Why the Kurds must be free

While many in Syria have greeted the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s oppressive regime with cautious joy, trepidation prevails among the nation’s 2.5million Kurds. They were no friends of Assad. But they know that the hard-won freedom they currently enjoy in Syria’s Kurdish-held north-east, under the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), is now under greater threat than at any point in the past decade.

This threat doesn’t come directly from the Islamist forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which toppled Assad on 8 December. HTS has shown little interest so far in starting a conflict with AANES and its armed defenders, the multiethnic, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Indeed, it was notable that when HTS took Aleppo at the start of this month, the insurgents gave Aleppo’s Kurdish-controlled enclaves a wide berth.

The danger comes, rather, from Syria’s northern neighbour, Turkey. Intent on crushing the desire for independence among his nation’s own restive, 20million-strong Kurdish population, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has no desire to see a second autonomous Kurdish region cement itself on his nation’s southern border. He may have developed a cordial, oil-trading relationship with the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq, established in the early 1990s. But the AANES and its governing body, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), is a different political entity. The PYD is a radical, democratic movement closely related to Turkey’s own outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

This is partly why Ankara, mainly through a group of militias it backs known now as the Syrian National Army, has been intervening in the Syrian conflict since the popular uprisings against Assad in 2011 – namely, to suppress Syria’s Kurds. Up until the past year, its influence had largely been held in check by the US, its NATO ally, and above all by Russia and Iran, both of which propped up Assad’s despotic regime. With the retreat of Russia and Iran over the past year – to concentrate on waging war with Ukraine and Israel respectively – Turkey has become increasingly free to pursue its key objective. Namely, to push the AANES away from the northern border and back into the Syrian desert, and provide room to resettle Syrian refugees currently in Turkey.

Such is Turkey’s current influence in Syria, HTS could not have staged its takeover, launched from the Turkish-protected north west, without approval from Ankara. Some analysts claim that Erdoğan even vetoed an earlier planned offensive on Aleppo in October. Either way, HTS’s toppling of Assad has cleared the way for Turkey to ramp up its war on Syria’s Kurds.

All signs certainly point towards this outcome. In the months before HTS began its quick-fire offensive, the Turkish airforce has carried out strikes on electricity infrastructure in north-east Syria, depriving over a million living in the AANES of access to electricity and water. As Aleppo fell to HTS at the start of December, the SNA was busy seizing Tel Rifaat, a SDF-controlled town close to the Turkish border, before, a week later, it captured Manbij, another SDF stronghold. By all accounts, the SNA has now set its sights on capturing Kobane, the Kurdish-majority city that the Kurdish People’s Defence Units (YPG) rescued from an ISIS attack in 2015.

The internationalised conflict within Syria’s borders is far from over. With Turkey now the dominant regional player, the conflict’s focus has shifted. It is now potentially turning into a war between the Turkish-backed SNA in the north, alongside a newly installed HTS government, and the Kurdish-majority AANES in the east.

This is a conflict about more than territory. It’s about the future of Kurds in Syria, and indeed in the wider Middle East. It is about the attempt of an external actor to snuff out Kurds’ aspirations for autonomy, for independence, so tentatively realised in the AANES. An attempt, that is, to deny the millions of people who live there the chance to live in freedom.

The situation in which they now find themselves is all too familiar to the Kurds. They are an Iranic people who have lived for millennia in a vast area stretching from the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros mountains to the Euphrates in the West, and as far as the Black Sea in the north. For much of that time, Kurdish tribes lived sometimes peaceably, sometimes rebelliously, under successive Arab, Persian and Turkic empires.

In the late 19th century, Kurdish intellectuals began pursuing the same nationalist ideals that at the time had seized the imagination of many throughout Europe and beyond. For a brief moment, as the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War, it looked as if Kurds’ dreams of a homeland might finally be realised. In 1918, in his ‘Fourteen Points’, a statement of principles for postwar peace negotiations, US president Woodrow Wilson declared that ‘nationalities… now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development’. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed by some of the Allies and the Ottomans in 1920 but never ratified, even demarcated a version of Kurdistan in what is now Turkey. But Britain, France and a resurgent Turkey soon had other ideas. Following Turkey’s war of independence, the new Turkish government renegotiated with the Allies. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 established full Turkish control over what would have been Kurdistan.

