Molan’s fate, and the Iranian missiles that continue to strike targets across northern Iraq, encapsulates the grave threat faced by Kurds and their political representatives. Rumored US support for a cross-border Kurdish assault on Iran has failed to materialize, leaving the Kurds exposed on the frontlines of a war they didn’t start. Three more Kurdish fighters were injured in a fresh strike just hours after Donald Trump announced the extension of a fragile ceasefire.

Yet beyond the Kurds and their unending fight for self-determination, Molan’s death also points to a broader crisis, one rapidly reaching boiling-point right across Iraq. Compared to Iran’s well-publicized ties to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, Tehran’s network of Iraqi Shia militias receive relatively little attention abroad. But amid missile strikes and the high-profile kidnapping of a US journalist, US-Iraqi relations are now at their lowest ebb since 2003. Just this week, Washington cut Iraq off from dollar shipments altogether, demanding its nominal partner sever ties with Tehran and arrest militia members accused of attacks on US bases. As Trump’s standoff with the Revolutionary Guards continues, his war on Iran looks set to spill over onto yet another country.

The semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), established following the Gulf War, has long been a loyal partner to the West. One street in the capital Erbil was recently renamed after John Major, honoring Britain’s own role in establishing the safe haven in Iraq’s mountainous north, today home to around six million Kurds. So when the American press started leaking news that the US and Israel were looking to “arm the Kurds” in the early days of the 2026 war, it seemed a repeat of that same partnership could be on the cards in neighboring Iran, itself home to some 10 million Kurds. The Islamic Republic has killed tens of thousands of its own Kurdish population over the years, including during 2022’s “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising and in response to massive protests this January.

But according to Hoshyar Siwaily, the head of foreign relations for the KRI’s governing Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), reports of an imminent US-backed cross-border operation were fake news. “Even when the KRI is facing continuous missile and drone attacks, from both Iran and our neighbors in Iraq, the West has not provided the KRI with the means to defend itself,” Siwaily tells UnHerd. “We’ve been asking the US and our European partners to provide us with air defense systems, which we think they would be willing to provide — but Baghdad’s position hinders that kind of direct assistance.”

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US forces stationed in Erbil operate their own air-defense system at the city’s airport. That means some protection for locals; busy shopping streets are peppered with falling shrapnel more than direct missile impacts. Still, it’s better than Kurdish regions outside the capital, which have no such shield. That includes the camps housing the various exiled Iranian Kurdish parties, sheltering under the wing of their more successful Iraqi brethren, and where most of the Kurdish casualties have been concentrated.

Hassan Sharifi is a senior representative of the KDP-I, the largest and oldest Iranian Kurdish opposition party. “We don’t have any role in starting this war between Iran and Israel and the USA, and we don’t have any role in it continuing or stopping,” he says, wearing a military-green version of the traditional Kurdish cummerbund as he speaks in his party’s Erbil headquarters. “And yet Iran continues to strike us, all day every day.”

Both domestically and abroad, scapegoating the Kurds has long been an attractive option for Iran, as it fights its asymmetrical war with the West. Washington’s careless hints at a partnership between the Kurds, the US and Israel have only poured oil on the fire. Adib Khaladyan, a political representative for another Iranian-Kurdish opposition group, counts members of his own small party among the dead. “We have refrained from any attacks on Iran since 2005, but they have never ceased attacking us,” he tells UnHerd in the lobby of an Erbil hotel included on an Iranian hit list for allegedly sheltering US and Israeli intelligence agents. Khaladyan, for his part, denies this charge. “There’s no concrete evidence Israel is supporting any Iranian Kurdish party,” he says, adding that the Islamic Republic nonetheless targets Iranian Kurdish parties and the houses of their members.

In any case, decades of political exile and internal repression by Tehran mean their scope for action within Iran itself is relatively limited, with the Iraqi-Kurdish authorities pragmatically keeping their Iranian guests on a tight leash. “We are not willing to let these [opposition] political parties use Kurdistan as a base to launch their attacks against Iran,” Siwaily says, pointing to a 2023 agreement between the KRI, Baghdad and Tehran aimed at disarming the Kurdish-Iranian opposition. But though the Kurds haven’t fired a single bullet against Iran throughout the two-month conflict, the war has reached their doorstep anyway. As well as contending with over 700 Iranian strikes since the war began, Iraqi Kurds have faced fire from their Arab compatriots.

As the leading force of the Shia Muslim world, Tehran has long sought influence in majority-Shia Iraq, home to both Shia Islam’s most sacred sites and the seminaries that honed the Islamic Republic’s religious leaders. While the US was busy backing Kurdish aspirations in the north during its wars with Saddam Hussein, Iran supported militias in the Shia south. Iran-backed insurgents went on to resist the post-2003 US occupation, before growing in strength and influence as they joined the fight against ISIS. Scores of militias, grouped under the banner of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), can today field hundreds of thousands of fighters. More than that, they regularly launch missile attacks at US bases and assets across the region — including, of course, the Kurds.

Tehran has a well-known policy financing and training regional proxies like Hezbollah and the Houthis, enabling them to attack common foes in Israel and the US. But Iran’s Iraqi allies are arguably more valuable still, providing not just military cover, but billions of dollars in cash. These militias dominate Iraqi politics through the “Coordination Framework” of Shiite political parties, helping Iran achieve massive control over Iraq’s political, economic and legislative apparatus. To that extent, “militia” is a misnomer for a network that may still engage in checkpoint-level corruption at the grassroots, but which at the state level runs vast construction, agriculture, real estate and infrastructure enterprises. Especially as it struggles with sanctions and now a blockade, Iran is more reliant than ever on billions of dollars arriving from Iraq via shell companies and informal transfers, with the PMF for instance deploying a complex scheme to make $1.5 billion from Iraq’s black-market exchange rate.

While Washington and Tehran continue their will-they-won’t-they dance over a ceasefire, meanwhile, another set of highly significant negotiations is taking place in Iraq. The Baghdad political establishment is currently struggling to overcome a five-month deadlock and elect a new prime minister. A candidate elected with heavy Iranian backing has already been directly vetoed by President Trump under threat of US sanctions — but the pro-Iranian bloc is now trying to advance another pick, himself already sanctioned by Washington. US Special Envoy Tom Barrack this week stopped in Erbil before flying down to Baghdad, arriving in the capital to lobby for US interests to be respected. A senior member of the Revolutionary Guards was elsewhere in the city, making the opposite case for Iran. Hezbollah may be decimated, and Tehran in turmoil, but in Baghdad the US-Iranian struggle continues on an equal footing.

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Since the 7 October attack and Israel’s bloody reprisals across the Middle East, the Iraqi front has remained relatively quiet, as Iran’s proxies concentrated on consolidating and institutionalizing their power. The PMF’s penetration of Iraq was underscored this month when they plucked US journalist Shelly Kittleson from the streets of Baghdad and fired drones at a US diplomatic convoy from within the capital. All the same, US and Israeli strikes killing scores of PMF militiamen have not yet been met with an aggressive response.

Now, however, the hour of reckoning may finally have come. This week, the US has stopped all dollar shipments to Iraq’s central bank, and suspended all security coordination with the Iraqi government. Besides the Kurds, the US has its allies in Iraq’s formal security forces. Unfortunately for Washington, the PMF is larger and better-financed than Iraq’s actual army. If, in other words, the US and Israel ramp up their strikes, this political and economic struggle could yet devolve into outright civil conflict, pitting the PMF against Iraq’s beleaguered armed forces plus Sunni and tribal armed groups. Such chaos would, of course, create room for militant Islamists of all stripes — an especially concerning scenario given the US has just airlifted nearly 6,000 ISIS detainees from Syria and deposited them into Iraqi custody.

The shock-waves would certainly extend to Kurdistan, the USA’s last solid ally in Iraq, where political parties are struggling to plot a course through a sea of historic enemies. Even the pro-Western KDP has fostered a pragmatic alliance with the pro-Iranian presidential candidate in Baghdad. Iran, for its part, continues to exert deeper influence across Iraqi-Iranian borderlands controlled by the KDP’s historic rivals in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). It was here that Kurdish hospitals turned away the wounded Kurdish fighter, fearing Iranian reprisals.

“Although we are partners of the USA,” says the Kurdish politician Siwaily, “we would like to stay neutral, because this war is bigger than us.” But though Trump has now extended his ceasefire deadline, missiles continue to fly over Kurdistan, and the drums of war are sounding in Baghdad. Staying neutral might well be wishful thinking.

Whether noble or naive, this project now looks doomed as AANES’s great power backers turn their fickle attentions to Damascus, and the Damascus government has in turn successfully reasserted its control through military coercion. Within a matter of days, as its Sunni Arab levies turned their affections to their ethnic kin in Damascus and their guns on their former allies, Northeast Syria switched from a bold experiment in multi-ethnic governance to a desperate, rearguard battle for Kurdish cultural and political autonomy. The war, at its presumed end, reverted to the dynamics of its earliest days, when Ahmed al-Sharaa, then leader of the Syrian al-Qaeda faction Jabhat al-Nusra, had attempted, along with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels and tribes of changeable loyalties, to seize control of the oil-rich, and newly Kurdish-run region, Syria’s breadbasket.

Simultaneously rich in resources yet neglected by its central government, and host to the country’s richest mix of ethnic and religious minorities, alternately the tools and the victims of the central state, the Syrian Jazira had always run according to its own dynamics. Both colonial French and independent Syrian administrations in distant, Levantine Damascus expended significant, if sporadic, effort in absorbing this neglected region of Mesopotamia within the modern state system, privileging one ethnic group against another for reasons of statecraft, and building model towns and vast dams, as evocative in their current dilapidation of failed modernities as the ancient tells dotting the landscape, now repurposed as gun emplacements, are of earlier lost civilizations.

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Perhaps the AANES experiment can now be added to this melancholy list. Birthed from the fusion of Kurdish nationalism and Marxist-Leninist thought that initially drove the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) independence movement, the AANES, a project of the PKK’s Syrian sister organization, the Democratic Union Party ‎(PYD), performed an attempted shift to anarchist political theory. The thought of the American writer Murray Bookchin, as reworked by the PKK’s occluded godhead figure Abdullah Öcalan from his Turkish jail cell, was its most notable innovation. Echoing Öcalan’s rejection of the PKK’s previous project of independence for the Kurdish nation, the AANES presented itself as an explicitly multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian state in which the greatest possible autonomy was devolved to religious and ethnic communities, beneath the benign framework of Jazira’s de facto autonomy from Damascus. In practice, the quasi-anarchist devolution of power resulted in the proliferation of bureaucratic structures. Local empowerment, similarly, meant the elevation of new elites loyal to the project, and the freezing out of dissidents, particularly rival Kurdish factions. Imperfect though it may have been, compared to the overt totalitarianism of the Baathist state, the anarchic infighting of the FSA rebels, and the gothic cruelties of ISIS, history is likely to remember it more favorably than today’s discourse would suggest.

Barely populated until the French Mandate period, except during the annual circulation of nomadic Bedouin shepherds, the portion of Syria east of the Euphrates underwent during the early 20th century a transformative period of internal and external immigration and development analogous, in a modest way, to that of California or Australia. Ethnic Kurds fleeing the collapse of proto-nationalist rebellions in Ataturk’s Turkey, along with Syriac Christians fleeing the Seifo genocide and many uprooted Armenians streamed south across the culverts and rusting tracks of the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway line, which still marks the modern border, joining their ethnic kin residing there from the beginning of recorded history. Ethnic Assyrians from British-Mandate northern Iraq similarly sought French protection from the predation of the Iraqi state and its Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen auxiliaries, establishing a string of fiercely Christian villages along the Khabur river. Northeast Syria was shaped by the cultural memory of ethnic conflict; its past decade of governance was an attempt to evade the return of its attendant cruelties.

As such, the AANES project was always as much one of necessity as Leftist idealism. The Kurdish regions of northern Syria, stretching West of the Euphrates into Aleppo, were separated from each other by clusters of Arab and Turkmen towns and villages, in large part the result of the Baathist state’s settlement of Arabs from Syria’s desert hinterland to hinder any Kurdish attempts at secession. While the early successes of the Syrian Kurds under the PYD, following a negotiated handover of control by Assad’s overstretched government, resulted in what was essentially the occupation by its YPG military forces of Arab settlements, loyal to one or other rebel or jihadist faction, America’s decisive intervention in the war against ISIS resulted in both sudden and unexpected great power backing for Northeast Syria and an evolution of Kurdish political attitudes towards local Arabs.

Partly at America’s behest, in a failed attempt to assuage the Syrian rebels’ combative Western think-tank diaspora, and partly a genuine attempt to impose progressive governance among a population Kurds frequently portray as stunted by its own reactionary obscurantism and crude ethnic chauvinism, Northeast Syria’s autonomous quasi-government undertook a project of delegating political and military authority to Arab regions won back from ISIS. It was an ambitious goal which seemed, for a decade, to have won majority acquiescence, if not affection. It became the boast of the regional administration that its armed forces, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), was now predominantly composed of Arabs, a feat of enlightened governance that rapidly proved hollow, over the past two weeks, when the majority of these Arab fighters effortlessly switched sides. Having lost almost all its Arab accretions, the SDF was once again, in practice, the Kurdish YPG, an ethnic militia fighting for purely Kurdish goals. Now that, under the threat of military defeat, a shrunken version of these forces will be subsumed under the Damascus government’s control, their future role — on paper, and in reality — remains to be seen.

