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Out of the frying pan? Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images.
Syria’s two million Kurds have every reason to loathe Bashar al-Assad. His Baathist regime long repressed their identity, and there are many Kurdish activists among the countless people emerging, dazed and stumbling, from the dictatorship’s dungeons. But even as Kurds danced and toppled statues, the shadow of further violence cast a pall across the celebrations, especially now their bête noire Turkey is emerging as the dominant foreign power in a new Syria.
With Russian forces withdrawing in disarray, Washington wrong-footed, and Tehran neutered by Israel, Erdoğan appears the main winner from the extraordinary developments in Syria. Turkey’s own objectives in Syria are clear enough: liquidating the Kurdish presence on its border by establishing a 20-mile deep corridor of Turkish influence. In fact, it was reportedly Assad’s refusal to capitulate to this proposed violation of Syrian sovereignty which led Ankara to give an implicit green light to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s military operation. Aleppo, the first city to fall to HTS’s blitzkrieg advance, was a former jewel in the Ottoman Empire’s crown. After its capture, the Turkish flag flew from the Aleppo citadel once more.
Under Assad, the Kurds were written out of state politics — literally. Hundreds of thousands were denied Syrian identity papers, following a Sixties policy intended to “Arabise” the country’s north. In practice, that involved displacing the Kurds, described by an official as a “malignant tumour” in the body of the nation. Over more recent decades, Assad tolerated a militant Kurdish presence within Syria’s borders. The idea was to provoke nearby Turkey, a Nato member and key Western ally. Yet as the relationship between Damascus and Ankara warmed after the Cold War, that arrangement came to an end, and local Kurdish leaders were jailed or expelled. Many locals bear the scars of torture from those dark years, particularly after Assad’s security forces violently repressed a Kurdish uprising in 2005.
The revolutionary Kurdish political movement has moved away from its Marxist-Leninist roots, instead advancing a unique model based on women’s autonomy, minority representation, and a nominally devolved system of municipal governance. That’s even as it retains a strict Leninist political culture, an ideological paradox which nonetheless allowed the Kurds to react swiftly following the 2011 outbreak of the Syrian civil war. Soon enough, they declared autonomy in Rojava, as Syrian Kurds refer to their homeland. During the brutal fight that followed, the Syrian Arab Republic spilled oceans of blood to keep Arab-majority cities in its grasp. That it quickly withdrew its forces from Kurdish areas, surrendering control to a ragtag militia, shows how little it cared about its nominally Kurdish citizens.
Beyond the Baath Party’s Arabist sentiments encouraging a dismissive view of Kurds, Assad likely felt able to ignore his country’s Kurds for other reasons. When compared with the Kurdish homelands in Iran, Iraq and Turkey, the arid badlands of Syrian Kurdistan were long dismissed as poor and undynamic. Yet the Kurds, bolstered by returning militants, battle-hardened during a dogged guerrilla war against Turkey, proved the only local force capable of defeating Islamic State. Along the way, they saved the Yazidis from genocide, and forged unexpected tactical partnerships with both Americans and local Arabs. As they drove Isis out of its former strongholds, including its erstwhile capital Raqqa, the Kurds helped forge a fragile multi-ethnic alliance alongside Arab Muslims, Yazidis, Christians, and other minorities. Known as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), this alliance has since faced existential threats. That includes a deadly Islamic State insurgency; sporadic battles against Assad; and successive military occupations launched by Turkey — with Ankara bitterly opposed to the project in Kurdish-led autonomy on its southern border.
Throughout this fraught process, constructing a quasi-state while espousing a determinedly anti-statist ideology, the Kurdish movement demonstrated a protean diplomatic adaptability, finding various accommodations with Assad, Islamist and secular opposition forces, the US and Russia. With Russian and Iranian troops stationed in western Kurdish regions, and the US, UK and France to the east, the Syrian Kurds were able to exploit tensions between the two blocs, and make themselves indispensable to both. Kurdish forces even mediated when US and Russian patrols clashed while establishing their respective zones of influence in 2019-2020: a striking illustration of their ability to profit from the chaos of great-power conflict.
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SubscribeErdogan is a Pan Islamist who operates under a veneer of pragmatism. His espousal of hardline Salafist Islam is being ignored by the West but is bound to create further tensions in Central, West and South Asia.
He is much more dangerous than any other tinpot dictators.
I see the Imam of the Great Mosque in Constantinople has resumed giving the sermon leaning on a drawn scimitar.
I make it a rule of taking such gestures and their backers at face value these days.
https://medium.com/exploring-history/hagia-sophia-opening-spawns-new-era-turkey-99fd01b28798
Yet the Western leadership turns a blind eye….
Excellent article thank you. I fear that the answer to the question posed in the headline is “yes”.
Extraordinarily worrying given not only relatively recent events but also the history of brutal genocides perpetrated in that region by the Ottomans in the early 20th century.
Turkey’s actions in this articles seem to be framed as anti-insurgency, and illegitimate only in their methods and violence. The heart of the matter is the National PACT, an explicitly expansionist and revanchist program which leaders of all stripea publicly support with shameless maps of Greater Turkey.
I would love to know more about the Kurds. This article hasn’t been very informative. Are they just communists, or in what way have they “moved on” from that? I don’t know. I suspect however that they aren’t Muslims, and hence the hatred? Which, if true, is not good news for the Syrian Christians either..
The plight of the Kurds, it should not be forgotten, was the trigger – or pretext – for the US invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein. Beware intervention.
for months I heard that Erdogan’s interest was Gaza and potentially going to the aid of fellow Muslims because Turks were so enraged by what is happening. Then we learn that Turkey has been supplying Israel with oil and otherwise behaving more as an ally than opponent. Politics is an interesting business.
Turkey is a key member of NATO, they can do what they want
Israel controls the US, they can attack and invade any country they like
Thats the way the rules based order works
And yet – the UN apparatchiks were quick to condemn Israel’s destruction of the Syrian army’s strategic arms stockpiles, including chemical weapons (!), and the IDF’s limited incursion in the uninhabited Golan buffer zone after it had been deserted by the Syrian army and after the IDF had had to rescue an UNDOF base that had been overrun by jihadist militants (!!). But not a word about Turkey’s large scale invasion and bombing of civilians in Rojava …
Two tier UN.
Let me know when the US and EU impose sanctions on Isreal or Turkey
Why would they impose sanctions on Israel? The only country in the region where any of us would live, by the way.