Indeed, the modern state system in the Middle East, drawn up like lines on a chalkboard by the Great Powers, left the Kurds with no territory at all. From the interwar period onwards, they were a people divided between the modern states of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. A vast Middle Eastern populace rendered a minority within four different nations. Today, numbering somewhere between 30million and 45million people, they are the largest populace in the world without a state.

For most of the 20th century, the Kurds were the victims of the modern state system, their aspirations to autonomy thwarted by the separate nations in which they found themselves. Successive governments in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria violently suppressed them, putting down rebellions, massacring them and often seeking to erase all trace of their culture. In 1963, then Syrian police chief Mohammed Talib Hilal likened the Kurds to a ‘malignant tumor’ that needed to be excised.

Not that they were powerless. In Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran, they organised militarily and politically, from the establishment of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Iran in 1946 (which soon moved into Iraq, too) to the foundation of the PKK in Turkey, in November 1978. They also received backing from the Soviet Union and sometimes from the US. In 1975, the CIA, with Henry Kissinger lurking in the background, promised to provide Iraqi Kurds with weapons to fight Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, only to withdraw all support when the US suddenly struck a deal with Saddam.

Indeed, these frequent betrayals from fairweather international ‘friends’ have marked the Kurds’s modern history. They have frequently been used by powerful states, especially during the Cold War era, only to be abandoned when their desire for independence started to pose a threat to the modern Middle Eastern state system.

That was until the 1990s. In an ironic twist, successive US-led interventions in the Middle East unwittingly paved the way for Kurds’ to begin realising their dreams of autonomy. It began with the Gulf War in 1991, when US-led forces mounted a one-sided counter-offensive against Iraq after it had invaded Kuwait. This did great damage to the Iraqi state, and gave the Iraqi Kurds in the north the chance to carve out a degree of regional autonomy, protected by Western forces’ no-fly zone. The result was the establishment in 1992 of the semi-independent Kurdish Region. The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which thoroughly destroyed the Iraqi state, gave the Kurdish Regional Government a further chance to consolidate its power.

The rigid state system in the Middle East, constructed by the Great Powers at the end of the First World War, had long blocked Kurdish aspirations to self-governance. Suddenly, the unravelling of that system, largely at the hands of those who had once built it, was now fuelling those aspirations to self-governance. And nowhere more so than in Syria.

The popular uprisings against Assad in 2011 thoroughly undermined what authority his tinpot dictatorship had. Throughout much of western and central Syria, various external actors and Islamist militias exploited the subsequent power vacuum, as a popular rebellion morphed into a bloody, internationalised conflict. In Syria’s north and east, however, it was the Kurdish majority represented by the PYD and its military wing, the YPG, that took over. In 2012, they started to realise Syrian Kurds’ long-held dream of independence, in the shape of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, often referred to as Rojava (‘the west’).

The AANES is a remarkable achievement. In part, it’s the product of the vision of Abdullah Öcalan, the incarcerated leader of the PKK and inspiration behind the PYD. Having founded the PKK nearly five decades ago along Stalinist lines, his thinking moved far beyond Marxist-Leninst orthodoxy after his imprisonment in 1999. From that point on, he began revising his ideas by drawing on strands of New Leftist thought – most notably, that of the now largely forgotten Murray Bookchin, a Bronx-born self-educated political philosopher and historian, who had developed libertarian socialist theories of self-government, shot through with ecological concerns. Bookchin’s work allowed Öcalan to reconceive his and his party’s political project. He now imagined Kurdish independence in terms of a democratic, non-statist, decentralised model of socialism.

