turkey and its Syrian Islamist proxy militias move their focus towards the Kurds rather than on challenging the Assad regime. With this invasion, Erdogan and his government’s Free Syrian Army (FSA) allies clearly displayed a change in priorities: no longer is it regime change and removal of Assad above all else; now it is no Kurdish autonomy and no secular, democratic movements in Syria above all else.
After two months of daily bombings with thousands of elite Turkish forces accompanied by FSA Islamist fighters, Afrin has fallen and is in a dire situation, with an echoing silence emanating from the international community.
Erdogan and the Kurds
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long expressed his opposition to Kurdish rights and autonomy. In a speech in 2004, he once said “I am opposed to Kurdish autonomy, even if it is in Argentina.” And while never much of a friend to the Kurdish people or other minorities in Turkey, Erdogan’s animosity against the Kurds truly burgeoned after the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a majority Kurdish party, won 13 percent of the vote in Turkey’s 2015 general elections. Before this election, Erdogan was engaged in peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Despite years of conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK over Kurdish rights and autonomy, many analysts suggested that these peace talks may finally bare fruit in positively addressing Turkey’s “Kurdish Question.” Yet this dream was short-lived. The HDP electoral showing threatened Erdogan’s quest for authoritarian power in Turkey. Not only did the HDP demonstrate an ability to attract voters outside of its Kurdish constituency, but it also successfully promoted a left-wing, secular, and democratic alternative to Erdogan’s movement of authoritarian political Islamism. The HDP victory also marked the first time that a Kurdish-dominant party was able to win more than 10 percent of the vote in Turkey.
In response Erdogan moved to end the peace process and soon launched a brutal military campaign against the Kurdish regions of Turkey, all under the pretext of combatting the PKK. In addition to this domestic military campaign, Erdogan and his government began sacking numerous Kurdish elected officials (mayors, lawmakers), arresting thousands of HDP members and Kurdish activists, and destroying Kurdish towns and historic sites. This political purge and domestic military campaign has gone into overdrive after the failed coup against Erdogan by the Gulen movement in July 2016. Erdogan has used the failed coup as a pretext to amass more and more unchecked authoritarian powers as well as to crack down on political opponents and dissidents, most strikingly the Kurds.
The Erdogan government’s animus towards the Kurds extended even outside of his country’s borders. When the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq held a referendum on independence from Iraq in September 2017, Turkey reacted by, in coordination with Iran and the Iraqi government, imposing stringent sanctions on the KRG.
Erdogan’s recent actions against the Kurds at home and abroad only illuminates what many regional analysts have long claimed — Turkey’s president aims to construct a Neo-Ottoman empire, one built upon a combination of Turkish nationalism, a Sunni political Islamism heavily influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology, and the suppression of ethnic and religious minority groups. In many recent speeches, Erdogan has talked about restoring the geography of the Ottoman Empire and claiming that the Islamic world has long awaited for “their return.” The true goal of Erdogan’s invasion of Afrin is simply to change the region’s demographics, pushing out Kurds, Yazidis, and other minorities while moving in and empowering Turks, Turkmen, and Sunni Arabs sympathetic to Erdogan’s ideology and cause.
With the fall of Afrin this has been clearly demonstrated with the FSA and Turkish forces destroying Kurdish national and cultural symbols, such as the statue of Kawa the Blacksmith, which have nothing to do with the PKK or YPG/J. It is thus no surprise that Turkey’s flag now flies all across Afrin.
Erdogan’s Relationship with Syrian Jihadi Groups
Since Syria’s civil war began in 2011, Erdogan’s government has allied with, funded, and trained a number of Syrian rebel groups who not only espouse a takfiri jihadist or an extremely conservative political Islamist religious ideology but also have engaged in brutal inhumane acts. These groups include Nour al-Din al-Zenki, Ahrar Al Sham, Sham Legion, among others. Many of these groups have expressed their support for ethnic cleansing of Kurdish and Yazidi areas unless they convert to their extremist views of Islam. In some cases, former ISIS fighters have even joined the Turkish state and its proxies in the fight against the Kurds in Afrin. This should be no surprise as a number of past reports have exposed the collaborative relationship between the Erdogan government and ISIS. This is a relationship that may well backfire, however, with the real possibility that some day ISIS and/or these other jihadi groups will set their sights on Turkey.
In contrast, the defense of Afrin and the overall SDF cause has attracted a number of Arab fighters, Turkish leftists, Western volunteer fighters, and other non-Kurdish supporters.