The integration terms finally accepted, at gunpoint, by the autonomous administration last weekend, though better than those of a fortnight ago are worse than those of the unimplemented March agreement. Consequently, much has been made in recent days of the AANES’s failures to come to terms with al-Sharaa’s shock capture of the Syrian state just over a year ago, and negotiate a settlement with the new reality. Certainly, the region’s political focus had, since the seeming cornering of the Sunni Arab rebellion into its Idlib Bantustan, centered on negotiating re-integration into Assad’s Baathist state in a manner that preserved some means of political and military autonomy. Yet Assad, over-confident of his own position as victor of the long and bloody war, refused to offer more than integration into the central state on terms that amounted to surrender. The new regime in Damascus now offers little different: what has changed is its greater power of coercion, and international backing, compared to its previous Baathist iteration.

Putin, once an occasional, tacit partner of the Kurds west of the Euphrates, has fully backed the new Damascus government, another instance where Russia, once America’s rival in Syria, shares increasingly aligned interests with the Trump White House. Calls for the protection of Kurdish cultural rights and social norms by European states are outweighed by their overriding political interest in the accelerated removal of their more than one million mostly Sunni Arab refugees. Regionally, the success or otherwise of the Northeast’s reintegration will determine Israel’s ability to justify its military protection of Druze autonomists in the southern province of Sweida. Relations with mostly Shia Iraq, which has its own reasons to look askance at Sunni jihadist governance and is currently making a show of reinforcing its border with Syria, will be fraught at best. Given the sheer improbability of fate’s wheel suddenly projecting al-Sharaa into Assad’s Damascus palace, it would be foolhardy to offer any firm predictions, rather than vague anxieties, for the country’s future.

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For the Kurds themselves, the experiment in enlightened multi-ethnic governance proved, at the crucial moment, a dramatic and costly Achilles heel. The result, over time, will likely be the weakening of PKK ideology in favor of some form of pan-Kurdish ethnic nationalism, whose early stirrings are apparent in the flow of volunteers from northern Iraq to defend their ethnic kin, the sudden revival of the Kurdish flag, Ala Rengin, in Northeast Syria, and in the readoption of the ethnic term Rojava, or West Kurdistan, in place of its previously bland geographic descriptor. When even Abdullah Öcalan’s nephew Ömer, an MP in Turkey’s parliament for the movement-aligned DEM party, feels compelled to proclaim “Long live the Kurds and Kurdistan”, and “the Kurdish nation will not forgive the enmity committed against it”, we sense the tectonic plates of Kurdish politics shifting away from Leftist post-national idealism towards an embryonic ethnic nationalism. The decade-long experience of Kurdish self-governance, military success and international diplomacy will shape whatever follows the likely collapse of the AANES statelet, whether what replaces it will coalesce in the mountainous redoubts of eastern Turkey, Western Iran and northern Iraq, or in the grey cities of the European diaspora. So, too, will bitter analysis of the project’s failings.

Yet it would be unfair for harsh self-criticism to so soon follow hindsight. For all its faults, the Kurdish project of autonomy from the Syrian central state evolved, through managing the dynamics of their multi-ethnic region, into one that ironically and idealistically attempted to make the very idea of equable Syrian co-existence a political possibility. Inversely, the current Damascus project of re-centralization has, in western Syria, been accompanied by sectarian massacres and other abuses, which have increased the antipathy of peripheral minority populations towards the central state. Sunni Arab supporters of the al-Sharaa government, whose decade-long displeasure at having their ethnic kin ruled by minorities is accompanied by certainty of their own natural right to rule those same minorities, have made much of Kurdish intransigence while minimizing or even justifying the starkest governance failures of their own new regime. Yet the past year’s massacres of Alawites and Druze, punctuating the failed integration talks with the AANES, only heightened the Kurdish disinclination to disarm and dissolve its forces and place the fates of its people in the benevolence of the central state.

Syria’s post-independence oscillation between peripheral revolts and centralized coercion, the very cycle that produced both Assad and his own overthrow, is simply the remorseless logic of a country, like neighboring Lebanon and Iraq, held hostage by its own tangled demographics. Whether or not the new Syria can break this cycle is an open question. It will take great feats of governance, and of control over his own disparate armed forces, by al-Sharaa to avoid the logic of Syria’s demographic confusion weakening his own state-building project just as, suddenly and catastrophically, it did for the Kurds. Syria’s ethnic and religious complexity makes it a hard country to rule, historically veering, as a result, between instability and oppression. The Kurdish attempt to find another, progressive path ultimately failed, for the same reasons. The lessons, it ought not to need underlining, reach far beyond Syria’s borders.

So far, he has said the right things, apparently trying to govern with pragmatism. But the reality is that the future of Syria does not lie with him — and his fellow Sunnis — alone. Syria’s minorities will help decide the nation’s fate as well, and none is as large or powerful as its Kurds. They, after all, are the only real force in the country outside Damascus that can put a disciplined army in the field: the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which was built in alliance with the United States to destroy ISIS. No less important, they control about 70% of Syria’s oil and gas reserves.

That blend of military and economic neatly explains why, if Syria is to survive as a viable state, Sharaa must find a way to accommodate its Kurdish minority, which even amid the upheavals of war and displacement represent roughly a tenth of the country’s total population. Combined with a gaggle of other minorities — Christians, Alawites, Druze — Syria simply cannot be the Sunni Caliphate that Sharaa once sought.

Still, many Kurds remain wary. In the cafés of Qamishli, the main city of the Syrian Kurdish region popularly known as Rojava, people joke that Sharaa’s beard may be shorter — but his prayers are the same. They want Syria to work. They need it to. But behind the dark humor lies genuine fear: that a man defined by jihad can never build the pluralist state necessary to keep Syria together.

No one understands these tensions better than Aldar Khalil. Officially, he is a senior member of the Executive Committee of the Democratic Society Movement in Rojava — the Kurdish-run autonomous region in Syria’s northeast — and its most powerful figure. In reality, he is its de facto leader. Whether or not the Syrian state can hold together will come down, in large part, to the decisions he and a few others around him take.

To meet Khalil, I leave Qamishli and travel through pale emptiness to the town of Hasakah. At checkpoints, Kurdish fighters in faded fatigues wave me through. We enter the city and eat. Night falls and we wait for news. It’s time: follow the black car, we are told. We end up in a municipal building of some kind. Prominently displayed on a wall is a photo of Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who’s been in a Turkish prison since 1999, and whose picture you see everywhere in Rojava. We sit in a large room with Kurdish carpets on the wall. Coffee and bottles of water are laid out for us.

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Khalil enters with his security detail. He wears beige trousers and a checked shirt. I notice that his left hand is missing. Later I ask why, but nobody really knows. One of my guides ventures that it might have something to do with a grenade, but that’s just speculation.

Khalil’s manner is polite, controlled, his voice almost soft. “People in Syria began the revolution hoping for a democratic system,” he says. “But after the regime collapsed, what came was in total opposition to that: a government that wants to take us back 1,400 years.” He means Sharaa. “This is someone with a very restrictive mind,” Khalil continues flatly. “You cannot expect someone like that to change. Maybe he changes his name or city, maybe he speaks differently for the media — but his beliefs stay the same.”

So can the Kurds deal with such a man? “We are Syrians,” Khalil replies. “Either we cede from Syria — and we have no plans for that — or we need to work with whoever is in Damascus, we have to deal with him. We are forced to negotiate.” What about clashes with Alawites on the coast, and with the Druze in Suweyda earlier this year, which both led to brief revivals of Syria’s sectarian slaughter? Does Khalil blame the government for those? “Of course we blame the government.”

Khalil’s own vision is simple: a decentralized Syria, each community managing itself, united by loose federal ties. Fail, he warns, and the country will slide back into civil war, not just in Rojava but “everywhere in Syria”. Not that Damascus is the only threat to Rojava’s future. It was Turkey, after all, that armed and bankrolled Sharaa’s overthrow of Assad at the end of last year, and which has considerable sway with Damascus now. This also poses a considerable problem for Rojava, whose Kurdish forces President Erdogan sees simply as the Syrian version of the PKK — which it considers to be a terror group responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in its mountainous southeast.

“Recently we have had several meetings in Damascus with the Syrian government,” Khalil tells me. “But unfortunately, after every meeting, Damascus promises to form committees to work on integration and then, immediately afterwards, Turkey steps in to impede the process. At the moment, we have two delegations waiting to see what will happen next, because Turkey keeps undermining the negotiations.”

I leave Khalil and step into the night. The traffic is heavy. Concrete minarets stand tall in the gloom. The next morning I’m back on the road again. The sun is climbing high, flattening everything into gold and white. I drive near Qamishli airport, and, to my right, the Turkish border scars the horizon. Every few kilometers, a watchtower stands looking across. To my left, a Russian flag flaps limply over an armored compound.

It’s a physical reminder of the perennial role of outsiders here. Before I arrived, a regional expert explained the situation to me by way of analogy. “Think of Syria as a condominium,” he said. “Russia owns the walls, America the roof, and Turkey has the keys. Everyone else rents the space inside.”

He was exaggerating for effect, but I now see what he means. Everywhere I look in Rojava, there are signs of this uneasy balance: Russian soldiers buy bread from Kurdish stalls; American engineers fix irrigation pumps; Turkish drones strike sporadically. It’s a useful reminder of how crucial this region remains: Moscow still needs Damascus to keep its port on the Mediterranean, while Iran wants a corridor to the sea once more and the United States, half-hearted and weary, stays only to contain the remnants of ISIS.

To understand what this might mean for the Kurds, I meet Fawza Yusuf, co-chair of the Autonomous Administration’s Executive Council. Composed and cheerful, she heads the delegation that meets with Damascus, which is to say she’s the woman now negotiating the fate of Syria for the Kurds. Like Khalil, meanwhile, she stresses the importance of negotiating with the new regime in Damascus. “From the start we believed the only way is peace, dialogue, and negotiation,” she explains. “We must talk to Damascus directly — there is no other path.”

It is the language of a negotiator who understands both the limits and the possibilities of her position. “We have fought enough wars,” Yusuf continues, sipping black tea. “Now we need a country where our children can live.” Yet — and again like Khalil — she’s skeptical of Sharaa’s intentions. “Their policy is anti-democratic,” she says. “They still don’t recognize others. But we continue working.”

What she means by “working” is critical, both to the Kurds and Damascus, and it includes the slow-motion integration of the SDF into the national army. You cannot run an effective state unless you have a monopoly on the use of force, which comes through having sole control of its only army. The Kurds, for their part, accept this, albeit on their own terms. “We agreed with Damascus that we will join the Syrian army — but not as individuals,” she says. “We will join as brigades: the SDF will become three brigades in the national army and remain stationed here.”

The SDF gives Rojava leverage — up to a point. The force numbers roughly perhaps 70,000 fighters, most of them veterans hardened by years of war with ISIS. They’re battle-tested, and disciplined in light-infantry and counterinsurgency tactics, but lack heavy armor, air defense, and artillery. In open battle, then, they’d be little match for Damascus’s army or Russian airpower. Yet in their own territory – the plains and towns of the northeast – they could bleed any invading force through guerrilla warfare and local support.

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It is a clever sort of compromise: ostensible unity, but without surrender, even as Yusuf herself evokes a “decentralized” Syria going forward. Yet with many in Damascus seeing federalism as the short end of a secessionist wedge, optimism is perhaps harder in practice. Rhetorically, certainly, Sharaa is unequivocal about the need for a united Syria. “We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible,” he said on 25 February, during the opening speech of the Syrian National Dialogue Conference in Damascus.

And if a Turkish-backed Sharaa is one worry for Yusuf, another foreign power looms large over Syria too. Israeli aircraft have long been a presence in the night skies, striking weapons depots from Damascus to Deir ez-Zor, sometimes near the oil fields the Kurds control. A weak, divided Syria suits Israel’s security. While Iran’s land bridge to Hezbollah fell with Assad, the Israelis want to ensure that Iranian militias cannot burrow their way into the nascent post-Assad state.

But Israel and the Kurds have much in common. Both perennial outsiders in a largely Sunni Arab Middle East, they have survived by living on the edge, sustained by vigilance. They have collaborated in the past, and, for many of the Kurds here, Israel is a model of the type of muscular independence they seek.

Yet the Israeli model the Kurds quietly admire – a small, embattled state that survived by building institutions, intelligence networks and deterrent power – offers both inspiration and illusion. Israel’s strength came from coherent leadership, outside backing, and a shared national narrative. The Kurds, by contrast, remain divided between rival parties and foreign patrons. Emulating Israel’s vigilance is one thing; reproducing its fortress statehood in the middle of Arab Syria is quite another.