In March 2005, Öcalan issued his ‘Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in Kurdistan’. In this he urged members of the PKK and its Syrian affiliate, the PYD, to stop attacking the government, and work instead towards the creation of a network of municipal assemblies throughout Kurdish areas. He coined the term ‘democratic confederalism’ to describe this democracy without the state.

So when the PYD-led Kurds that dominate north-eastern Syria established Rojava as an autonomous zone in 2012, they did so according to Öcalan’s blueprint. This is clear from Rojava’s founding charter, ratified in 2014 and amended several times since. ‘Under the Charter’, runs its opening preamble, ‘we, the people of the Autonomous Regions, unite in the spirit of reconciliation, pluralism and democratic participation so that all may express themselves freely in public life’. What follows is an explicit commitment to creating democratic institutions, from ‘councils and public institutions elected by popular vote’ to the pledge that ‘all cities, towns and villages in Syria which accede to this charter may form cantons falling within autonomous regions… [each] founded upon the principle of local self-government’.

In the AANES, religion is tolerated, as a matter for the private sphere, not for public authorities. And liberal freedoms are championed: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; including freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’

After over a decade of existence, the reality of Rojava is far more rough and ready than the theory’s airless abstractions intend. Over half of those living in the territories are Kurdish, but there are also Assyrian Christians and smaller populations of Turkmen, Armenian, Circassian and Yazidi minorities. They are hardly all ardent adherents to PYD ideals, or true believers in the AANES charter. Furthermore, the region’s shattered economy is sustained by a black-market in oil, which rather undercuts Bookchin’s and Öcalan’s talk of ecological utopia. And for much of its existence it has been at war with Turkish-backed militias, assorted jihadist groups and, of course, ISIS itself.

Yet despite it all, what has emerged in Syria’s north east, through its network of self-administrating councils and cantons, is a testament to a people’s desire for freedom. The AANES is a raucous, tough democracy. A place in which people regardless of religion, ethnicity and gender are free to air their views and engage in the practice of self-government. As one writer who visited Rojava in 2020 recalls, the local meetings were robust, democratic affairs. They force the governing PYD to ‘rethink, revise or defend its positions on issues such as women’s education, conscription, the detention of ISIS-linked individuals… Neither Öcalan nor Bookchin envisaged the scene I witnessed in Raqqa, in which tribal sheikhs quarrelled with Kurdish women’s activists over the primary-school curriculum.’

Thanks to this courageous experiment in democracy, Kurds, Turkmens and Arabs rub up alongside each other, as they work through their grievances. It means that now in the Middle East, amid theocratic tyrants and assorted violent Islamists, a tough little democratic flower is blooming. As the late leftist David Graeber put it after a trip to the AANES in 2014, Rojava ‘is one of few bright spots – albeit a very bright one – to emerge from the tragedy of the Syrian revolution’.

Little wonder, perhaps, that those living there are so willing to fight for it. Öcalan himself always conceived of democratic society in militant terms – as a system that must be able to protect itself. ‘Societies without any mechanism of self-defence’, he wrote in 2005, ‘lose their identities, their capability of democratic decision-making, and their political nature’. There’s little chance of that with the AANES. Its principal defence force remains the YPG, which since 2015 has led the broader Syrian Democratic Forces, which includes several non-Kurdish militias. It is said to number something in the region of 80,000 to 100,000 fighters.

This willingness among Syria’s Kurds and other minorities to lay down their lives for their nascent democracy, to fight for their autonomy, is the main reason why they were able to do what the national armies in Syria and Iraq were unable to – that is, stand up to the barbaric zealots of ISIS. Because they believed passionately in what they were defending. It is also why, from 2014 onwards, the US decided to back the YPG in Kurds’ near-enough existential war with the black-clad Islamists – because the Kurdish-led forces seemed to be just about the only actors within Syria capable of fighting back.