Russia’s Interests
The main goal of the Russian-Turkish-Iranian alliance is to weaken U.S. influence in Syria and the Middle East at large. Russia also wants to further alienate Turkey’s relationship with the United States and NATO. Therefore, allowing Turkey to attack Afrin was an easy decision for Russia, especially in light of recent strategic arms deals and nuclear power agreements between the two countries. Greenlighting Turkey’s invasion of Afrin also provided the Russia-Iran-Assad axis some relief with FSA and rebels fighters taking their focus away from fighting against the Assad regime. Russia’s decision not to assist the Kurds in Afrin also reflects its decision to punish the YPG/J for its past decision to strongly ally with the United States in the fight against ISIS and, to a lesser extent, against the Assad regime forces in eastern Syria. As stated earlier, the invasion of Afrin solidifies a new paradigm for Turkey and its proxies in Syria, with the goal of regime change and battling the Assad regime being replaced with a rampant anti-Kurdish campaign.
International Silence
Turkey’s forces and its proxies have committed blatant war crimes against civilians in Afrin. There are hundreds of graphic photographs and videos showing the brutal airstrikes and their inhumane aftermath. A recent GRAPHIC report details the extensive atrocities of the Turkish military and its Syrian jihadi militias against civilians in the region. These tactics are not new for Turkey and these FSA militias, however. For example, during the battle to push ISIS out of Al Bab, Turkish shelling, artillery and aircraft killed nearly 500 civilians, including 122 children.
Despite Turkey’s current war crimes in its invasion of Afrin, the international community continues to be silent. Since the invasion began, very few lawmakers in Europe have spoken out — while in the U.S. a shocking total of zero lawmakers have had anything to say. While the statements from some of these European officials may help spread the word, there has been no government willing to take against against Turkey in any form in order to cease this unnecessary brutality and loss of innocent life. Many Kurds believe this inaction and silence is a result of Turkey blackmailing Europe and the United States over the refugee crisis — that is, Erdogan’s government threatens to cease cooperation with housing the thousands of Middle Eastern and North African refugees heading into Europe if the West dares to speak out against the Turkish state’s tyrannical and inhumane actions.
A New Border Control — Changing of the Guards
During most of the Syrian civil war, since 2012, the YPG/J have controlled the majority of the northern borders between Syria and Turkey. Some pockets of this border area remained under Turkish proxy control, and was thus used to aid various extremist groups. But, after Turkey’s Euphrates shield operation and now its invasion of Afrin, it is Turkey and its Islamist proxy forces who control most of the Turkish-Syrian border area. These new borders present a real threat of incubating travel routes for international jihadists from Syria into Europe and the United States. With a now weakened YPG/J, who in the past have cooperated with the West on international security issues and helped many European countries with intelligence on their citizens joining terror groups in Syria, this prospect seems even more likely. Turkey stands to be victim of this threat as well, as the Erdogan government fails to exercise full control over some of these takfiri jihadist factions.
What’s Next for the Kurds of Syria?
The Kurds have been betrayed many times in their history — whether by the U.S., Russia, or both (for example, in 1946 when the two global powers coordinated with the Iranian government to crush the fledgling independent Kurdish state in Mahabad). Yet the Kurdish people and their cause lived on. And they will continue to live on, even after this most recent betrayal.
In the short term, the invasion of Afrin may be a loss for the Syrian Kurds and a victory for Turkey, yet sooner or later, in the long run, these lines of victory and defeat may not be so clear. For, it will only be some time before Turkey’s takfirist and jihadist proxies will turn on them. It is also likely that attempts by these local actors to govern in the Afrin region will fail. The fact that this region will still remain demographically Kurdish, at least in the short term, makes the prospect of insurgency very likely. So while Turkey and its proxies may win the traditional war, Turkey and the FSA may soon very well be bogged down in asymmetric battles in the future. There is also the potential that the FSA militant groups may end up fighting amongst each other.
In contrast, while the Syrian Kurds may be militarily defeated in the short term, in the long term their ideals and movement will live on. Their experiment in local-self governance, democracy, gender equality, secularism, and ethnic coexistence will remain strong in other Kurdish areas of Syria and may even be adopted elsewhere.
The U.S. still has a chance to support this cause, to support these people who have been the most effective and reliable fighters against ISIS, takfirist jihadism, and conservative political Islamism. The United States still has the opportunity to stand on the right side of history and recognize the Northern Syrian Federation and its governing structure as a constructive model not only for Kurds but for the rest of Syria. Doing so will not only lessen Kurdish bitterness towards the U.S. for its silence and inaction during the invasion of Afrin, but it will also help the United States and its allies in the region stand strong against the Russian-Turkish-Iranian presence in Syria. If the U.S. fails to quickly take this stand for its SDF allies in eastern Syria, the Syrian Kurds may eventually begin to reach some type of agreement with the Iranian regime. For, this may be the least worst option left for them in order to achieve some semblance of survival and limited autonomy.
The U.S. has given Turkey much and more, but in return they have received nothing back but threats to their national interest and security. The U.S. has a chance to foster a more productive, reciprocal relationship with Syria’s Kurds — a relationship that could help to stifle the power of both the Assad regime and Syria’s takfiri and jihadist militias. But such a relationship cannot happen while Turkey is allowed to slaughter the Kurdish people and their allies in Afrin and elsewhere.