Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is threatening to follow up the capture of the Kurdish enclave of Afrin by launching an across-the-board military offensive against the remaining Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria and the main Yazidi population centre in the Sinjar region of Iraqi Kurdistan.
He claimed that the next target of Turkish troops would be the cities of Manbij, which the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) captured from Isis in 2016, and Kobani, which withstood a famous siege by Isis that ended in 2015. Unlike Afrin, both places are protected by the US Air Force, backed by 2,000 US specialised ground troops.
Mr Erdogan undoubtedly intends in the long term to eliminate the de facto Kurdish state that developed in northern and eastern Syria as the result of the advance of the YPG, backed by US air power, in the war against Isis. But it is unlikely that he will seek a confrontation with the US, which is sending out patrols of armoured vehicles into the front lines around Manbij, a strategically placed city between Aleppo and the Euphrates.
Speaking soon after the Turkish invasion of Afrin on 20 January, Gen Joseph Votel, commander of the US Central Command, said that withdrawing US forces from Manbij was “not something we are looking into”.
The Turkish leader threatened that his country’s troops could cross into Iraq to drive out Kurdish militants from Sinjar, if the Iraqi government did not oust them from there itself. The area is under the strong influence of the YPG, which intervened militarily in 2014 to protect the Yazidi community who were being massacred, raped and enslaved by Isis, which was then at the peak of its power.
The threat of a widening offensive against Syrian Kurdish forces is probably a manoeuvre by Mr Erdogan to divert attention from the situation in the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, which Turkish-backed forces captured on Sunday. There is a mass exodus of more than 200,000 people, according to a senior Kurdish official. “The people with cars are sleeping in the cars, the people without are sleeping under the trees with their children,” Hevi Mustafa, a top member of the Kurdish civil authority in the Afrin area, told a news agency.
The UN says that 98,000 recently displaced people from Afrin have registered with it at three centres outside the enclave. Another report said that 120,000 Kurds are not being allowed to enter Syrian government held territory and are unable to return to Afrin. The US State Department said it was “deeply concerned” by the humanitarian situation.
There may be less than meets the eye in a Turkish promise to leave Afrin once military operations are over. “We are not permanent there [in Afrin] and we are certainly not invaders,” said Bekir Bozdag, a deputy prime minister. “Our goal is to hand the region back to its real owners after clearing it of terrorists.” The reference to “real owners” may refer to a Turkish claim that many Arabs have been driven out of Afrin in the past and will now recover their homes, a form of enforced “re-Arabisation” that would take advantage of the flight of much of the Kurdish population. A Turkish military withdrawal, even if it took place, would not mean much because Turkey and Turkish-controlled territory surrounds Afrin on three sides and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) units, which would presumably stay in Afrin, take their orders from Turkey.
Turkish-led forces are carrying out widespread looting of government offices, shops and homes in Afrin as well as stealing vehicles, such as farm machinery, tractors and trailers according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It says that the looting and arrests are fuelling growing resentment among displaced people. Pictures from the area show tractors being driven away by uniformed militiamen.
The Kurdish YPG, which did not make a final stand in Manbij, says that it will revert to guerrilla warfare, something in which its commanders have great experience. But this may not be easy to do in a place like Afrin, which is isolated from the main Kurdish-held territory east of the Euphrates river. Guerrilla attacks are likely to provoke retaliation against the remaining Kurdish civilian population who might then leave Afrin and further open the door to ethnic cleansing.
It’s a cruel saga, and one that promises no immediate end. Turkey, considered one of the more potent of powers within the NATO alliance, has manoeuvred itself into a play that Washington will find hard to avoid. For Ankara, one thing must not happen as Islamic State forces gradually vanish, or more likely metamorphose into the next force they will, in time, become. It is that inconvenient matter of the Kurds, ever present, and, in recent few years ever forceful, about carving out territory within Syria and Iraq.
The United States has seen the Kurds as something of a gem, desperate, keen to fight, and often effective in their encounters with the Islamic State forces and their various incarnations. Ankara has been none too pleased with that fact. Guns, once acquired, are used; weapons, once used, are hard to put down.
NATO allies, on this score, do not see eye to eye, and have never done so. These eyes have parted even further with Washington’s promise that a 30,000 Kurdish-led border force will be established to police Turkish-Iraq borders in an effort to quash any resurgence of Islamic State forces. The promise has also managed to irk Iran and Russia, who see such a force as directed, not merely at Islamic State, but against their regional influence.
