The US has been repeatedly trying to reassure their Kurdish allies that they don’t face any major threat from Turkey. Turkey, however, seems to be going out of their way to make clear they are very much a threat, and that their goal in the region is the end of Kurdish autonomy in Syria.
On Friday, Turkish President Erdogan said that there was no longer any reason for the international community to back the Kurdish SDF, and demanded that other nations, particularly the United States, end their support for that group.
Though the demand has been renewed since the Turkish-backed regime change in Syria, it is not entirely new, as Turkey has been demanding the US stop backing the SDF for many years now. The US chose to get out of Turkey’s way for anti-Kurd offensives in 2019, a decision which led to a lot of criticism, though ultimately the US did not remain unaligned with the SDF, which controls area along Syria’s largest oil and natural gas fields.
With Assad ousted, Turkey seems to believe that they can convince the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to tamp down Kurdish ambitions for autonomy. Foreign Minister Hasan Fidan said Turkey is prepared to do “whatever it takes,” up to and including military action, to see this goal through if the HTS proves unable to address “territorial integrity,” which is to say ensuring the Kurds don’t retain any measure of the autonomy they enjoy right now.
Fidan elaborated on those comment on Sunday, saying that Turkey believes there is “no room” for the Kurdish YPG organization inside Syria. The YPG is the largest of multiple factions that make up the SDF.
Though presented as a question of national unity for Syria, Turkey’s problem with the Kurds, and particularly with the YPG, long predates this regime change. Turkey has fought off and on against the Kurdish PKK separatists for decades, and considers the YPG effectively an offshoot of the PKK.
In practice, the YPG is a separate organization, though it does have substantial ideological similarity to the PKK. Turkey appears to see weakening the autonomous ambitions of Kurds in Syria and Iraq as part and parcel to preventing the PKK from re-emerging inside Turkey to try to carve out an autonomous region as well.
The anti-YPG intentions mean Turkey would end up with substantial control over the new Syrian government. That’s not sitting well with other regional powers, like Israel, and some are suggesting backing the Kurds more overtly as a way to prevent Turkey from gaining too much clout inside Syria.
I can only imagine that the USA will comply. I wish they wouldn't but that's how history teaches us: the communist self-defense forces will be thrown under the bus just as the anarchists were in 1936 (Syria is not different from Spain back in those days and Erdogan's Turkey is not different from Mussolini's Italy, maybe worse).
If Turkey bombed the oil patches in Iraq and Syria, would the Kurds melt away? Do they actually have a national identity and history?
No the Kurds have fought the Turks for a very long period (most of my life time) under much worse conditions – like fighting Saddam Hussein and Ruhollah Khomeini at the same time. So while setting them back by losing them some territory and oil revenue is not likely to make them melt away.
Fighting them will get easier but Trump & co are not likely to be too happy about the Turks attacking oil (especially not in Iraq) I think they believe they have the monopoly on that.
Saladin (of fighting Richard the Lionheart fame) was a Kurd – Kurdish is an Indo-European language i.e. not anything like Turkish or Arabic – but closer related to Farsi ('Iranian').
Finally the Kurds are majority Suni Moslems while they are majority Shia in Iran and the new leadership in Iraq is also Shia.
LOL, you have no idea! It’s totally not about oil for them, they’ve been fighting against Turkey (primarily), Iran and Iraq (but never really against Baathist Syria, with whom they had uneasy coexistence even after the “civil war” began). Kurdistan is the largest nation without state in West Eurasia, with some 35-45 million people, depending on how you count, more than half of which are prisoners of Turkey’s imperialist borders.
They have a history of course: they’re already mentioned already in the Anabasis of Xenophon, and they had several historical realms in Antiquity such as Corduene and Adiabene (the first non-Hebrew realm to convert to Judaism) and later on in the early Modern Age (Qara Qolunyu, etc.) In fact their language is widely believed to be even older, directly derived from ancient Mede, the Iranic people that the Persians conquered.
