Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to have stepped back from the brink of a military intervention in Kobani, the Syrian town just over the border, which the Kurds seized in 2012 and which is currently under siege from Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). As fighters from the Syrian Kurdish Protection Units (YPG) battle it out with the well-armed, strategically cunning, terrorists, Turkish soldiers stand on the other side of no-man’s land where their tanks sit idle, watching with apparent indifference.
The Kurds and Daesh are both pretenders to the same swathe of trans-border territory in Iraq and Syria. Both are unwelcome where Ankara is concerned and both will be weakened by the current battle. Erdogan, a pragmatist, will have the latter very much in mind. On Monday, Turkish fighter planes attacked Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebel targets near the Iraqi border, re-igniting the state’s aggression towards its own restive Kurds after a decade of relative peace.
By resisting Washington’s calls to help the YPG in Kobani, Erdogan is alienating an important ally. Yet, the armed PKK (which seeks Kurdish autonomy and umbrellas the YPG) is on Pentagon’s list of terrorist entities as well as Ankara’s, and the European Union’s. US President Barack Obama himself appears to be drifting, concluding his ‘what next’ meeting with military heads of 22 states on Wednesday with the ambiguous statement, “there’ll be set-backs as well as progress”. The Kurdish question is now central to the increasingly complex, escalating crisis ... and regional and international actors have been busy reversing and performing U-turns in order to politically and militarily exploit its possibilities.
The region’s 30-35 million Kurds live mostly in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria where they form significant minorities and where they have been routinely oppressed. The Kurds have been used as pawns in regional power games before — the Shah of Iran encouraged the Iraqi Kurds to rebel against Baghdad in the 1970s, for example — but never on this scale. Syrian President Bashar Al Assad — always a wily fox — realised early on in the Syrian civil war that the Kurds could play a pivotal role. When the Kurdish militia took advantage of the security vacuum to seize control of the northeast of the country (including Kobani) in 2012, Al Assad (who had routinely oppressed them and designated them ‘foreigners’) immediately granted them the citizenship they had been denied for 50 years and withdrew all his troops from the area. He hoped to buy their loyalty against the rebels and to use the Kurdish-controlled zone as a buffer against Turkey. He has been relatively successful in both respects.
After the Iranian revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa declaring a jihad against the Kurds (who are mostly Sunnis) inside Iran. Yet, in June 2014, Iran was the first country to arm and train the Iraqi Kurds’ Pershmerga forces as they battled with Daesh in autonomous Kurdistan’s oil-rich city Erbil; Tehran would prefer to fight Daesh in Iraq and Syria than in its own backyard.
As Erdogan considers his next move, he should realise that playing the Kurdish card can never produce a winning game. There is some antipathy within the Turkish population towards the Kurds, not only for historical, largely racist, reasons but, more recently, because of the PKK’s support for the Al Assad regime and the Iraqi Kurds’ willingness to sell oil to Israel. The Turkish ‘street’ then may not support an intervention in Kobani.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s Kurdish ‘street’ has mobilised in protest not only at Ankara’s failure to help their comrades in Kobani, but also at the authorities’ refusal to allow fighters from other Kurdish regions to transit to Syria. Erdogan responded by sending tanks into Diyarbakir, the de facto Kurdish capital and at least 21 protestors have been killed. If the YPG prevails in Kobani, it may revitalise the Turkish Kurds impetus for autonomy — something Ankara dreads and is unlikely, then, to facilitate. Erdogan has other reasons to hesitate: He made it clear to his coalition allies that help for Kobani was inextricably linked to an assurance that Al Assad would also be targeted. Yet, Ankara’s demands for a buffer zone inside Syria and a no-fly zone have yet to be met. These are defences Erdogan needs for protection both from Al Assad and Daesh, which will be hell-bent on revenge if he hastens their departure from Kobani.
If Erdogan fails to respond to coalition pressure to intervene in Kobani, he will be isolated among the Sunni-bloc and its allies and will face growing and continued unrest from the Kurds at home and on Turkey’s borders. In addition, Daesh — if it takes Kobani — presents an obvious threat to Turkey’s security and there are some 2,000 Turkish fighters in its ranks. In my opinion, Erdogan made a catastrophic mistake when he became embroiled in the Syrian conflict. His judgement may well have been hampered by his personal animosity towards Al Assad and he has not been able to deliver on his threats, compromising his credibility both at home and on the world stage. Now Turkey’s own political infrastructure has been undermined.
Turkey’s battle with the PKK through the 1980s and 1990s destabilised the country and cost some 45,000 lives. Since PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured by Turkish security forces 15 years ago, an uneasy truce has prevailed. Turkey’s relative stability and improved internal security were key to the ‘economic miracle’ Erdogan has presided over and which has made him so popular. Now all that is threatened.
Abdel Bari Atwan is the editor-in-chief of digital newspaper Rai alYoum: http://www.raialyoum.com. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@abdelbariatwan.