There are other dangers in being seen as Israel’s proxy. The Druze of southern Syria learned that lesson when their perceived ties to Tel Aviv turned them into targets for both foreign jihadists and the Damascus regime. For the Kurds, then, any open alignment with Israel risks uniting Ankara, Tehran, and Damascus against them: a trinity of enemies they can hardly afford. Their survival, as ever, depends on balancing between powers without becoming the pawn of any.

And if Syria’s future depends on Rojava — secession would certainly wreck the country’s economy, and perhaps even rekindle the civil war’s ethnic butchery — the whole region hinges on it too. If Rojava unravels, after all, Lebanon’s sectarian truce could collapse; Iraq’s Kurdish-Arab balance might crack; Turkey would face renewed insurgency; Iran would push its militias deeper west. If Syria’s fate still depends on foreign powers, then, those same foreign powers are bound to Syria too — whether at the White House or closer to home.

As the most organized and militant opposition within Iran, the Kurds might dream of forging a coalition with the country’s other minorities and playing a determinant role in any future civil conflict, just like their Syrian Kurdish counterparts during that country’s civil war. More pragmatically, they recognize that continued Israeli attacks will only bring fresh hardship to their long-suffering people, who are now being targeted by the Islamic regime even as Israel seeks to exploit their cause. This impasse was underscored during Israel’s bombing campaign, as IDF airstrikes hit a hospital in Iran’s largest Kurdish-majority city, while Iran executed three Kurdish men as part of a wider crackdown.

Iran’s Kurds are long used to losing out when great powers clash. The Kurdish and Persian languages have common roots, and the two peoples’ histories are deeply entwined. Iran’s foundational Safavid order even has its roots in a mystic, millenarian Kurdish Sufi order. Thereafter, wherever Kurdish principalities and vassal states bubbled up, they were overrun, as the Ottomans and Persians engaged in scorched-earth battles across their territory.

More recently, the first modern, independent Kurdish polity was established by Iranian Kurds. But the Soviet-sponsored Republic of Mahabad was soon abandoned by Moscow, then crushed by the Western-backed Shah.

This betrayal set the tone for subsequent decades. The 1979 Islamic Revolution brought no respite to the Kurds, who had generally backed the overthrow of the Shah’s repressive apparatus but soon launched their own insurgency to oppose the new, Islamist regime. Thousands of them were killed and 1,200 political prisoners were executed as forces loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini once again suppressed their bid for sovereignty.

During the brutal trench combat of the Iran-Iraq War, Tehran backed Iraqi Kurds and Baghdad backed Iranian Kurds, each side then taking revenge on their domestic Kurdish populations. Iran kept executing Kurds, while Iraqi Kurdistan suffered the Anfal genocide perpetrated by Saddam Hussein, and marked by the use of chemical weapons. Once again, neither East nor West was interested in alleviating Kurdish suffering — except insofar as it could be exploited to suit other regional agendas.

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Given these limitations, Iran’s complex constellation of Leftist and nationalist Kurdish opposition forces have unsurprisingly been driven into exile. The PKK itself has long had an ambiguous relationship with Tehran, generally preferring to concentrate its firepower on Turkey, even if its affiliates have fought a waning battle against Iranian forces. Iran’s strong repressive apparatus means there’s presently little room for any of these parties to maneuver.

Meanwhile, the Kurdish political movement is not only exiled and fragmented, but also isolated within Iran itself. This vast, diverse country is also home to tens of millions of Turkic-speaking Azeris, plus a restive Baloch population on the Pakistani border, and an Arab minority at the strategic chokepoint where Iran, Iraq and Kuwait meet the Persian Gulf. These groups have distinct agendas and ideologies and have historically struggled to forge meaningful links — regardless of their shared experiences of repression.

Compared to the darkest days of the Eighties, the current situation is nonetheless slightly improved. Iran recognizes Kurdish as a regional language, with the country’s Kurdish-speaking President Masoud Pezeshkian recently addressing Kurds in their mother tongue. Reformist politicians are now apt to make (generally unfulfilled) overtures towards the Iranian Kurds. But for the most part, they still suffer discrimination, poverty, and brutal repression. Many eke out a living as illegal porters, laboring across the inhospitable mountains dividing Iranian Kurdistan from Turkey, carrying smuggled goods on their backs. Otherwise, little escapes the region save grainy clips of abuse by the Revolutionary Guards and Guidance Patrol, better known as the morality police.

Given this long-term repression, many Iranian Kurds would welcome a change of government, potentially even one brought about by Israeli intervention. But past and present experience suggest that Israeli exploitation is unlikely to further the Kurdish cause. With Israel’s “12-Day War” on Iran apparently over, at least for the moment, the question now is what role Iran’s Kurds will play in future phases of the conflict.

Despite the challenges they face, Iranian Kurdish armed groups are the country’s strongest opposition. In their statement responding to Israel’s strikes, the PKK’s Iranian affiliates somewhat hopefully envisage a rejuvenated “Women, Life, Freedom” protest movement, backed by a rainbow coalition of women, minority movements and pro-democratic forces. Meanwhile, a recent détente between the PKK and Turkey could pave the way for a surge of manpower and matériel to the PKK’s Iranian affiliates, even as the PKK remains included on global terror lists and is unlikely to pursue Western policy goals. A smaller, less radical Iranian Kurdish group called Komala is busy in Washington, openly touting for military aid by promising a “nuclear-free Iran”. It’s therefore possible to imagine a future in which Tehran’s grip on power slackens and diverse Kurdish forces overcome ideological differences to establish de facto autonomy in their home regions.

But this scenario remains an outside possibility. As demonstrated by the ongoing crackdown, which has seen Tehran arrest hundreds of people in Kurdish regions and throughout Iran, Israel’s assault is more likely to entrench the militarization and centralization of Iranian society. Any path towards a reformed Iran will be long and bloody, and it’s difficult to imagine how any such domestic movement could avoid being exploited or fractured by the sponsorship of foreign powers. Notably, Turkey would likely benefit from any such breakdown to enter the Iranian arena as a sponsor of the Azeri population, to the inevitable detriment of the Kurds. For its part, Israel has long sought to find individual Kurdish leaders or groups to exploit as part of its so-called “periphery doctrine”, forging alliances and proxy relationships with non-Muslims and non-Arabs excluded from Middle Eastern politics.

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To be fair, there is a significant degree of sympathy for both the US and Israel on the Kurdish street. But even less ideologically motivated Iraqi Kurdish leaders, who have long benefited from a steady oil trade through Turkey to Israel, have condemned Israel’s latest round of strikes. They recognize that Netanyahu’s rhetorical manipulation of the Kurdish cause endangers Kurds, aligning them with Israeli interests and further isolating the minority from their neighbors throughout the Muslim world. The Kurds are thus transformed into low-hanging fruit, enabling Iran to claim victorious “retaliation” against Israel by striking random Iraqi Kurdish targets and executing Kurdish political prisoners on spurious, unproven claims of Mossad links.

As for the Kurds themselves, anti-imperialist and Islamic solidarity, plus shared experiences of genocide, inspire sympathy with Palestinians. The PKK itself began life training with Palestinian militants in Lebanon’s Beka’a Valley, and remains vocally opposed to Nato imperialism and Israeli settler colonialism. As Israeli bombs fell around Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, the female Kurdish political prisoners detained there released an open letter calling for an end to the assault and warning that “foreign powers” could not bring liberation to their people.

This explains why many Kurds are angered by Netanyahu’s appropriation of the originally-Kurdish “Woman, Life, Freedom” slogan. The phrase became a famous rallying-cry for Kurdish-led anti-regime protests after Iran’s morality police killed a young Kurdish woman following an alleged hijab infraction. It then spread around the world in a campaign backed by Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush, divorced from its radical roots and adopted by the conservative, nationalistic, anti-Kurdish mainstream of the Iranian opposition.

None of this helped Kurdish protesters, who were executed in their hundreds. On the contrary, Netanyahu’s lip-service only endangered the Kurds by enabling Iranian authorities to present any and all Kurdish opposition as Israeli stooges. Rather than suggesting any forthcoming material support, Netanyahu’s latest speech is the Iranian edition of an Israeli tactic long familiar from Turkey and Syria — using rhetorical appeals over the Kurds to deflect criticism of Israel’s own, genocidal war in Gaza.

For now, exiled Kurdish militants continue to mull their options in the event of full-scale war, while urging a path beyond both Israel’s genocidal war and Iran’s repressive regime. Between retributive Iranian violence on the one hand, and cynical exploitation by Israel on the other, that path may prove hard to find.

In another twist to the 20th-century tale of foreign exploitation, Henry Kissinger once plotted a Kurdish uprising against Saddam in cahoots with the Iranian Shah, only to cancel the operation and abandon America’s Kurdish allies once more. In Kissinger’s own telling, the Kurds had to recognise that “covert action should not be confused with missionary work”. As great-power conflict continues to rage across their homeland, the Kurds forget this ugly, realist lesson at their peril.

The PKK’s senior leadership recently gathered in the cave networks where they shelter from ceaseless Turkish airstrikes, and in a somber-looking conference proposed an end to the conflict which has cost a reported 40,000 lives. Most of the dead were Kurdish civilians killed by Turkey’s brutal counter-insurgency, a fact often missed when that grim statistic is trotted out. And, certainly, Ankara’s drone technology and growing geopolitical clout have tipped the balance against the PKK, with the group’s embattled, exiled leaders hardly negotiating from a place of strength.

Yet rumors of the PKK’s demise are often greatly exaggerated. The sophisticated, sprawling Kurdish revolutionary movement is a many-headed hydra, and a step back for the guerrilla forces stationed in the Iraqi mountains may well come with gains elsewhere across Kurdish-majority regions in Turkey, Syria and Iran. Whether the PKK will actually down arms remains an open question. Whatever happens next, Kurdistan remains a crucial geopolitical battleground, and the PKK’s movement will continue to play a crucial role in a conflict stretching from Gaza to Tehran and beyond.

It’s hard to reconcile familiar images of gleaming Mediterranean holiday resorts — with their rows of equally gleaming “Turkey teeth” — to the savage guerrilla warfare at the far end of Anatolia. But the violence is very real. The West chooses to see Turkey as a flawed but basically functional parliamentary democracy. But with tens of thousands of Kurdish politicians, MPs, mayors and activists detained in recent years, this definition seems like a weak excuse to avoid provoking a deeply authoritarian ally.

As for the PKK itself, the group is often portrayed as an anachronistic throwback to a vanished era of anti-colonial struggle, beginning its fight for an independent, socialist Kurdish state “late” in the 20th century. Yet the group has moved with the times. The Nineties were a period of deep crisis, as the party reckoned with the USSR’s collapse as a potential sponsor of Kurdish national aspirations. The broader ideological delegitimization of communism did not help either. These existential challenges were compounded by the 1999 capture of the PKK’s political and intellectual figurehead Abdullah Öcalan, who has remained detained ever since on the prison island Imrali, where his almost total isolation inspires frequent comparison with Nelson Mandela.

Reacting to these developments, Öcalan came to view both communist and capitalist nation states as inherently repressive — a message reiterated by banners adorning the PKK’s subterranean disarmament conference. Instead, Öcalan now advocates for a decentralized federation based on municipal governance, minority representation, women’s autonomy, and ecology. This unexpected departure from communist and nationalist orthodoxy almost tore his party apart. During a period of reformation lasting from 1999 until 2003, the PKK briefly changed its name, sought to reorganize into an unarmed, civil and political federation, and entered into secret negotiations with Ankara. None of these steps caused the PKK to collapse, and indeed are effectively being repeated in this latest détente.

Indeed, these internal upheavals helped the PKK refind its strength, diversifying its tactics and building up ever-broader support in Kurdish civil society. Parties sympathetic to Öcalan’s vision made unprecedented gains in Turkey’s parliament, alongside renewed Turkey-PKK peace talks. At the same time, the revolutionary Kurdish movement achieved global fame. ISIS were sweeping through Iraq and Syria, and only the PKK stood in their way, fending off the jihadist genocide of the Yazidis and leading thousands of the Kurdish-speaking religious minority to safety — all in unexpected battlefield coordination with the US. The PKK’s Syrian affiliates went further still, winning the support of a US-led “Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS”, as its all-female Kurdish units spearheaded a successful, years-long campaign to eradicate the caliphate.

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Millions of people now lived under PKK-inspired rule in and around Syrian Kurdistan, guarded by the presence of US troops. Tens of thousands of women took up arms and many more joined a civil-society revolution, as Kurds celebrated unprecedented freedoms and local communities explored self-governance amid the chaos of the Syrian civil war. Öcalan must have rubbed his eyes to see his utopian vision taking hold in a growing zone of PKK influence reaching almost to the Mediterranean.

Almost, but not quite. As ISIS were defeated, Turkey reacted violently to the Kurdish movement’s domestic, cross-border and international gains. Peace talks foundered amid bitter and renewed civil conflict in Turkey, while cross-border military operations against Syrian Kurdish regions killed hundreds and displaced hundreds of thousands more. Syrian Kurds’ dreams of international recognition for their embattled enclave vanished. Yet as this potted history shows, the PKK’s story is one of dogged survival and organizational flexibility, adapting its tactics and even its ideology to respond to challenges of the sort which have crushed many other would-be revolutionary movements. The latest disarmament announcement is equally part of this continued, strategic evolution.

For Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also has problems of his own. Turkey is confronting both Israel and Iran, putting Ankara on an uncomfortable collision course with both of the Middle East’s power blocs. These tensions have reached boiling point following the unexpected December 2024 ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad by militant Islamist forces with deep and growing ties to Ankara. Iran was the big loser as Turkey expanded its influence in Syria, while Israel will not countenance the presence of Turkish military bases and former al-Qaeda affiliates near its own, growing zone of occupation in southern Syria.

Meanwhile, the PKK’s Syrian affiliates continue to control a third of the country’s territory, its oil wealth, and its largest single armed force in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The US-trained, highly effective SDF guards tens of thousands of ISIS affiliates on behalf of its Western allies, and Americans have no desire to see the slightly less radical Islamists who now rule Damascus take control of these facilities. If Turkey and Syria’s jihadist-turned-statesman Ahmed al-Sharaa want the Western powers to continue their rapid normalization of the new regime, they would be well advised to continue their present strategy and avoid picking a fight with the SDF. Rather, heavy US pressure has brought about a tentative peace deal between the SDF and Damascus, in tandem with the PKK-Ankara agreement. For now, Turkish airstrikes against Syrian Kurdish regions have abated.

Syrian Kurdish leaders are therefore quietly confident, issuing maximalist demands aimed at preserving their Kurdish-led, multiethnic federation and its military wing, even as they prepare for the potential evacuation of PKK-trained military commanders from Syria and fret over a future, unwanted clash with Damascus. Some degree of Syrian Kurdish autonomy will certainly be preserved, though how far this will resemble Öcalan’s radical, direct-democratic vision is another question.

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Across the border, it is less clear what the PKK will get from its own deal with Ankara — beyond a mooted amnesty for the majority of its guerrilla fighters and transfer to a nominally safe third country for senior commanders. A close listen to the “disarmament” speech makes it clear the PKK will only down weapons if their demands are met, including Öcalan’s release as a non-negotiable first step. Ankara must therefore take the next step: a genuine, internationally monitored amnesty would be a good place to start.

There are many hurdles before a peaceful transition, each presenting an opportunity for both the PKK and Turkey to abandon the process once again. Ankara has over 100 military bases deep in Iraqi Kurdish territory, waypoints for its war against the PKK. This little-known, de facto occupation is linked to Turkey’s so-called “Development Road”. A $17-billion project, it will link Baghdad to Europe via Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey, offering a third way beyond both the Houthi-blockaded Red Sea and a proposed alternative route running from India to Europe through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Israel, but unacceptably bypassing Turkey. As Turkey seeks to align itself as a key regional partner, therefore, Ankara will be loath to give up its Iraqi beachhead in the name of a peace deal. As of today, Turkish airstrikes continue to hit PKK’s positions in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Meanwhile, battle-hardened PKK veterans may wonder if their sacrifices are justified by Kurdish gains in the Turkish parliament or Syria, and continue their fight under yet another name. Intriguingly, the 1999-2004 ceasefire period saw the PKK switch focus from its long-term battle against Turkey to back its Iranian Kurdish affiliates targeting the no-less repressive Iranian regime. Today, Israel’s obliteration of the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” raises the possibility of future destabilization in the Islamic Republic. The PKK, or its successor organizations, might well be drawn into any such future conflict. Meanwhile, Israel has been making overtures to the Syrian Kurds, at the risk of alienating their Arab allies and international supporters.

Kurdistan may remain formally divided between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, but it lies at an increasingly crucial geostrategic crossroads — not only between the Middle East’s warring power blocs, but also on routes for infrastructure, oil and even water. Those weary, gray-haired Kurdish militants never completed their political scientific degrees, but they have learned valuable lessons across 50 years of conflict. As state power declines, drone technology becomes cheaper, and resources become scarcer right across the world, canny non-state armed groups like the PKK and the Houthis can and will play an increasing role over the coming decades. The PKK may be changing strategies once again, but its long struggle is far from over.

Welcome, then, to the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), a place that sometimes feels at the very edge of world affairs. Save the Catalan Parliament, no foreign body recognizes this multi-ethnic federation of four million people, often known by its Kurdish name Rojava. And yet this rugged corner of the Middle East, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, has long been a fulcrum of regional change. The Assyrians and Seleucids and Ottomans have all come and gone, leaving locals deeply conscious of their storied history. One group of AANES-affiliated Arab women’s activists have named themselves “Zenobia” — evoking the ancient warrior queen who briefly defied Rome here back in the 3rd century.

These days, AANES faces threats equal to Aurelian’s legions. After the dramatic collapse of the Assad regime, Damascus is ruled by Ahmed al-Sharaa, and his al-Qaeda offshoot Hayyat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Turkey, HTS’s key backer, lurks behind the border wall, its drones leaving vapor trails spiraling through the sky as they target AANES ambulances, civilian protesters and Kurdish commanders continuing the fight against ISIS. And then there is the Islamic State itself, no longer a physical Caliphate but still backed by tens of thousands of fanatical detainees, currently wallowing in AANES-run camps but eager for revenge.

With Donald Trump still prevaricating over Washington’s role in the region, the future feels bewilderingly unclear. Nor is this surprising. AANES’s existential struggles for survival have long been animated by dynamics driving the broader conflict now engulfing the Middle East — proxy conflict amid a new Cold War; Islamist insurgency and authoritarian brutality; struggles over oil and water resources between rich capitals and impoverished regions. All the while, the AANES’s vision of multi-ethnic federation governance offers a striking alternative to Islamism and autocracy, even as its fate hints at the future course of conflicts swirling through Syria, the Levant, and beyond.

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Throughout Syria’s decade-long civil war, these complex tensions played out in Qamishlo. The largest Syrian Kurdish city, and the AANES’s de facto capital, it was long divided between Russian-backed Assadists and US-backed Kurds. In practice, that created a complex patchwork of checkpoints and intrigue recalling Cold War Berlin. Woe betide the visitor who confused a checkpoint belonging to “Sutoro” (a pro-Kurdish Christian militia) with one guarded by “Sootoro” (their pro-Assad rivals).

Today, Russian troops are withdrawing from their base at Qamishlo airport, their presence untenable since Assad’s ouster. Yet the uneasy peace that endured here for over a decade hints at the strange relationship between Bashar al-Assad and his former Kurdish subjects. The Assads historically repressed Kurdish language and culture, while the AANES’s armed forces sporadically skirmished with Assadist militias. But as he focused on entrenching his doomed regime, Assad mostly left the Kurds alone.

Many locals fear the same cannot be said for his successors. “Assad was brutal, but you knew where you stood with him,” says Abu Adil, a guard standing by a former regime compound in downtown Qamishlo, a defaced poster of the dictator flapping nearby. “We don’t know if HTS will come and take these buildings over, if the [AANES] will move in, or if we can tear them down and build something in their place.” Abu Adil knows how volatile politics here can be. He himself was displaced in a 2019 Turkish offensive that saw hundreds killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. “Turkey’s militias stole everything,” he explains. “They didn’t leave a single washing machine behind. We don’t have any problem with HTS: but Turkey is the problem.”

Ankara has long been existentially opposed to the AANES, fearing the project in Kurdish-led autonomy provides ideological inspiration and material support to Kurdish militants hoping to dislodge Turkey’s own Islamist autocrat: President Erdoğan. With the Assads gone, Turkey is now aiming to finish what it started in 2019. Last December, Ankara moved to occupy all the remaining AANES-held territory west of the Euphrates, displacing 100,000 people. Over 100 civilians have been killed in ongoing Turkish airstrikes, amid reports of potential war crimes, with the offensive now concentrated around a key hydroelectric dam offering Turkey a potential bridgehead across the Euphrates.

Especially considering their long fight against ISIS — the battle to retake the key city of Kobane killed hundreds of Kurdish fighters — many newly displaced refugees are unsurprisingly resentful. “We were a shield protecting not only the rest of [AANES], but the whole world,” says Ahmed Sharo, a gold merchant and AANES loyalist who fled the Turks to Qamishlo. I’ve heard similar arguments during previous trips to Rojava, but the mood is now especially bitter. No wonder: after wallowing in a refugee camp for years, Sharo says he only had 30 minutes to flee advancing Turkish militias. After we spoke, two women approached and asked for money, a first in all my visits to Rojava’s proud and politicized refugee camps.

It’s clear, then, that many locals here are tired of life in the AANES, unrecognized by the world and exposed to the depredations of a major NATO ally. Yet if Turkey’s assault is particularly concerning to people like Sharo — the Kurds, Yazidis and Christians who’ve benefited most from Rojava’s model of minority self-determination — they’re not the only ones to worry. Just like the region’s population at large, both the civilian AANES and its military wing are now Arab-majority, working to unite religiously conservative Arab communities into their multi-ethnic project. The “administration and the military” are not Kurdish, emphasizes Hamdan al-Abd, a charismatic, mustachioed sheikh who represents Arab interests in the AANES Executive Council. “Rather, they respect and protect all communities in the region.”

Others would disagree. I meet al-Abd in Raqqa, the former ISIS capital and now the largest city in the AANES. Like other officials, he is careful to fly both the AANES’s livery and the new three-starred Syrian flag in office, the latter waved by pro-democracy protesters at the start of the civil war and now by the new Islamist government in Damascus. Yet when protesters in Raqqa raised this same flag following Assad’s expulsion, AANES security forces opened fire. In a gloomy hotel lobby, I hold furtive conversations with activists who say they’ve consecutively been detained by the Assads, ISIS and the AANES. “People here don’t feel free, as they now do in the rest of Syria,” says one. “We believe that the new government in Damascus has the same ideas as us, and in the future, this city will be part of their central government system.”

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Nor are these revolutionaries-turned-NGO-employees the only ones to disdain the AANES experiment. Jihadis do too, as I discovered when I visited a Raqqa lingerie store. The owner implausibly claims her husband died of a heart attack just as US forces carpet-bombed the city, making her the likely widow of an ISIS fighter. She says the people of Raqqa are “waiting and praying” for Turkish militias to purge the city’s secular Kurdish administration. Though her prosperous business could never have existed under ISIS — the Caliphate were never big fans of latex corsets, even sold by women in full niqabs — she hopes Ankara’s close relationship with al-Sharaa in Damascus can bring an end to corruption at checkpoints and bring down import tariffs.

The AANES has shown some openness to local sensitivities. Though the diplomatic and military elite is still dominated by Kurds, Raqqa and other Arab areas have been able to secure exemptions in areas like secular education, military service, oil tariffs and marriage law. Public opinion in Raqqa is therefore more nuanced than either the AANES or its opponents suggest. By defending the rule of law and protecting basic services even in Arab regions — visiting for the first time in three years, I was struck by the pace of reconstruction in Raqqa’s bustling market — officials have long been able to secure tacit support from locals otherwise suspicious of its modernizing, feminist vision. “Despite all the errors AANES has made, it is nonetheless the best option in Syria,” a female Arab journalist in Raqqa tells me, sipping a fruit milkshake from a nearby store. “I personally would like to see the AANES and HTS reach a deal for a shared administration.”

Syria’s leaders have tried to find some common ground. Al-Sharaa has already met the top Syrian Kurdish commander, while HTS and AANES have maintained a careful ceasefire, with both sides expressing sincere desires to prevent further conflict and establish working committees and a national conference. But Turkey’s massive influence as al-Sharaa’s key foreign interlocutor is frustrating progress, while both sides have deeply contrasting visions about what Syria should look like: secular versus clerical; federal versus unitary.

This creates a paradoxical challenge for AANES leaders eager to devolve decision-making autonomy to Syrian communities. But like that lingerie store owner, many people in these same communities long for a more-or-less centralized Syria, a vision they trust the new strongman in Damascus to deliver. Before the war, Syria was not a particularly conservative or radicalized country. Yet 14 bloody years of conflict have catalyzed Islamist militancy and Sunni Arab chauvinism, particularly in reaction to the Alawite clique around Assad. More broadly, even moderate Arabs — and some Kurds — would be willing to tolerate a degree of Islamist authoritarianism under HTS as the price of internal stability and reentry into global markets.

Resolving these questions is especially urgent given the deteriorating humanitarian situation. In Kurdish, “the grass is always greener on the other side” is pessimistically rendered as “herbs grown in your own garden always taste bitter” — an apt description of mutual suspicions between Kurds and Arabs. In Raqqa, locals claim the Kurdish administration is appropriating local oil wealth to fund its own separatist ambitions, as wild rumors fly of 24-hour electricity and newly-paved roads in Kurdish areas. But when I travel north to Kobane, site of that famous 2015 victory, I find just the opposite. Turkish airstrikes have put the hydroelectric dam out of action, while their proxy militiamen regularly pepper frontline pumping stations with heavy weapons. Without electricity, hospitals are battling to maintain basic standards, and even the proverbial gardens are struggling. Without much rain this year, the environmental crisis in this desertifying region only grows.