On Saturday, 72 Turkish jets targeted the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in Syria in an effort, codenamed Olive Branch, to remove, what Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called a terrorist threat across northern Syria. “Beginning from the west, step by step, we will annihilate the terror corridor up the Iraqi border.” Within that enclave are some 8 to 10 thousand Kurdish fighters. But added to that are 800 thousand vulnerable civilians, many displaced by the Syrian Civil War.
No more negotiations, no more chit chat or fanciful discourses about peaceful resolutions and amiable settlements – this was belligerence, pure and simple. “No one can say a word,” blustered the Turkish leader. “Whatever happens, we do not care anymore at all. Now we only care about what happens on the ground.”
Did it matter that the operation was just another example of Syria’s sovereignty as contingent, best ignored rather than respected by yet another power keen to issue its stamp on the area’s geography? Bekir Bozdağ, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, made a rather weak effort suggesting that such a military venture was temporary, a necessarily surgical move to target an infection. Once achieved, Turkish forces would withdraw.
Bozdağ proceeded to name organisations that have all found the convenient rhetorical packaging of terrorism. There are no distinctions to be had between the Kurdish YPG, or the PKK groups, nor those of the Islamic State. “The only target of the operation is the terrorist groups and the terrorists as well as their barracks, shelters, positions, weapons and equipment.”
As has been the official line in the conflicts that have mushroomed from Syria to Iraq, civilians are not targeted, even if they might be slaughtered. “Civilians are never targeted. Every kind of planning has been done to avoid any damage to civilians.”
Masks, posturing, and a good deal of dissimulation, are essential across the diplomatic engagement here. The one group that seems to be coming out of this rather poorly are history’s traditional whipping boys, the Kurds, who remain gristle in the broader strategic picture. Russia, for one, has blamed the United States for feeding the unstable situation while urging restraint on the part of Ankara’s forces.
“Provocative actions by the US, aimed at isolating regions with predominantly Kurdish population, were the main factors that contributed to the development of a crisis in this part of Syria,” went a statement.
Despite adopting a frowning line to the attacks, there is little doubt that discussions would have been had ahead of time with officials in Moscow, given the presence in the Russian capital of Hakan Fidan of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization and Hulusi Akar, chief of staff of Turkey’s army.
Iran, in turn, has been taking the position that such incursions, rather than dousing the fires of terrorist groups, emboldens them. Careful eyes are noting the fortunes of the respective players in this latest, murderous squabble.
The attacks were far from negligible, comprising some 100 targets. Another important feature of this muddled equation was the role played by fighters of the Free Syria Army, who also participated in operations against the Kurds.
The great power play here, even in the murky bloodiness, is that no one wants a genuinely viable Kurdistan front, and certainly one that has any claim to international legitimacy. One neutralised, weakened, and preferably defanged, is a position that seems to have been reached. Moscow will be assured that future conflict can be averted; Ankara will keep its sword sheathed in future. Washington will be left somewhere in between, left behind in another play it misread. Humanitarian catastrophe will be assured.
Syria’s War of Ethnic Cleansing
Syrian Arab militiamen leading the Turkish attack on Afrin in northern Syria are threatening to massacre its Kurdish population unless they convert to the variant of Islam espoused by Isis and al-Qaeda. In the past such demands have preceded the mass killings of sectarian and ethnic minorities in both Syria and Iraq.
In one video a militia fighter flanked by others describes the Kurds as “infidels” and issues a stark warning, saying “by Allah, if you repent and come back to Allah, then know that you are our brothers. But if you refuse, then we see that your heads are ripe, and that it’s time for us to pluck them.” Though the Kurds in Afrin are Sunni Muslims, Isis and al-Qaeda traditionally punish those who fail to subscribe to their beliefs as heretics deserving death.
“The video is 100 per cent authentic,” said Rami Abdulrahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which released it, in an interview with The Independent. He adds that he is very concerned about the fate of some Yazidi villages in Afrin captured by the advancing Turkish forces, saying he has seen videos taken by the militiamen themselves in one of which “an elderly Yazidi man is questioned by them, asking him how many times he prays a day.”
