Kurds Thrown to Wolves by the US

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

As the Kurds always tell the world, they have no friends but the mountains.

This was demonstrated yet again earlier this month, as the Kurds in war-torn Syria were deserted by U.S. President Donald Trump and left to the tender mercies of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is determined to wipe out any vestige of Kurdish self-rule in Syria.

The Turkish military incursion into northern Syria came after the Trump administration decided to withdraw American troops, which had offered a measure of protection to the Kurds.

Trump declared that, with the Islamic State largely defeated, the United States has no business in Syria any longer.

So the Kurds were reduced, as a fallback, to a quick alliance with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – also no democrat, nor exactly a friend, either.

“If we have to choose between compromise and genocide, we will choose our people,” declared Mazloum Abdi, the commander-in-chief of the Kurdish forces.

This has left open the possibility of an armed confrontation between the Turkish and Syrian armies in the buffer zone that Turkey seeks to create along its long border with Syria.

The Kurds, at least 30 million people, are the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of their own, but most live in Turkey and Iraq, and so the world’s attention has mainly been paid to the Kurdish minorities in those countries until now. 

In northern Iraq, the Kurdish Regional Government has been governing a virtually sovereign de facto state for decades.

In Turkey, on the other hand, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is an organization Ankara defines as a terrorist organization. Its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, is currently serving a life sentence in Turkey. Before he was arrested, Ocalan based his operations out of Syria.

In Syria, Kurds make up between seven and 10 per cent of the population -- some two million people. For decades, they were suppressed and denied basic rights. They were largely overlooked until the country descended into civil war.

The Syrian Kurdish militias, known as the People’s Protection Units (YPG), are the military wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD). Fighting under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the areas they control in Syria are now known as Rojava, or Western Kurdistan.

The SDF has 70,000 soldiers and has borne the brunt of the fighting against the Islamic State, losing 11,000 fighters. But, by trying to cave out an autonomous region along the Syrian border with Turkey, they have drawn the ire of Erdogan. 

He considers them allies, if not indeed an arm, of the PKK, which has waged an armed campaign in Turkey that has killed more than 40,000 people since 1984. The YPG, after all, was spun out of the PKK in 2003. 

The only ones that have come out relatively well in this whole chaotic mess are the Russians, who are trying to act as a buffer and political go-between. A temporary ceasefire is currently in place to allow Kurdish forces to move away from Turkey’s border.

Perhaps Americans can’t afford to police the world’s tribal conflicts anymore, but Moscow has definitely increased its clout in Syria.