With so much uncertainty, it’s no wonder some in AANES are looking further afield for security. Abu Adil, the security guard in Qamishlo, has already sent his sons to the neighboring Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) to find work. Like many Syrian Kurds, he uses the word “Kurdistan” simply to mean the rival Iraqi region, suggesting a lack of faith in the AANES’s own Kurdish project. Absent other friends, the Kurds are forced to hope US protection can keep them safe, even if that means partnering with the conservative KRI. Given Trump’s erratic foreign policy, that isn’t a sure bet, though it’s undoubtedly more plausible than hoping Israel will come to the rescue, as some desperate locals would wish: Tel Aviv has happily instrumentalized the Kurdish cause while keeping up a brisk oil trade with Ankara.

Assessing these panicked appeals, a Syrian Kurdish friend describes his stateless people as “children who grew up without parents, leaving them desperate for love from anyone.” Indeed, the Syrian Kurds have long sought support in unexpected places. On the one hand, the AANES has drawn support from the international Left by advancing its progressive ideology through the “anti-fascist” struggle against ISIS. On the other, the AANES’s armed wing successfully established themselves as the Pentagon’s indispensable partner in the war against Islamist terror. Even beyond emotive appeals to anti-fascist values, or else the security risk posed by over 40,000 ISIS affiliates still held in the region, yearning for a HTS takeover, there are reasons for observers of all stripes to care about what happens next.

When appealing to its anarchist and socialist supporters, the AANES has long drawn comparisons to the Spanish Civil War. The analogy is more than a rhetorical flourish. Just like in Spain, the Syrian bloodbath presaged a far wider conflict, one defined by proxy warfare, state collapse and mass displacement. The conflict offers a case-study for the coming disintegration of the so-called “rules-based international system” — a euphemism for US hegemony — as Islamism and other forms of political militancy both challenge and buttress central state power.

All this is precipitated by rising temperatures, desertification, failed harvests, and the weaponization of water resources. Israel’s degradation of Iran’s clients in Hezbollah and Hamas forms part of this broader story, paving the way for Assad’s collapse. Turkey’s expansion of drone and proxy warfare beyond Syria into Iraq, Azerbaijan and Libya does too. The mooted economic corridor linking Saudi Arabia through Israel to Europe, while evading Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, will be linked to fresh conflicts, as will Turkey’s competing, multi-billion dollar Development Road project between Baghdad and the West. Combined with worsening resource competition in the Eastern Mediterranean and Horn of Africa, little wonder that AANES representatives have long referred to this spiraling polycrisis by a simpler name: World War III.

The complex struggles in northern Syria therefore form part of a broader picture, suggesting ways in which state governance, resistance and reaction might evolve in decades to come. For all their differences, the AANES and HTS have responded to these historical upheavals in strikingly similar ways. “HTS have two faces,” says one opposition activist in Raqqa. “One is a religious face, which aims to export jihad worldwide; and the other is a political one, which tries to find a solution for all the peoples in Syria. We are with them for this second approach.” The AANES, which has long sought to balance radical Leftist militancy and institutionalized legitimacy, could be described in similar terms. Evolving far beyond its utopian vision of a decentralized “commune of communes”, it’s established a complex federation capable of feeding and protecting millions of people despite severe ideological differences. Indeed, while AANES officials dramatically claim that “Turkey wants to reorganize Syrian society under an Ottoman vilayet system”, their own project rather closely resembles that unwieldy pre-modern federation.

Given this mutual pragmatism, it’s possible to at least imagine a future modus vivendi between HTS and the AANES. While the latter have declared their readiness to recognize al-Sharaa, and integrate into his new Syrian army, any such transition is likely to be fraught and protracted. Rather, the Kurdish leadership will seek ways to survive, adapting themselves to a diminished role in the new Syria. Their chances depend on the direction taken in Damascus. Al-Sharaa himself looks set to continue down the path of technocratic crony capitalism, coupled with authoritarian repression of civil society. It’s a model he has already successfully trialed in Idlib, while the new Syrian foreign minister recently joined Tony Blair on stage at Davos to proclaim his hopes that his country would follow the Saudi Arabian path toward neoliberal integration. While this model could protect some basic rights, community self-determination in the Kurdish model is likely to remain beyond the pale.

Nonetheless, it’s striking to hear AANES talking points over women’s and minority rights being echoed by both al-Sharaa and the conservative Arab opposition in Raqqa. From 1789 to 1917, all true revolutions have had an impact beyond their collapse, as civil rights once seen as radical become everyday conventions. The same could yet happen in Syria. Of course, the Spanish Civil War analogy also implies the likelihood of the Rojavan revolution’s final defeat. Yet this is a corner of the world where hope can thrive even in the grimmest of circumstances, even amid the “bitter herbs” of your own garden. Just ask Raqqa’s female activists, whose namesake Zenobia died in exile, her resistance to the Romans crushed.

Amid fresh chaos in Syria, history risks repeating itself. Turkey has again unleashed its militias against the Kurdish enclave, and thousands more IS members could yet escape. That includes dozens of British citizens, from young children to Shamima Begum to violent male killers. No wonder Sebastian Gorka, Donald Trump’s counter-terrorism pick, is urging London to follow the American lead and repatriate its militants, hoping they can be tried and punished back home.

The British public and Government are dead set against any such repatriations. Yet it’s exactly this policy of abandoning both the detainees, and their Kurdish jailers, which endangers British lives — and risks blowback of terrifying proportions.

The end of the Assad regime has transformed Syria, including the multi-ethnic polity led by the Kurds in North and East Syria (NES). Emboldened by the collapse of Baathism, Turkey is conducting fresh military operations against the Kurds, just like those that enabled Gondal’s escape five years ago. At the same time, the change of government in Washington could bring its own challenges. Trump is currently weighing up withdrawing from the country altogether, leaving the Kurds, and their prisoners, to their fate.

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All the while, IS remains a threat years after their physical caliphate was eradicated. Attacks in Syria nearly tripled in 2024, while the top Syrian Kurdish commander has warned that Turkish attacks on their territory are further strengthening the organization. The group’s ideology is still potent too. Just last week, a lone-wolf IS-linked extremist killed 15 in New Orleans, underscoring the diverse threat still posed.

Any breakout would strengthen the organization’s resilient transnational networks, encouraging further attacks across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Even before Assad’s fall, the head of MI5 used a rare public address to warn that IS were the number one security threat facing the country, a danger that would increase exponentially if thousands of radicalized loyalists went loose.

Given all this, it’s unsurprising that Trump should push the UK to take back its own militants, ensuring they can’t fade into the wilderness, but finally face criminal justice at last. Nor is the incoming president alone. The Biden administration, the UK’s own terrorism tsar, and the Kurds themselves have all reiterated the same message: there are urgent security reasons for Britain to secure its IS members.

Yet though Khaled Issa, co-chair for foreign affairs in NES, warns that defeating the threat is “the responsibility of the international community as a whole”, David Lammy has poured cold water on any chance of a policy rethink. Rather, the UK looks set to leave its erstwhile Kurdish allies to guard prisoners alone.

As hardly needs restating, the establishment of anything resembling a new caliphate would be a disaster: not just for Britain, but also ordinary people throughout the Middle East. Exploiting civil war in Iraq and Syria, the Salafist organization rose to rule 10 million people back in 2014, drawing thousands of volunteers from over 80 countries. While Assad was responsible for the bulk of the deaths in his country’s bloodbath, IS’s crimes were particularly heinous. They perpetuated a genocide against the Yazidis; slaughtered Shia Muslims and Christians; burned and beheaded prisoners; paraded crucified corpses; raped gay men and threw them off buildings.

Amid this nightmare, the Syrian Kurds found themselves in an unexpected alliance. Kurdish fighters rapidly proved themselves the only force capable of defeating IS on the battlefield, winning global sympathy and ultimately direct support from the USA, UK and other Western powers. Turkey — which fields Nato’s second-largest army — had long fought a violent war against Kurdish guerrillas battling for autonomy. President Erdoğan, for his part, was unsurprisingly enraged as the US chose to partner with Kurdish ground forces. But Washington trusted their Kurdish partners, and ignored protests from Ankara to offer “temporary and transactional” support to a multiethnic anti-IS coalition spearheaded by Kurdish units. By 2017, this coalition had liberated Raqqa, the IS capital, capturing thousands of jihadis as they went.

Yet these battle-hardened volunteers didn’t simply vanish alongside their caliphate. As Issa notes, over 10,000 male combatants remain in Kurdish custody, all guarded on a minuscule budget and amid war, geopolitical isolation and economic collapse. Male militants are held dozens to a room in former schools, crudely repurposed as detention centers. These are places where disease and radicalization spread with equal ease.

Meanwhile, thousands of highly radicalized female members and their children are held alongside innocent, internally-displaced Syrians and Iraqis in a shabby camp-cum-detention center called al-Hol. Among the endless rows of tents, female loyalists run a clandestine “mini-caliphate” — where they intimidate other residents through beatings, arson, and murder. Some even hold Yazidi women in secret slavery to this day. More than half of the camp’s population is under 12, with female militants grooming and training young boys to continue the jihad. When I visited al-Hol, primary-aged children threw stones as we walked among the tents, raising their index fingers in salute to Allah.

While these conditions might seem a fitting punishment, in truth they only create the perfect conditions for the organization to regroup and rebuild: an ongoing sleeper-cell campaign outside the camps and prisons has killed hundreds of locals. At the same time, Assad’s fall has brought fresh opportunities for IS, benefiting in particular from Turkey’s manipulation of the Syrian crisis to launch fresh attacks against NES. Notwithstanding its claims to oppose IS, the Erdoğan government has happily indulged extremists elsewhere, allowing many thousands of militants to cross its territory into Syria. Today, Ankara bankrolls dozens of Islamist militias for the purposes of targeting the Kurds, including those sanctioned by the USA for sheltering members of IS, while top jihadi commanders have long hidden in Turkish-occupied territory.

Combined with the eagerness of IS members themselves to escape their rackety Kurdish prisons, the arguments in favor of repatriation are clear — not least when the numbers, for Britain anyway, are so manageable. With no more than 10 male British fighters left in Syria, alongside 20 women and 40 minors, it wouldn’t be hard for the UK criminal justice system to process them. As UK terrorism commissioner Jonathan Hall KC has rightly noted, a country of the UK’s stature could easily manage the repatriation of a few dozen ISIS affiliates.

Why, then, has Britain been so slow to take action? Part of the answer again involves Turkey, which is bitterly opposed to any form of political or diplomatic recognition of NES. Domestic opposition clearly matters too. Liberal commentators are doubtless too quick to paint British IS affiliates as mere victims rather than potential culprits who need to be brought to trial, whether in the UK or elsewhere. But at the same time, conservative voices are too hasty in demanding that IS detainees in Syria are left to rot, ignoring the reality that this places an unjustifiable security and humanitarian burden on the Kurds.

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What’s missing in all this is the voice of the UK’s own Kurdish partners. As Issa puts it: “ISIS committed crimes against our people, war crimes, crimes against humanity, yet there was no international court or criminal justice procedure.” He and his colleagues have therefore been appealing for the West to repatriate its own nationals; to set up a proper international court or tribunal to process those thousands of global IS fighters; and to provide proper financial, political and diplomatic support to their beleaguered administration.

A senior Syrian Kurdish delegation will shortly visit the UK, where the security threat posed by IS detainees in NES will be high on the agenda. But while these officials have met with Trump and Emmanuel Macron, British authorities once again seem terrified of upsetting President Erdoğan, the new kingmaker in Syria — and a key British trade partner. And with Turkey clamoring to finish the destruction it began back in 2019, time is running out for the UK to prevent a catastrophe whose fallout will reach far beyond the windblown camps of northern Syria, with fanatics far worse than Shamima Begum free to spread terror once more.

We join a short queue and a guard looks vaguely in our direction. “Ok, prepare the cigarette. Oh, and take off your seatbelt. If you’re not smoking and you’re wearing a seatbelt, it means you’re UN, which is a problem because it means paperwork.” I do as instructed, and also take out a set of prayer beads I bought in Baghdad. “Nice touch,” says Mohammed with a grin as we pass through with ease.

Mosul suffered more than almost any other Iraqi city following the US invasion. The removal of Saddam brought the people a taste of democracy, but it also unleashed a sectarian war, mainly between Sunni and Shia. Of many things the carnage spawned, the Sunni terror group Isis was arguably the worst. 

In December 2013, after an attack on the city of Fallujah, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then the leader of al-Qaeda’s pathologically anti-Shia offshoot the “Islamic State of Iraq”, announced he was forming the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”. Six months later, it captured Mosul, Iraq’s second most important city. From the pulpit of the city’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri, al-Baghdadi proclaimed the birth of a new worldwide Islamic Caliphate.

Isis then swept across the country. The Iraqi army simply couldn’t cope. At its peak, in autumn 2014, the caliphate spanned 41,000 miles across Iraq and Syria ― and ruled over eight million people, as well as its 40,000 foreign fighters who arrived from 120 countries. As we drive into the city, I ask Mohammed who joined Isis. “Various people,” he replies. “Those who supported Saddam; people who had family members killed by the Americans; and then many Sunnis who got sick of being treated like shit by Baghdad and the Iraqi security forces after Saddam fell.”