So from that moment in 2014, when the then Obama administration began a bombing campaign to prevent Kobane, a Kurdish town on the Turkish border, from falling to ISIS, the US happily used Rojava’s Kurds to pursue its own shifting objectives in Syria. In June 2017, the SDF took the fight to Raqqa, the de facto capital of ISIS’s caliphate. After a brutal, ruinous, months-long fight, Raqqa was finally liberated by the SDF in October 2017. Then, 18 months later, in March 2019, the SDF took control of the last ISIS-held areas, around the town of Baghouz near the Iraq-Syria border. This prompted an SDF spokesperson to announce the ‘total elimination of [the] so-called caliphate’.

Yet while the Syrian Kurds’ certainly benefitted from American military backing in their battle against the reactionary Islamists of ISIS, it also came with geopolitical consequences. For as soon as the US intervened on the Kurds’ side in 2014, it prompted a huge escalation in Turkey’s attacks on Kurds in Syria and, indeed, in Turkey. President Erdoğan left no room for doubt as to his intentions in a statement in June 2015: ‘We will never allow the establishment of a [Kurdish] state in Syria’s north and our south. We will continue to fight in this regard no matter what it costs.’

And fight they have done. Over the past decade, Turkish-backed Arab militias, under the banner of the Syrian National Army, have conducted a brutal campaign against the AANES. They have attacked key infrastructure, killed hundreds of civilians and displaced thousands more along Syria’s northern border with Turkey. In 2020, UN investigators accused the SNA of war crimes, including murder, torture and arbitary detention. Ultimately, Turkey would like to see the AANES subdued by other Syrian factions more favourable to Ankara, such as HTS.

As it stands today, the continued presence of nearly a thousand US troops in Syria’s north east restricts Turkey’s room for manoeuvre. Their presence is possibly the one thing standing in the way of a large-scale Turkish-backed assault on at least the northern parts of Rojava.

Indeed, in 2019, we saw what might happen if the US abandons the Kurds completely. Within days of President Trump announcing a rapid withdrawal of the nearly 2,000 troops stationed in Syria at the time, Turkey had begun a military campaign against the Kurds. It prompted Trump to slap sanctions on Turkey and perform a partial u-turn, with a small number of troops ordered to remain to protect oil installations.

Five years on, Syrian Kurds’ situation is even more perilous. To their north, they face a Turkish state that refuses to accept the AANES’s existence, seeing it as a spur to Kurdish separatism within its own borders. To their west, a conglomerate of Islamist militias has just seized control of what’s left of the Syrian state. And the US, their chief international ally since 2014, seems only too happy to cast them to the Middle Eastern wind. President Trump has already betrayed them once, and, judging by his social-media post this month, there’s a strong chance he could do so again. ‘Syria is a mess, but is not our friend’, he said: ‘The United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight.’ Members of his top team, including security adviser Mike Waltz and secretary of state Marco Rubio are supporters of the Kurds, but it remains to be seen how much influence they will have.

The US is now on the brink of doing to the Kurds what Western powers have done since they carved up the Middle East a century ago. They betrayed them then, when Britain and France allowed Kemal Atatürk’s Turkish forces to roll tanks through the Treaty of Sèvres and its promise of a Kurdish state. They did it in the 1980s, when the US repaid Saddam Hussein for Iraq’s war with Iran by looking the other way while his forces massacred and gassed Iraq’s Kurds. And they could potentially do so again, by leaving the AANES at the mercy of external actors who desire its destruction.

This would represent a gross moral betrayal. A betrayal of those who put their lives on the line to defeat ISIS and, above all, of a brave people’s attempt to forge a democratic, self-governing region in the heart of the Middle East.

Kurdish people have been left once again in a wretched position, dependent for their survival, as they too often are, on the interests and calculations of others, be it the willingness of the HTS to strike an agreement or the strategic concerns of Turkey and the US. This fatal dependence on others, especially a treacherous West, has blighted the Kurds for too long. Now more than ever they need the autonomy they have fought so hard for to be recognised internationally. And right now, as Turkey menaces and the US retreats, that need has rarely been greater.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.