Previous to “Medianization” they were, along with the neighboring Armenians, the somewhat famous Hurrians of Mittani (Bronze Age) and Urartu (early Iron Age). But that’s stretching things a bit, I guess. But just considering from the Median Empire onwards, they’re much older in their region than any Arab or Turk, or even Armenians, and similarly old to Persians
In any case, the most interesting part is that since some time ago, they have overcome the very concept of “nation-state” and they’re not anymore fighting for nationalist secesion but for regime change all around them in terms socialist, multiethnic, feminist, ecologist and confederalist. Read Abdullah Öcalan’s “Democratic Confederalism” for the fundamental manifesto. They don’t consider themselves anymore even Marxist, let alone Leninist, because they realize that the problem is much deeper than Capitalism and also that the “nation-state” is bourgeois, unjust and imperialist by default, that something like Switzerland is a much better model in terms political.
Thanks, very informative. But hasn’t their collaboration with the US of Israel in the FUBAR of the entire mid-east disqualified their progressivist creds?
The revolutionary movement is the same AFAIK, their goals are clear: self-defense (essentially against Turkey and their islamo-fascist mercenary thugs) and promotion of their Apoist agenda. The “unnatural” alliance with the USA is clearly very fragile (it was something Obama conceived in his last months in office, after he fell out with Erdogan and Gral. Allen) and the SDF acknowledges that much. But they have no option, because nobody else would back them (there’re some rumors that Iran might consider it but that’s even more unnatural than with the USA, as they are radically oppossed in terms of headscarf and self-rule). The real problem is that the USA is not really protecting them against Turkey and their goons either and now that has become the major issue much as in the days of ISIS.
Clinton allied with the Kurds in Iran and Iraq, this is not anything recent. They've been one of the largest non-state recipients of US weapons since then.
But the Kurds of Iraq have very different politics: the right wing ones (Barzani faction, KDP) are actually slaves of Turkey (and of the USA therefore) and effectively finance Erdogan’s mafia and ultimately export oil to Israel. The left wing ones (Talabani faction, PUK) are loosely allied with the Apoists but they are themselves quite moderate and not at all near communist. Any Apoist attemt at setting their own presence in Basur (Iraqi Kurdistan) has been met with trans-border aggression by Turkey.
Iranian Kurds are more Apoist however.
I don’t care if it’s the USA or Satan himself who backs them, they are about the only global faction that makes any sense to sympathize with, at least from my viewpoint. Occasionally (rarely but sometimes) the USA takes the right side, another example was Kosova, whose democratic self-determination could hardly exist without NATO support. Even in Afghanistan I was ready to accept the mega-corrupt US protectorate as lesser evil vs the fascist Talibans.
The USA is not automatically wrong every single time, however it works hard in that direction. Similarly US rivals, enemies or antagonists are not always right, even if they are the lesser evil in many cases (not all).
Frequently when the US pretends to be doing “the right thing” they are in reality doing something else entirely and something not terrible happens by accident. The KLA originally got their funding for weapons from heroin smuggling, and it seems to have been one of the reasons why they were chosen as allies. With US supplied weapons they became the largest importer of heroin in Europe, wresting control from the Russian and Ukrainian mafias. Kosovo got its independence, and Europe got a flood of cheap Afghan heroin. The Afghan Mujaheddin sold opium for weapons purchases, until the US State Department sent Richard Armitrage to teach them how to change low-profit high-bulk opium into high-profit low-bulk heroin. With the increase in funding the Soviets were driven out and contributed to the bankrupting of the USSR, and tons of heroin ended up in the US.
The US has been such a rich country for so long, we could have done so many great things to improve the world. Instead short term thinking rules our culture and we end up empowering the most vile people on the planet, spending more money for inferior results.
You’re right: their motivations are their own but still I’m OK if it works for overall justice. Kosova demanded independence, were under Serbian terrorism (I’ve been in Prishtina in the days of Arkan, mind you, but even in Belgrade they told you about it). It was necessary and I don’t care how bad it was for the feelings of Chetniks or Putin’s ambitions.