Saddam’s fall emancipated Iraq’s Shia majority, many of whom were looking for payback after feeling victimised under his Sunni rule. “There was so much anger here,” Mohammed tells me. “In Mosul, between 2011-2014, every neighbourhood had only one entrance and exit and if the soldier guarding it was in a bad mood, he’d just close everything. There were lines of cars waiting for hours.”

We weave slowly through traffic until we reach the Taqatu al Dawasa roundabout, one of the busiest in Mosul. “Over there used to be a tall building — the Orzdy,” Mohammed tells me breezily. “Isis used to throw gays off it.”

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Almost everything around me is either half-destroyed or being rebuilt. “This street used to be a line of trenches,” Mohammed says as he points out of the window to his left. “The two sides would just fire bombs and rockets at each other.” We pass a Mosul police patrol truck with a man in a balaclava standing on the back, holding a mounted PKC machine gun. SWAT is written across his back.

We enter Mosul’s old city. It’s a hive of winding narrow streets with construction works everywhere. I notice some graffiti and ask if it’s political. “Real Estate advert,” he replies. Mosul was once a battlefield; now it’s a building site. Billions have poured in to regenerate the city. “ When I was embedded with the military during the Battle of Mosul,” explains Mohammed, “this street was all rubble. Only Humvees could drive here. I’ve never seen so many people get killed. At least 50 every day — and that was just in our area. God only knows how many civilians got caught in crossfire.

We get out and walk. Mohammed points to a green door. “That’s a garden. During the fighting there were so many bodies there was no space in the cemeteries, so they’d bury them in their gardens.” We walk on. Once more Mohammed sweeps his arms outwards. “All this was a battlefield — between the Iraqi Golden Division and Isis.”

If the fight against Isis was brutal, their rule here was arguably worse. In a small shop in the old city, I meet Sarmad Al Moaymy, a realtor who lived under their rule. “In 2014, even several months before the city’s fall, it was obvious that Isis had taken over — and it was Nouri al Maliki [who became Prime Minister after Saddam’s fall] who gave them the “space” to do so,” he tells me as we drink tea. “The Government treated the people here really badly, arresting them randomly and forcing them to pay bribes to get out of jail, which they couldn’t afford. The people felt like they were being suffocated. Isis came and kicked out the Government and gave them freedom — they felt alive again; in the beginning at least.

“For a while the city was safe; every neighbourhood had the concrete blocks around their entrances removed; people could drive around again. Then Isis slowly started publishing laws and restrictions: no shorts or tight trousers; then people had to have beards. That’s when we started to realise what they were. Every day they would execute people on the roundabout in front of everyone. It was terrifying: today it was a stranger, tomorrow your neighbour, the next day it could be you. I refused to grow a beard so after six months I fled the city.”

In the nearby bazaar, I meet Fares Khalaf, a former sergeant in the fire department of the army and now a wheat farmer dressed in the traditional thawb. The market is a sensory assault: old electric fans recycle hot air; cuts of meat hang from hooks; sparks fly from welding tools. Rows of fake Prada and Hermes bags are lined up next to sacks of vegetables and nuts and fruit. “Life under Daesh [Isis] flipped upside down,” he tells me. “Before, we used to farm our barley and sell it to the government; under Isis there was no government — so we had to come to the bazaar to sell it. Wages for workers fell from 25,000 Dinars to 3,000. Many people tried to flee. But I stayed, where would I go? My family and my farm are here. And besides, you need money to flee.”

By this point, Isis’s violence had spread well beyond the city walls. “They killed nine from my village, one of whom was my son,” he says without changing his tone. “It was in 2014. My son and eight other men were driving in their cars and Isis shot them. They did an investigation afterwards and came to my house to say that they had killed him by accident and that they were sorry. I said: ‘What does your sorry get me? Does it get my son back?’”

It was this sort of barbaric behaviour that forced the Iraqi state to finally step in — even if it needed a lot of help to finish the job. On 13 June 2014, just days after Isis took Mosul, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric, issued a call to all Iraqis to take up arms against the terror group. For the Shia it had the force of a Fatwa. Two days later, Al Maliki announced the formation of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), a group of (predominantly Shia) militias who would band together to fight Isis, and in so doing radically change the Iraqi state.

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Only Sistani had the moral authority to unite these rival groups. Few noted the irony of him bringing them together in a de facto alliance with Tehran. The Iranians had been arming and funding Shia groups in Iraq since the fall of Saddam — the PMF was their chance to scale up this influence. Meanwhile, someone with sufficient military skills was needed to run them effectively, and with the charisma and political nous to keep them united. There was perhaps only one man in the entire Middle East who could do that: the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani.

Not just an accomplished military commander, Soleimani was a master of a particularly Iranian art: political warfare. For years he had overseen the killings of US soldiers and subverted US policy in Iraq wherever he could. Now he dreamed of turning the PMF into a centralised force like the IRGC.

Soleimani soon made his presence felt. He was, by all accounts, “fearless” — famous for never wearing a flak jacket, even on the front lines. His fame spread. In December 2014, Newsweek put Soleimani on the cover, while the accompanying article claimed that the Shia militias were the only chance the world had of defeating Isis.

In truth, the militias were just one part of a combined effort that involved the Iraqi army, Kurdish Peshmerga and, flying overhead providing air cover in what was an inescapable irony for all concerned, the US-led coalition. For the next two years, this alliance drove Isis out of cities across Iraq. By the end of 2016, it controlled just 7% of Iraqi territory. Its final stronghold was Mosul and both the Iraqi security forces and the coalition were determined that the PMF — whose militias were often brutal to the Sunni inhabitants of the towns they liberated — would be kept out of the fight.

Rebin Rozhbayani, was then an officer in the 3rd battalion, 1st brigade of the Kurdish Peshmerga, was part of the first push to retake Mosul on 16 October 2016. The battalion’s job was to pierce the Isis lines that surrounded the city, open the gates, and allow the Iraqi army to enter the city.

The fight was tough. On the first day, as they reached the village of Fazilia near Mosul, a suicide bomber drove into their convoy, destroying two Humvees and killing three of his comrades. Canadian air support then announced they were pulling out to another sector where other forces were taking heavy casualties.

“We continued,” he tells me. “But then a second car hit our PAK unit. We lost two more Peshmerga. Once the Canadians had gone, we had to stop and put our American armoured vehicles into a 360-degree defensive circle. We spent the night like that, though no one slept as we were surrounded by Isis not knowing when they would attack. We were two brigades, 200 Peshmergas, facing about 200 of them.”

The second day was perhaps worse: “We killed about 20 Isis fighters who emerged from tunnels they had dug around the city to attack us with RPGs and SPG-9s. Getting captured was always a big fear. In the beginning, they wanted to capture rather than kill us. I used to listen to their radio and they always said: ‘Take them as prisoners, it’s so much more effective.’ A lot of their power came from their beheading videos. That’s partly how they captured Mosul so quickly. Their videos were so violent that the Iraqis forces became scared to fight them.”

After losing 31 Peshmerga, the brigade managed to enter the village of Bashiqa, where the fight was easier since Isis were withdrawing to Mosul for their final stand. It was the beginning of the end.

Rozhbayani accepts that Iran played a role in fighting Isis but, he stresses, it always had its own agenda — it didn’t matter what was good for Iraq. “The plan was to push Isis out of Iraq and back into Syria. But [Syrian leader] Bashar al-Assad is Iran’s client and the Iranians didn’t want them there, so they pushed them toward Kurdistan instead. And then at the end of it all, the PMF got 40 seats in the Iraqi parliament,” he concludes with a slight laugh. Once more, Soleimani’s political skills played a role. After Isis’s defeat, the Iranian-backed militias proclaimed themselves the country’s saviours, organising victory parades and celebrations.

Even today, in parts of the city, images of Soleimani and Abu Mahdi Muhandis, the former deputy leader of the PMF, both killed in a US drone strike in 2020, are pinned to almost every lamppost. The checkpoint to the city is supposed to be manned by local police, but the guards are Shia militias dressed up in their uniforms. “Look at their beards,” Mohammed told me as we passed through. “No Iraqi policeman or soldier is allowed to have a beard like that.” They collect a tax of 10,000 dinars from every truck that comes through.

We later pass the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, its dome reduced to a torn and gaping turquoise shell swaddled in brown scaffolding. When Mosul was about to fall, Isis had a choice: either retreat from the site where the Caliphate had been announced or blow it up. It chose the latter.

Will Mosul recover? I ask Mohammed. “Life is back,” he replies. “Corruption is back. In fact, everything is worse — because so many people lost loved ones. There is a huge ditch in Khalsa in southwest Mosul, which contains the bodies of more than 14,000 civilians and police killed by Isis. And all this for what? WMDs? Oh please. The only WMD Iraq ever had was stupidity.”

I have had several chances to visit Iraq since ISIS took hold in 2014. My first three trips involved having to bypass ISIS-controlled Mosul to reach the land where the Yazidi genocide was committed. I was there to meet survivors, as well as the admirable female fighters taking on the Islamic State, for my movie Sisters in Arms.

On my most recent visit, we were accompanied by a fleet of helicopters and were able to land in the former capital of the caliphate — the now-liberated Mosul. Standing in front of the ruins of the al-Nori Mosque, President Macron delivered a message of hope. This was the very place where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had launched his murderous caliphate, only to blow it up in the face of defeat — a desperate attempt to hide behind a veneer of strength. Obscurantists destroy while democrats rebuild.

But unfortunately, the democrats sometimes leave a foundation so weak that they collapse in a few days. This is the disastrous spectacle that the world has witnessed in Afghanistan – hardly the outcome we might have hoped for twenty years after 9/11.

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The Afghan Resistance has begun

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The visuals are horrific: Taliban soldiers strutting around in GI uniforms, driving abandoned humvees, terrorising Afghan civilians, especially women, and ultimately crushing the final bulwark of freedom — the resistance in the Panjshir valley. Tragically, this was all accomplished with the help of weapons and equipment left behind by the United States.

Carefully coached by Qatar — the best PR firm for political Islam in the world — the Taliban claims to have evolved. It promises an “inclusive” government, but this includes only the old guard members of the Taliban and the worst incarnations of Salafism.

Afghanistan is now fated to become a sanctuary for jihadists — especially for a revitalised al-Qaeda. One Afghan chieftain who led Bin Laden’s “black guard” has already returned to the country in triumph, while Ayman al-Zawahiri, the brains behind 9/11, will likely now be protected by the Emirate of the Taliban.

Several failures explain this disastrous state of affairs. The most obvious was the failure to cut off the Taliban from the drug trafficking that funded them, as well as the failure to isolate them from their sponsors, the Pakistani Secret Service.

But the most important failing was not a military one. It was psychological: it was to fail to realise that you can only beat terrorism by attacking its ideological roots — religious fundamentalism. France and Europe realised this a long time ago — only to be labelled “Islamophobes” by parts of the American media whenever they dared to robustly defend secular values.

Some in the United States seem to believe that religious fundamentalists can embrace democracy overnight. They view Islamism through the prism of their own world, believing that everyone aims for the same thing — social justice. That blend of naivety and cynicism has even led some to suggest that the Taliban have changed. After all, that is what they promised, hand on heart, during the negotiations in Doha. Surely they were telling the truth?

A similar naivety has been displayed towards the Muslim Brotherhood, often presented as “democrats”, or even “largely secular”, in the American press. Even Hezbollah and Hamas have been described as “anti-imperialists”.

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Yet anyone who has closely studied Islamist movements knows that their acceptance of democracy is always tactical, viewed as a means to advancing theocracy and Islamic law. Any commitments given to the West are worthless; for the Taliban, Sharia law is the supreme goal.

Of all the extremist movements I have studied, from the ultra-religious Right to neo-Nazism, none has shown such talent at strategic subterfuge as Islamists. They know better than anyone how to instrumentalise democracy to promote anti-democratic views — or how to be victims of “islamophobia” while radicalising the muslim youth of Europe, convincing them that they would be happier in the shadow of a caliphate, rather than in secular democracies.

Of course, the American intervention in Iraq has not completely failed. Life for ordinary Iraqis in the Kurdish north is no longer the procession of massacres and executions that it was under Saddam Hussein.

But while they are freed from daily terror, Iraqi communities continue to eye each other with suspicion and bitterness. Some Sunnis continue to perceive ISIS as a form of protection against a government under the influence of Iran, which now arms Shia militias in the country’s many disputed areas.

The country continues to smoulder and the “Lebanonisation” of Iraq — its disintegration — remains a possibility, with the tiniest spark capable of enflaming the Sunni community once again to support a revived jihadist movement. Just like the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIS is waiting patiently on the sideline for the Americans to depart. Such an outcome would prove to be the final failure of American policy in the Middle East.

So is the era of Western “interference” dead?

Here, a distinction can and should be made between a neoconservative vision of values being inflicted by force and our duty to care about what is happening in the rest of the world. It is, after all, possible to support democracy without wishing to impose it from above by military means. Indeed, during President Macron’s visit to Iraq late last month, he specifically made this distinction and called for a new approach which he called “neither interference, nor indifference”.

It is unacceptable to undermine a country which poses no immediate threat to the rest of the world, nor has genocidal plans for its own people. But it is “indifference” to allow tyrants to thrive — first in their own countries, then globally.