Such interrogations of Yazidis by Isis to prove that they were not Muslims often preceded the killings, rapes and the taking of Yazidi women as sex slaves when Isis seized Yazidi areas in northern Iraq in 2014. Mr Abdulrahman, who is the leading human rights monitor in Syria with a network of informants throughout the country, says he is worried that international attention is entirely focused on the Syrian army assault on Eastern Ghouta and “nobody is talking about” the potential slaughter of the Kurds and other minorities in Afrin.
He says that the two situations are similar since “President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have taken 60 per cent of Ghouta and [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s forces have taken 60 per cent of Afrin.” He says that as many as one million Kurds may be threatened and adds that it is becoming extremely difficult for them to escape from Afrin because Syrian government checkpoints on the only road leading south to Aleppo “are demanding bribes of up to $4,000 per family to let people through.”
Mr Abdulrahman points to growing evidence drawn from videos taken by themselves of militiamen claiming to be members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) that the units advancing ahead of regular Turkish troops are extreme jihadis. This has previously been asserted by a former Isis member in an interview published by The Independent last month who said that many of his former comrades had been recruited and retrained by the Turkish military. He said that Isis recruits had been instructed by Turkish trainers not to use their traditional tactics, such as the of extensive use of car bombs, because this would identify them as terrorists. He suspected that Isis fighters would be used as cannon fodder in Turkey’s war against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and then discarded.
As the Turkish army closes in on Afrin and the Syrian army penetrates deeply into the opposition stronghold of Eastern Ghouta, people in both areas fear that they will be the victims of enforced demographic change. One Kurdish observer in Iraq said that he thought Mr Erdogan, who has claimed that the majority in Afrin is not Kurdish, will “bring in Turkmen and others to replace the Kurdish population.”
Isis is particularly hostile to the US-backed YPG, as its most effective enemy which drove it out of a quarter of Syrian territory and captured the de facto Isis capital of Raqqa last October after a four-month siege.
As Mr Abdulrahman says, the sieges of Afrin and Eastern Ghouta have much in common, though the number of those trapped in Afrin may be larger. Motives for refusing to leave are also much the same. “I will never leave Ghouta,” said Haytham Bakkar, an anti-government journalist living there, speaking just as the present Syrian Army assault was getting underway. “We have lived here for hundreds and thousands of years. Here our grandparents lived. Here are our houses and tombs. We were born here and we will die here. Our souls and roots are here.”
Bakkar says that most people in Eastern Ghouta are convinced that their departure is part of a broader government plan to make drastic demographic changes whereby their property would be given to others. He says that even if people survived the dangerous journey out of the area, they did not want “to watch TV news and see strangers living in our homes.”
Kurds make a similar calculation, but it is also becoming extremely dangerous for them to try to flee. Precedents have already been set for ethnic and sectarian cleansing all over Syria since 2011 as those in control oust members of other communities.
The YPG is a formidable force and the YPG spokesman Nouri Mahmoud says that the group has 10,000 fighters in the enclave who would fight to the end. He says that Kurds are already being displaced and “in one village alone 600 people were told to go.” He said that the Kurds feared a genocide was in the making and complained that “the international media focus on Eastern Ghouta has given the Turks the opportunity to step up their attack on Afrin without the rest of the world paying much attention”. The Kurdish authorities are trying to publicise the sufferings of civilians in Afrin, but are so far not having much success.
In the long term – and possibly in the short term – Afrin may prove to be indefensible. It is surrounded by Turkish forces and their FSA allies who are vastly superior in numbers and heavy weapons and are able to use air power and artillery without opposition.
None of the foreign players in the Syrian crisis show any sign of intervening against Turkey. The Turks were able to invade Afrin on 20 January because Russia decided it would no longer defend its airspace as it had been doing previously. Kurdish leaders say they believe that Russia, Iran and Turkey have agreed that Turkey will get Afrin, possibly in exchange for the Turks agreeing to drop their support for the one big remaining anti-Assad enclave in Idlib.
The Turkish offensive against the Kurds in Afrin will not end when it falls, but its elimination may set the stage for further Turkish attacks against Kurdish-held territory further east. This will bring the Turks into a confrontation with the Washington which will try mediate, but, if US forces are to stay in Syria, then they will still need the Kurds as their one ally on the ground. But, if the fall of Afrin is accompanied by mass killings and ethnic cleansing, then the war in northern Syria is about to get a whole lot worse.
Posted By Patrick Cockburn On March 21, 2018 @ 1:58 am In articles 2015
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