Putin is not always choosing the best allies either or doing the most correct things: they’re the good side in Ukraine but not in Chechnya and definitely not in Kosova or in general when supporting Serbian imperialism.
I see. Thanks Maju. Their irredentist ambition is laudable in itself, but allied to genocides, insupportable.
Say what? “Irredentist”? Allied to genocies? What are you talking about?
1. ??So they don’t want national autonomy??
2. and aren’t being godfathered by Washington??
3. so, what are they about??
1. They want Swiss-style self-rule for everyone. You clearly don’t understand “Democratic Confederalism” (Apoism): it’s not anymore about “bourgeois” nation-state, which they deem unjust and oppressive for minorities, but about multiethnic democratic confederalism.
2. They’re in uneasy alliance with the USA only since the “war on ISIS” and the USA is not providing adequate protection against their main enemy: Turkey and their fascist proxies, so it’s a most precarious “alliance” that has not served well the Federation and is about to end (probably Trump will just sell them to Erdogan, just as he did in 2018 in Afrin).
3. Öcalan’s Democratic Confederalism (full text): https://www.freeocalan.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Ocalan-Democratic-Confederalism.pdf
1. Swiss petit bourgeois idealism cum anarcho-mystification.
2. The Washington NeoConNazis are for 40 yrs the major force behind the policy of mid-east balkanization, the single largest component of which entailed supporting with training, arms and money,Kurdish separatism in Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
1. I’m bored of listening to treacherous neo-Stalinists (Dengists) that demanding people’s power is “petit bourgeois”: it’s not, it’s proletarian and revolutionary and there is no other way to ensure proletarian power or at least to approximate it. That neo-Platonic party-centric totalitarianism is what destroyed the first wave of communist revolutions in fact: all the power to the soviets should mean exactly all the power for the people (or working class), not for an elitist neo-Platonic party of some philosophers. Leninism brought Stalinism and Stalinism brought Brezhnevism and Dengism (and even Euro-Communism!), what didn’t bring was proletarian power, worker power, people’s power.
Switzerland and earlier Vasconia were product of peasant revolutions, with their achievements and shortcomings, they emerged in their day (5th and 13th century respectively) and got semi-exhausted in their revolutionary potential eventually but, as long as their legacy survives, they teach us something (or should if you paid any attention).
What is petty bourgeois is the nation-state (or so claim the Apoists) and the Stalinist betrayal of the “popular fronts”, which was basically renouncing to revolution altogether in favor of imitating bourgeois national-imperialism instead. A total disaster!
Like Cromwell’s Commonwealth was a very immature bourgeois regime (which nevertheless changed some things and left a legacy), Stalin’s USRR was a very immature proletarian experiment, which has eventually degenerated back into capitalism everywhere (except Cuba so far). So we have to reinvent everything and get rid of a lot of Bolshevik junk, while remaining loyal to the essentials (1st International rather than 2nd, because even Marx had to admit that allying with the social-reformists was very dubious).
This is not about loyalty to any dogma or party, it’s about actually achieving proletarian power and in this regard I trust much more the heterodox Apoists or even Greta Thurnberg (who proclaimed herself eco-communist and was canceled right away) than any pseudo-orthodox dogmatism promoted by Capitalist China.
2. The US elites are evil but so was the II Reich of Germany and yet Lenin traveled in that train and accepted other aid from them, because you don’t exist in a vacuum, you flourish in the bourgeois cracks and contradictions rather like those weeds that emerge from ruins and sometimes become magnificent trees and even jungles.
Said that, I believe that the NSF made an error by accepting US “alliance” (which is not really defending them from Turkey at all). But it’s their sovereign political decision and I have to respect it. And you do too: not only great powers have agency, these people probably have more agency than any “sovereign country” on Earth, all of them slaves to their parasitic oligarchies.