For as more democratic — and “indifferent” — countries retreat, the more influence they abandon to authoritarian regimes such as Russia, Turkey, Pakistan and Iran. These states have their own methods of interference, which have nothing to do with democracy or the desire to install democratic regimes. Quite the contrary; they are ruled by tyrants and dictators who see no problem with manipulating other countries with social media trolls and authoritarian state media outlets such as RT.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Now that Afghanistan has been abandoned, the honourable course for Europe and the United States is not just to become a place of safety for those fleeing dangerous regimes. Rather, they must also support and protect democracy in the Middle East where it still survives; to champion the autonomy of countries or regions which act as refuges or alternative systems of government; to create “safe spaces”, if you will, for the ideals of democracy and equality.

It should be our great honour, and our duty, to support the miracle which is Iraqi Kurdistan, defended valiantly by the Peshmerga, and which has provided a refuge to millions of international displaced peoples from the region. This is now a rare island of relative peace and stability in the war-stricken area.

Likewise we must support the miracle of Rojava, the Kurdish northeast region of Syria, which upholds courageously progressive, secular, egalitarian and environmental values — those which the West claims to defend as its own.

This is an opportunity to remind ourselves that the Kurds are on the frontline, defending our common values. They must no longer be abandoned to Turkish bombardments, which recently targeted a hospital in Sinjar without any reaction from NATO, Europe or the United States.

Similarly, it should also have been our duty to protect the Panjshir region of Afghanistan and its National Resistance Front. This mountainous area was the last region to resist the Taliban, acting as a haven for those fleeing their rule. Panjshir was reported to have fallen to the Taliban last week but guerrilla resistance is likely to continue — as it remains in the streets of Kabul, where brave women and men are demonstrating against the Taliban and the interference of Pakistan.

Across the country, pockets of democracy to survive, as symbols of resistance to tyranny and optimism for a better future. Democracy grows from such places — from the bottom, not the top.

In our own interest — in the interest of freeing Afghanistan — we must not let these seeds of hope perish.

But it’s coming true with Biden.

And historians will never stop wondering what could have induced the 46th president of the United States to commit such a grievous error.

Is it the naïveté of a politician lacking any sense of history or tragedy, the one who took the Taliban at their word when they assured us of their peaceful intentions in Doha in February 2020?

Is it the cynicism of a president already looking ahead to his re-election and pandering to those in swing-states who are said to be fed up with “endless wars”?

Is it an effect of a swing of the pendulum between the four major poles of American diplomacy laid out by Walter Russell Mead: Wilsonianism and its democratic messianism; Jeffersonianism and its hard and fast isolationism; Jacksonianism and its reflex to give tit for tat, but only when US interests appear directly targeted; and Hamiltonianism and the formulation, so dear to France’s Montesquieu, that America’s only truly vital interests were those of peaceful commerce?

Or is this a new pole altogether? One pioneered by Barack Obama in August 2013, when he declined to enforce the red line that he had said would be irretrievably crossed if the Syrian leader resorted to the use of chemical weapons against his own citizens? The one at work when, without warning or any shred of moral or strategic interest, Donald Trump abandoned his country’s Kurdish allies, first in Iraq when he allowed the pro-Iranian militias to invade Kirkuk, then in Syria when he allowed Erdogan’s murderous proxies to enter Rojava? The one brought to its culmination in the present Afghan rout, this abject display of open desertion being broadcast live to the world and punctuated, as I write, by scenes of panic and chaos at Kabul airport that could easily be mistaken for those in Saigon in 1975?

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Is it, in other words, the consolidation of a trend that I first sensed almost twenty years ago, when writing American Vertigo and later developed in The Empire and the Five Kings? Gone the great power, which has jettisoned its dreams of exceptionalism, its ambition to be a shining city upon a hill! Broken, the gracious Virgilian thread that made the invention of America a new Aeneid whose mission was no longer to rebuild Troy in Rome or Rome on a grand scale in Europe, but to reinvent Europe with improvements! Onward toward a new pre-Columbian order in which the old empire, in retreat, no longer counts and makes way for the latter-day reincarnations of the Ottoman Empire, Greater Persia, Great Russia, Imperial China, and, as here, the new Ummah made possible by a radical misreading of the Koran!

It is too early to know for certain.

And each of these explanations is at least partially true.

But the time has come for a review of accounts.

And that review shows that what the most pessimistic of us feared must be booked not just as a loss but as an abomination in three parts:

1. The wolves are through the gate

They are hunting down the supporters of republican government and institutions, as well as my journalist friends from Tolo News.

They are sending women back to their fabric prisons after many thousands of them had tasted dignity and become accustomed to gender equality and the freedom to show their faces.

Sharia is the law of the land.

Lists of suspects, banned and “wanted” people are being posted at the entrances to neighbourhoods, sounding an ominous clarion call.

Islamic tribunals will soon be operating at full speed, with their absurd crimes and atrocious punishments.

And the scenes of stoning that have been filmed over the past few months in remote villages will be reenacted live in Herat, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul, sites of high civilisation where the descendants of horsemen and poets had begun to embrace the democratic dream.

A people are in agony.

The triumph of a strain of barbarism that, twenty years ago, the great democracies and their Afghan allies easily defeated and whose legions of rabble on motorbikes are no more formidable today than they were back then.

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And of naïveté, when the American administration, speaking through national security adviser Jake Sullivan, adds credulity to dishonour by accepting the Taliban’s word that it is ready to “protect” civilians seeking to be evacuated from the country while offering dubious evidence of good intentions.

Worse than a crime, this is a mistake.

And, worse than a mistake, it is a stain.

A stain on the term of Joe Biden, whose first dramatic error this is.

But also, in a greater sense, this stain dishonours the modern conscience. It will take a long time for that conscience to forget this failure, this shame.

2. And what of the United States?

Already devalued by the sacrifice of the Kurds on the altar of appeasement, first toward Iran (the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq) and then toward Turkey (the Kurds in Syria), the word of the United States is suddenly worth nothing.

Imagine you are a Ukrainian in Donbass battling, in the trenches of Luhansk or Donetsk, pro-Russian separatists and mercenaries in the pay of the Kremlin.

An Armenian in Nagorno-Karabakh who has learned that the resentment of those pining for a return of the Ottoman Empire and denying the genocide of their ancestors knows no bounds or limitations.

Or a Taiwanese, South Korean or even a Japanese sensing the nearby presence of the iron jaw of Chinese totalitarianism just waiting to bite.

To say nothing of the Balts, the Poles, the Czechs — of Europeans, in other words — who had been living, like the generation of the founders of Europe, in the belief that venerable old treaties protected them and ensured their security.

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What do they all think of this self-inflicted Saigon? This geopolitical suicide? How can they avoid ruminating on the betrayal and massacre of Carthage’s Punic allies, as recounted by Gustave Flaubert in his novel Salammbô, when confronted with this spectacle, this disarray in a diplomatic system that has made the inexplicable choice, just weeks before the anniversary of September 11, of returning Afghanistan to the terrorists on a silver platter and allowing them to build a nest for the vipers of the new Al-Qaeda and their ilk? When confronted, yes, with the direct, deliberate and slow-motion abandonment of a people who, like the Kurds, were our rampart against radical Islam and protected the world from terrorism? Under the circumstances, how is it possible not to conclude that if Putin, Erdogan or Xi got it in his head to fill part of the void created by the American retreat there would be no one to oppose him?

Dizzying.

An Afghan Anschluss.

Munich on all fronts.

And even if one must be wary of comparing the incomparable, this is truly terrible.

3. But then, there is Panjshir

There remains, living in his homeland of Panjshir, one young man, Ahmad Massoud, son of the legendary Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who, in his day, embodied the struggle against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and who was assassinated two days before September 11.

A few days ago, just a few hours after the fall of Kabul, the young Ahmad Massoud was able to elude the hired killers sent to track him down.

Knowing that if they captured him, he might suffer the same fate as his illustrious father, he did exactly what his father had done, a little less than twenty-five years ago, after the first fall of Kabul, when he managed to get hold of one of the last old helicopters that the Taliban had not yet taken over and took refuge in his bastion in Panjshir, above the Shomali Plain, to organise the Afghan resistance.

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He wrote to me from his native village on Monday (16 August), several hours after rejoining his commanders.

“We find ourselves,” he wrote, “in the situation of Europe in 1940.”

The debacle is complete, he continued.

The spirit of collaboration is all around us.

Subjugation is closing in with sound and fury.

As Kabul groans, as the villages of the north and south are put in chains, vengeance is unfurling over our wounded land.

But despite reversal and even catastrophe, all is not lost, he told me.

With my Mujahideen, I intend to resume the struggle.

I call on all free women and men in the world, friends of Afghanistan old and young, to join us in spirit.

I call on all free fighters from all over the country, whatever their origin or ethnicity, to come to our valleys.

Already, he continued, groups of brave citizens are moving to the front with their creed, their bravery, and their antique rifles and grenade launchers.

I welcome them!

They will be — we will be — the living faces of the Resistance, and, soon enough, of the counteroffensive.

Free Afghanistan has lost Kabul, but it has not lost the war.

Massoud’s words were the words of the Spanish republicans in 1936.

Of Czech president Beneš in 1939 and of Alija Izetbegović, in 1992, at the height of the siege of Sarajevo, when he gave me a dramatic message to pass on to French president François Mitterrand.

Almost word for word, they are the words of General de Gaulle’s radio address to his defeated countrymen in June 1940, broadcast from London, in which he urged them not to submit but to continue to fight.

Except that the Afghans were betrayed, the young Massoud pointed out. Betrayed but not defeated. And they were not defeated because their leadership, their generals, did not even take them into battle.

* * *

I know this young man, just as I knew his father.

I have done numerous video interviews in the mountains of Panjshir, where, for a year, Massoud has been quietly preparing for the worst and stockpiling arms, equipment and supplies, as his father had done.

I trust him.

I believe him when he says he inherited from his father the taste for freedom and the instinct of fighting to defend it.

I believe him when he insists that he has no choice and that the fight is now ineluctably his, body and soul.

I believe that when he issues a call for all free Afghans who love their country and reject servitude, whether living in Afghanistan or abroad, to join him, he is not only sincere but credible.

At my initiative, France’s President Macron received him at the Elysée Palace on April 5, 2021.

I was present at that meeting, where the best of France appeared to have a rendezvous with an heir to the noblest anti-totalitarian and anti-fascist struggles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

And I am convinced that, in the new Great Game that lies ahead, it is this young man whom France, Britain and the rest of Europe will have to support.

In this area of the world, he is the embodiment of the future and of hope.

This was Donald Trump’s third appearance at the convention in the last four years, a necessity when 81% of white Evangelicals voted for him in 2016. After sticking with Trump through sexual assault accusations and scores of half-truths and outright lies, it seemed as though nothing could shake their faith in the man; yet an accumulation of factors may be eroding Evangelicals’ enthusiasm for the President, and perhaps even undermining their support altogether.

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By Christopher Rhodes

Last week’s sudden decision to call for US troops to step aside and allow Turkey to attack the Kurds of northern Syria, a staunch US ally in the fight against ISIS, has divided Trump’s most prominent Christian supporters. Some, like Perkins, have stuck by him. Another Christian ally, Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr., explained away the Syrian move as President Trump “keeping his promise to keep America out of endless wars”.

At the other extreme, Pat Robertson, one of the founding fathers of the Religious Right, said on his Christian Broadcasting Network that Trump was in danger of losing the “Mandate of Heaven” for abandoning the Kurds. In less harsh but still clear criticism of the President, Franklin Graham asked his followers to pray for President Trump to reconsider his decision, lest he endanger both the Kurds and the Christians that they’ve been protecting.

Even religiously conservative politicians are starting to break ranks. Retiring Illinois Rep. John Shimkus, who gained notoriety for using the Bible to dismiss climate change, officially withdrew his support for the President over the “despicable” decision regarding Syria. And prominent conservative Christian media personality Erick Erickson tweeted at Nancy Pelosi to speed up the impeachment process so that “perhaps we’ll still have time to save some of the Kurds”.

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During President Trump’s Values Voters speech, he painted impeachment proceedings as part of a witch-hunt against conservatives, an idea that found a strong reception among the audience. As his speech lurched from topic to topic, covering everything from the Second Amendment to late-term abortion, Barack Obama and “crooked Hillary,” he got the usual reaction from this crowd; cheers, chants (“four more years!”) and interjections (“that’s right!”) that would be typical of a Pentecostal church service.

But the energy changed after the president told an extended story about receiving the bodies of fallen soldiers and comforting grieving families. This tale, which he’s been using all week, was a preface for addressing the elephant in the room, and what followed was an extremely disjointed defence of the Syrian withdrawal, throwing out a host of different, sometimes contradictory justifications for abandoning the Kurds: that the US has sacrificed enough in the “never ending” wars of the Middle East; US involvement in the region has been based on “the biggest mistake” of the 2003 Iraq invasion; “The Kurds are fighting for their own land” now, not US interests; maybe the Kurds will see that they’re outmatched by Turkey and simply retreat; the US has already defeated ISIS; and Middle East involvement is distracting from other issues, including dealing with foreign policy concerns like China, Russia or building The Wall.

