Washington Kurdish Institute
March 18, 2019
Upon President Trump’s decision to pull out the U.S. troops of Syria last December, the Syrian Kurds were the first to oppose such a plan. Since they partnered with the U.S.-led coalition to defeat ISIS and other terrorist groups in Syria, the Kurds’ biggest fear remains a possible Turkish invasion of their region following the departure of the U.S. troops. The Kurds’ concern comes about as a result of almost of a century of animosity by Turkey against the Kurds, and the recent Turkish invasion of the Kurdish region of Afrin in January 2018, which was executed in coordination with various jihadist groups while the Kurds were battling ISIS. This invasion made the Kurds even more vigilant, prompting them to even hold talks with the Assad regime on basis of finding a “lesser evil” compared to Turkey and the jihadists. The Turkish invasion of Afrin region proved to the world that Turkey’s intention and top priority is to fight any Kurdish entity or region of self-administration anywhere. In Afrin, the Turkish military and their jihadist allies destroyed a most peaceful region in Syria and committed atrocities against civilians. Not only the Kurds who fear a Turkish invasion – the Christians of Syria, the indigenous Syriacs and Assyrians of the country, are also frightened by this prospect. ISIS terrorists have slaughtered many Christians, and, additionally, jihadists fighting under the banner the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have also displaced hundreds of Afrin’s Christians. Many Christians have participated, alongside the Kurds and other ethnic and religious groups, in the formation of the self-administration institutions now democratically governing the northeast of Syria, and have also contributed to the fight against ISIS as part of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the multi-ethnic and multi-religious armed force established in 2015.
According to Dr. Amy Holmes of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who recently visited northern Syria, the Christians “fear what Turkey is proposing, a so-called the ‘safe zone’ that would include the Turkish troops” in northern Syria. Dr. Holmes spoke to many Christians during her visit to Syria and explains that “the fear that they [Christians] have of this plan is related to their own personal family history of being subjected to the Seyfo massacre [the term Seyfo refers to the mass slaughter of the Syriac and other Christians living in the Ottoman Empire that occurred during World War I] and other forms of violence carried out against Syriac Christians in Turkey and here in Northern Syria in this region.”
#Syriac Christians’ fear of Turkish troops in north #Syria is related to their own personal history of being subjected to the Seyfo massacre in 1915 as the Ottoman Empire collapsed. They too reject the Turkish ‘safe zone’. @CJTFOIR @IRF_Ambassador pic.twitter.com/jhtRncY5nd
— Doktora Amy Austin Holmes (@AmyAustinHolmes) March 11, 2019
Last year in Afrin, the Turkish-backed jihadist forces robbed a church and later burned it down. They did not stop at this, and also displaced Christians as well as members of other religious minorities such as Yazidis and Alawites from the region. The jihadist proxies of Turkey in Syria are affiliated with various groups, but share a common view that non-Muslims are not welcome in Syria, and their belongings are to be plundered. Some of the Turkish-backed factions are or were members of al Qaeda, and others are former ISIS fighters. Indeed, the prospects of a Turkish invasion backed by jihadist proxy forces is reminiscent of the previous persecution faced by the region’s Christians during the final years of Ottoman rule. “For many of the people that I’ve spoken to over the past two weeks here in northern Syria,” Dr. Holmes explains, “the fear that they [Christians] have of the Turkish invasion is not something abstract, it’s not ideological but it’s related to their own personal family histories of being subjected to violence at the time of the collapose of the Ottoman Empire as Turkey was being established.”
After non-binding bill approved by the U.S. Senate which echoed warnings issued by the Pentagon that the decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria would empower terrorist groups, President Trump finally agreed to leave some troops in Syria. Nonetheless, Turkey is still demanding that the U.S. stand by as Turkish forces, presumably working in concert with the same jihadist groups used in Afrin, invade more of northern Syria and attack the institutions of the autonomous administration of the region which has been established to give all of the peoples of the area, Kurds, Arabs, Christians, and others, a say in their own affairs. After the Afrin invasion, Turkey is seemingly less able to play the Kurdish card, claiming to be working to protect innocent Kurds and only target specific groups, in Syria. Now, any further Turkish aggression in Syria is likely to face some measure of international condemnation, but the question remains, how engaged and invested will the U.S. and Europe be in the fate of northern Syria once ISIS is largely defeated by the Kurds and their allies?
Turkey’s NATO membership has long given Turkey a free hand to use its military and security forces against the Kurdish people, both within Turkey’s borders and beyond. The long reign of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been no different from the conflict-plagued tenures of his predecessors, as he has acted with impunity and launch various campaigns of aggression against Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq under the pretext of fighting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish party that has rebelled against the Turkish state for four decades, demanding basic rights for the Kurdish people. Syria’s Christians are not members of the PKK, nor are the rest of those among the ranks of the SDF, but this simple fact does not matter and is not reflected in any of Erdogan’s discourse. Erdogan’s ambitions are clear – he is fighting for the reestablishment of Turkish hegemony in the region, aiming to bring back the dominance lost with the disintegration of the Ottoman empire. Erdogan’s vision for Turkish hegemony is based on strengthening his personal power – indeed, even as he leads campaigns against real and imagined enemies throughout the world, he also often targets his former colleagues, including those who co-founded his political party (the Justice and Development Party, or AKP) and those who facilitated his rise to power.
“For the citizens of the northern Syria, whether Syriac Christians, or Kurds, or Arabs, these ambitions reflect a desire to repeat the policies of dominance and occupation of the Ottoman Empire. This means ethnic cleansing, demographic change and Turkification – similar to what Turkey did to the people of Afrin after it invaded their region in March 2018,” Bassam Ishaq, the President of the Syriac National Council (SNC) and envoy of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES) to Washington told the Washington Kurdish Institute. Mr. Ishaq rejects the idea of Turkish “safe zone,” explaining, “A buffer zone should be limited in scope of work to ensuring security for concerned party. It should not interfere with the way people of north Syria want to live which is articulated in the social contract of the self-administration of the region.” The SNC is a constituent of the council that participated in the establishment of self-administration in the region in partnership with the Kurds. “The Syriacs where among the political local actors of the North and East Syria that negotiated the social contract on which self-administration is based. The social contract articulated how the different ethnic and religious groups of the region want to live together,” said Mr. Ishaq.
The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, including Kurds, Arabs, and Christians, welcome any buffer zone with Turkey if it involves international forces or the United Nations. This would give the region safety and prevent attacks from the Turkish forces or jihadist groups. However, Erdogan yet refuses an international solution and insists on having Turkish forces and invade more Syrian territory. Turkey’s argument of protecting its national security from the Kurdish fighters is baseless since the Kurds of Syria have never attacked Turkey from Syria, and will not do so, as they certainly have no appetite to risk their gains and safety in Syria. On the contrary, Turkey has been attacking the Kurds not only in recent months, but throughout its history as a republic. Turkey’s proposal of “safe zone” or “buffer zone” is simply the use of new vocabulary to repeat Afrin invasion and commit additional atrocities against civilians, with the Kurds and Christians of the region once again being vulnerable to these acts of violence.