Oh, lawsy, the reason why they're a "nation without state" is because until modern times most of the population was migratory. Kurdish populations within Turkey stretch from the border of Syria almost to the border with Bulgaria. The PKK wanted to carve their "homeland" out of pieces of at least four countries and eject all non-Kurds. That project would have dwarfed the 1948 Nakba, and probably would have been the largest ethnic cleansing since the Indian Wars in the US. Even within the areas of Syria and Iraq that they control they were minorities until they forcibly ejected a portion of the native populations.
Again you have no idea whatsoever. You’re talking nonsense: Kurds were not “migratory” as is also the case of many other oppressed nations like my own Basque Nation, Catalonia, Scotland, Sardinia, Corsica and a long etcetera. One thing is being a landless people like the Jews or the Roma and another thing is being an occupied country (stateless nation).
So you’re for the Balkanization of pretty much the entire planet? What a great way to ensure a continual state of world-wide low-level warfare. You don’t by chance sell weapons, do you?
On a more serious note, how many Kurdish enclaves do you expect to create within Turkey? Do you think they should be able to eject non-Kurds from “their” territory? Or do you think there should be a single Kurdistan and all the Kurds be required to move there? Should inter-ethnic romances be prohibited to maintain the racial purity? Should Turks and Arabs ejected from the new country be recompensed for the loss of their property? What about when their descendants come back demanding their “right of return”? How far down this rat hole of foolishness are you interested in going?
The **ONLY** way there will be peace in this world is if these primitive notions of tribal superiority are left behind in the dust of history.
I’m for democracy (unity among equals with respect) not for “balcanization” (division and competition for the benefit of oligarchs), that’s the tradition in my country (Basque Country) thanks surely to a 5th century peasant revolution (bagauda) and it’s a model that I believe should be adopted worldwide, as it was in Switzerland centuries ago or is now in Upper Mesopotamia in very difficult circumstances. We can only have peace if we have full democracy (which implies also socialism, i.e. equality in economic power) and at least a modicum of true justice, in which evil is punished and cooperation at least not hindered.
Even in the Balcans Tito’s Yugoslavia stands out as the most successful socialist country ever and the most advanced Mediterranean country back in the day, thanks to mutually respectful federalism (not perfect but quite good anyhow) and to socialist “market economy” via cooperatives (I’m rather for mixed public-coop systems but those are debatable details).
I’m not (nor anybody is) arguing for your straw-man nonsense re. “ethically pure Kurdistan” or whatever. Remember that Apo Öcalan himself is an ethnic… Turk, not a true Kurd, but that doesn’t matter the least because there is ethnic adoption and also inter-ethnic solidarity. Nobody is expelling anyone from the Federation, all the opposite: lots of refugees from elsewhere in Syria are hosted there, even the ISIS loyals who were captured are being held in prisons but not tortured nor executed. In Afrin Canton, genocided by Turkey and their fascist mercenaries of the so-called SNA terrorist militias (true brown shirts of Turkey), half of the population was refugees (Arabs mostly) from Aleppo and other parts of Syria ravaged by the fascist aggression (so-called “rebels”) and these were also forcibly displaced by the Turkish Islamo-fascist invaders.
So it’s not at all about ethnocentrism nor racism, all the opposite. You’re being dishonest or are totally brainwashed by Erdogan’s propaganda.
Tükiye ruled Palestine for 600± years. European colonizers of Palestine are in deep doo doo.
Turkey's Erdogan is shipping natural gas to Israel while claiming Israel was an Ottoman Empire outpost and Turkey would like to regain it. I'm paraphrasing Crooke's statements.
Much depends on the US-Israel security arrangement after the global financial system collapses. When does Turkey plan on exiting NATO? Is Erdogan engaging in smoke and mirrors?
Alastair Crooke opines that Israel controls most if not all of Syria's freshwater supplies and presumably, water pipelines.
Most people relying on MSM are unaware that Kurds are one of (if not the) largest minority populations in Turkey, constituting just under 20% of the country's population. They're spread in enclaves stretching from the Syrian border almost to Bulgaria, as well as being liberally spread throughout the rest of the population at large.