The cheers and applause that President Trump had been enjoying grew sporadic and muted as he talked about the Syrian situation. Even when he pivoted back to some applause lines — touting his record on defending (Christian) religious freedom, attacking Congresswoman Ilhan Omar as anti-American and anti-Semitic, highlighting his support for Israel — he never seemed to recapture the crowd’s earlier enthusiasm.

And that, I think, is emblematic of where his presidency as a whole is with Evangelicals.

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Evangelical Christians are not particularly inclined to champion the cause of a stateless Muslim ethnic minority in the Middle East, but the idea of abandoning one’s allies and allowing the slaughter of former comrades-in-arms and their civilian relatives sits the wrong way with many of them.

This betrayal is especially hard to swallow because Christian persecution in the Middle East has been a prominent issue for American conservative Christians, and many have therefore been keeping track of how the Kurds became the major defenders of Christian minority populations in Iraq and Syria. American Evangelicals fear these Middle Eastern Christians may now be endangered by a policy that decimates and alienates the Kurds and allows for the resurgence of ISIS.

By itself, disagreements over foreign policy wouldn’t be enough to break Evangelical devotion to Trump, but the Ukraine scandal and impeachment inquiry may be further straining that relationship. Normally (that is, the post-2016 “new normal” that Trump has initiated), Ukrainian impeachment would cause supporters to circle their wagons around the president, seeing him as a fellow victim of Left-wing persecution. To some extent, that has happened, and many attendees at last weekend’s Summit said they were doubling down in their support of Trump against “harassment” by Democrats and the so-called “deep state”.

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But as the impeachment inquiry has gathered steam, Trump appears to be reverting to one of this tried-and-tested tactics when faced with allegations of wrongdoing: throwing his subordinates under the bus. Trump has at various times deflected blame for the Ukraine fiasco towards a number of people, such as Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

More importantly for Christian conservatives, Trump also needlessly threw Mike Pence into the mix, revealing that the vice president also had similar conversations with Ukrainian officials and that these interactions were routine. Pence is one of several administration officials accused of having helped cover up the president’s true intentions regarding holding back aid to Ukraine, and the vice president may suffer political, and maybe even legal consequences if he toes the White House line of not cooperating with House impeachment investigations.

Trump’s unprompted inclusion seemed to some like a cynical move to undermine the potential for Pence to assume the presidency if impeachment was successful. This may be a clever tactic; congressional Republicans will be much less likely to support impeachment and removal if it meant handing the White House to Nancy Pelosi, next in line for presidential succession if both Trump and Pence go down.

Or it may simply be sour grapes: it was rumored that his running mate was once willing to go along with a scheme by Republican leaders to replace Trump with Pence as the 2016 Republican presidential candidate after Trump’s “Access Hollywood” scandal emerged, and Donald Trump is not one to ever let a slight be forgotten, however chummy he and his vice president have been since.

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Swapping out Trump for Pence has not so secretly been a fantasy scenario for at least some Republicans, and surely many on the Religious Right have this idea in the back of their minds; why rely on Pence to push Trump in the direction of Evangelicals when they could just put the true Evangelical in the Oval Office? If the president becomes too politically toxic and Pence signals his willingness to step into the Oval Office, many Evangelicals could get behind such a move.

Protecting Christians abroad and keeping advisors like Mike Pence close were parts of the tacit agreement made between Donald Trump and conservative Christian voters, but the main goal of the Religious Right has for decades been to stack the judicial branch of government in order to reverse the progressive trends they so oppose. Donald Trump knows this; during his speech last weekend, he asserted that appointing judges was the most important job of a president and played up the over 150 federal court appointments and two Supreme Court picks he’s made so far.

Yet even with Trump’s apparent success in reshaping the courts, Evangelicals may be in for a disappointment. New Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have pushed the Court somewhat to the Right, but they haven’t been the firebrand conservatives that many conservatives were looking for. The new justices may prove unwilling to halt the trend of advances made to LGBT rights, and sexual identity may be ruled a federally protected class.

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Of course, the holy grail for Christian conservatives is overturning Roe v. Wade, and that test has yet to come. If a major case concerning abortion rights is decided by the Supreme Court — and several are currently in the pipeline — Evangelicals may start to shed their support for Trump, regardless of the outcome. A ruling that overturns or significantly weakens Roe may give Evangelicals a sense that their mission has been accomplish, and allow them to cease the moral compromises necessary to follow Trump wholeheartedly.

On the other hand, if Roe v. Wade is upheld even with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Evangelicals might fault Trump for not picking judges who were conservative enough, or they may be discouraged from their strategy of challenging abortion rights through the judiciary; either way, Donald Trump becomes less useful and more expendable.

A lot can happen between now and November 2020; perhaps these concerns will have been alleviated by then. And even if some conservative Christian leaders sour on Donald Trump, the Evangelical rank and file may continue to believe they “have a moral obligation to enthusiastically back” the President, as is asserted in a new book by Ralph Reed, one of Trump’s ardent Evangelical supporters.

But if Syria or the fallout from impeachment end up being the straws that break Evangelical’s backs concerning Trump, it will only be because of the other straws that have been piling up for a while now.

In 2016, American Evangelicals struck an ironically Faustian bargain: ally with Donald Trump, a man who represents everything they usually preach against, as their best shot of gaining the political and legal victories they sought at home and promoting Christians and their interests abroad.

For some, Donald Trump has not kept up his end of the bargain. And with the election just over a year away, Trump can no longer rely on the automatic backing of the Evangelical voters who came out for him in overwhelming force last time.

Erdoğan claims these changes are necessary to deal more effectively with the domestic and regional threats Turkey faces, depicting himself as the bulwark against the chaos of Syria or Yemen – a line employed by many autocrats in the region, as we can see in Jordan too.

He is right about the importance of Turkey. It borders Europe, is the second most powerful member of Nato, and performs security functions which no other state (not Greece, Israel, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia) could undertake in its stead. And so what happens when 60 million Turks vote next week concerns us in the West.

They vote amid a state of emergency and against a backdrop of economic turmoil. Although it was the fastest growing G20 country in 2017 (growth was 7.5%) the lira has lost 20 per cent of its value against the US dollar, inflation is in double digits, and the purchasing power of the average Turk has been eroded.

Fears that this economic crisis would degenerate, and worries about the growing appeal and strength of the opposition, explain why, in April, Erdoğan’s party, the AKP (Law and Justice Party) along with its nationalist MHP ally, Devlet Bahceli (they form the so-called People’s Alliance), brought the elections forward from the scheduled date in November 2019.

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A concerned AKP sought to seize an early advantage with prime minister Binali Yıldırım filching a former CHP (the main opposition party) proposal, which the AKP had initially rejected, to promise measures to restructure (that is erase) tax and insurance premium debts to public institutions as well as traffic, election and military service avoidance fines. The government has also offered to retroactively register nearly 13 million structures built without proper title deeds. There will be a 1,000-lira handout to pensioners before the two main annual Muslim holidays each year, and the 265-lira monthly additional pensioners’ allowance will be increased to 500 liras.

To shore up support, President Erdoğan is also making much of growing prosperity on his watch. During an electoral rally in the western province of Sakarya on 5th June, Erdoğan compared figures from the start of his Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) rule in 2002 to today.

“In 2002, 91,000 cars were sold, while 723,000 cars were sold last year. Some 1,088,000 refrigerators were sold back then and 3,107,000 were sold last year. It means that there are no poor people… if there is a fridge in every house, then we are on a certain level of prosperity.”

Sceptics have quietly noted, though, that 40 years ago, not many Turks stored food in the hollows of trees. But few dare openly criticise Erdogan. Thanks to coercive takeovers, most of the media is owned by corporations sympathetic to the president, while opposition press and TV have been closed down. For two years running, Turkey has topped the league table for imprisoning journalists (73, compared with 41 in China and 20 in Egypt).

Since the 2016 coup, some hundreds of thousands of people have been subjected to legalised intimidation, with 150,000 more detained in jail. These include the leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP party, Selahattin Demirtas, who has been held in Edirne high security prison for the last two years, facing multiple charges. If he is convicted, he could be imprisoned for 142 years. Demirtas is banned from TV, but he is still campaigning via his 1.6 million Twitter followers.

Polls, though, show that Erdoğan is not having it all his own way, even in a climate in which people are cagey about revealing voting intentions to strangers. They’re proving him right to have been wary of his opponents.

He was concerned, in particular, that momentum was building behind the ‘she-wolf’, a tough devout Muslim called Meral Aksener, leader of Iyi Partior ‘Good Party’. But by focusing on her, Erdoğan has taken his eye off the real opposition challenger: Muharrem Ince of the secular, Kemalist, social democratic CHP.

Ince has proved to be a formidable campaigner, managing to shrug off the idea that all secularists are snobby Istanbul elitists. A CHP MP since 2002, the 54-year-old former physics teacher likes to say that he comes from a pious village family in which some of his female relatives wear headscarves. He makes much of his ability to drive a tractor.

Ince has been getting out and about to deliver killer blows about Erdogan’s 16 years in power, his crazy economic views, and the corrupt profligacy of his regime of pious builders. Ince likes to point out that 100,000 new homes could have been built for the $1 billion cost of Erdogan’s massive Cumhurbaşkanlığı Külliyesi (presidential complex) in Ankara, which has 1,150 rooms and 63 elevators. The water goblets cost more than many Turks earn in a year. There is also the new 300-room presidential summer palace on a bay outside Marmaris.

Public discontent is not confined to Erdoğan’s personal megalomaniac building projects. Few are thrilled about the massive public infrastructure projects – bridges and the rail link under the Bosphorus – which are indemnified with onerous toll charges while public money is splurged to cover any failures by the private sector. There’s also an obvious religious agenda attached to these projects – clearly designed to transform ‘liberal’public spaces into Islamist and neo-Ottoman ones. A park and republican-era opera house in Istanbul’s Taksim Square were bulldozed, in 2013, to make way for a neo-Ottoman barracks and a giant mosque. Critics see this as the architectural manifestation of a broader effort to refashion Turkish society in line with values of the ruling AKP, whose Directorate of Religious Affairs has one of the highest budgets of all Turkish ministries ($899 million).

This unease is reflected in the latest polls, which point to Erdoğan winning 48.3% of the vote in a first round of the presidentials, with Ince receiving 31.4 per cent. That would guarantee a second round run-off, in which opposition parties could coalesce around a single candidate. At this point much will hinge on the mood Kurdish south-east and younger Turks. Ms Aksener is unpopular with the Kurds because of her stint as Turkey’s Interior Minister in 1996-97, when she took a very unforgiving line on the Kurdish PKK. By contrast, Ince has visited Demirtas in jail, and says he wants parliament to resolve the conflict with the Kurds through negotiations. So the more conservative among them, who detest the PKK, will probably vote for Erdoğan, but others will support Ince and the CHP.

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By Michael Burleigh

Meanwhile, in the parliamentary elections, it’s looking like the AKP and allies would not score an outright majority. The AKP is currently polling at 42.2% and its ally MHP 7.1%, with the CHP on 39.5%. Despite Demirtas being in jail, the HDP should achieve the 10 per cent needed to enter parliament. And without that majority, Erdoğan would be forced to rule by executive decree, slowing down his reforms, if not halting them.

It does look as though Turkey is proving just as impermeable to the AKP’s attempts to transform society in depth, as it proved impossible for the Kemalists to effect wholesale secularisation. Surveys of student views in the conservative imam-hatip religious schools (one of which the young Erdoğan attended) showed a shift towards ‘deism’ (a remotely omniscient deity) and a more personal, doubting, attitude towards Islam. Meanwhile, the birthrate is falling in secular cities.

While Erdoğan is likely to win the elections, whether his regime weathers the extreme volatility that is likely to afflict emerging markets in coming years seems doubtful, especially since his and the AKP’s attempts to re-engineer Turkish society are not gaining much ground. Ataturk did not succeed in vanquishing the obdurate old Turkey, but Erdoğan seems just as unlikely to be able to obliterate Ataturk’s legacy by the time the centenary of the republic is celebrated in four years’ time.

Kurdish Peshmerga forces bravely held off the world’s most brutal terrorist organisation with old AK47s and T55s – and let’s be clear, without their gigantic contribution, the murderous jihadists would still rape and kill their way to genocide. The West, in the moment of truth, bluntly told the Kurds that they were out there on their own.

In a grotesque display of historic miscalculation, we watched on as our Kurdish allies were crushed by Iranian-backed Shiite militia forces and elements of the Iraqi army in the assault on the city of Kirkuk in October.

The same Muslim people that climbed on churches to restore the cross of Christ, torn down by Islamist barbarians, are now being killed in the ongoing offensive in northern Iraq with American-made military vehicles and shiny new weapons – all at the behest of the theocratic mullah regime in Tehran.

Why should we care? Because what we have seen emerging in Kurdistan since the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime – the commitment to confront Islamic extremism, gender equality, religious pluralism – is the most promising democracy experiment in the Middle East since the creation of the state of Israel.

Defeating the Islamic State is not enough. We need to help shape an environment which leaves no room for forces just as dangerous and reactionary.

For more background please read “Challenging Capture of Kirkuk Necessary to Counter Iran“.

***

Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.