Commentary
Rojava is under fire – it’s our fight too
By resisting terror and building a democratic and egalitarian order among endless difficulties, the Kurds have taught us perseverance. Today, it’s not just about the betrayal of their cause, but also about the betrayal of ours.
In the winter of 2014, there was fighting in Kobane, with the Kurdish defenses caught in a pincer between the advancing ISIS forces and the Turkish border, patrolled by soldiers sympathetic to the jihadists.
Kobane, the place where post-Assad Syria was born, is now besieged again, ten years after Obama's decision, after pressure by public opinion across the world, to intervene on the side of those who showed themselves capable of resisting the spread of a terror that seemed unstoppable. Months earlier, that force of terror, which was selling Kurdish-Yazidi girls who survived the genocide on the slave market, had displayed four severed heads of Kurds as a warning at the entrance to Azaz, between Aleppo and Turkey, announcing the start of decapitation season. Back then, the poorly armed Kurds looked like a peasant self-defense brigade.
But things changed quickly: volunteers arrived from all over the world, and the savagery made an impression on female fighters, who were attracted by the equalitarian vocation of Kurdish democratic confederalism and also joined in from across the border. The Syrian Kurds are estimated to have lost 15,000 fighters in the campaign against the Islamic State, in which they went all the way to the stronghold of Raqqa and led the U.S. special forces to eliminate Caliph al-Baghdadi on the Turkish border. With the few resources they have, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the military backbone of the Kurdish-led autonomous rule, are having to deal with the tens of thousands of prisoners who survived the latest ISIS battle, squeezed between the refusal of their home countries to accept their repatriation and continued attempts at rebellion.
The Islamic State's new caliph is now assumed to be hiding far from the Levant, probably in Somali Puntland. A few days ago, ISIS assassinated a minister of the Afghanistan Emirate, a Taliban war hero belonging to the Haqqani clan. In Syria, ISIS has committed 700 terrorist attacks in 2024, three times more than in the previous year: operations that are increasingly frequent, sophisticated, and no longer limited to oil infrastructure in the region guarded by U.S. troops deployed alongside the SDF. The U.S. maintains 900 troops on the ground, and it is clear that, now as then (see, for instance, post-Gaddafi Libya), jihadist militiamen are carving out margins of maneuver along the fault lines of existing conflicts: U.S. commands have claimed to have struck ISIS preemptively some 80 times in the last two weeks of Syrian chaos alone.
In parallel with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham offensive that brought down the Assad regime, the Syrian National Army (SNA) militias have moved north: funded by Turkey, these are largely paramilitaries with a jihadist past, whose rule in Syrian regions controlled by Ankara has been marked by violence and extortion. After the SDF withdrew from Manbij, a majority-Arab city on the western side of the Euphrates River, an American-brokered ceasefire last week brought the Islamist militiamen back within sight of Kobane.
That is a golden opportunity for Erdogan's Turkey, which has for years insisted on a 22-mile “security strip” along which it wants to operate inside the Syrian border against the “PKK terrorists.” So it’s no wonder that the SNA has now broken the ceasefire and the Turks have begun dismantling the wall on the Kobane border, massing forces and artillery. Their aim is to wipe out Kurdish self-rule east of the Euphrates, occupying 120km of the border. Turkey has said it was ready to take over the whole anti-ISIS campaign in Syria, and is pulling all the strings it controls in the region, including traditionalist Kurdish factions and political clans that rule the autonomous region of northern Iraq – the so-called “good Kurds” protected by Ankara. Meanwhile, the so-called “terrorist” leaders in Rojava have taken up the new flag of the Syrian revolution and are appealing to Trump, asking him to stop Erdogan: it’s unclear whether Washington will let the Turks use the airspace they need to strike.
For her part, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock paid tribute to Kobane and Rojava, calling on Erdogan to respect Syrian sovereignty, while there was only silence from Italy.
Pro-Turkish militia leaders have gone to Damascus seeking tacit support from the new strongman, Al-Julani, who does not in fact seem inclined toward a decentralized or federal vision of the new Syrian political order. These new leaders are hardly mere emissaries of Ankara, but have survived for years in the shadow of the Turkish border. The accounts to settle among the different revolutionary factions are many and complicated, at least since Assad released Islamists and jihadists in order to poison the wells of the uprising against his regime.
The Kurdish issue spans the entire Middle East region. It’s not only about Turkey and Syria, but also about the militants of the Woman Life Freedom movement, whom Iran has been persecuting all the way into Iraqi cities, forcing them to flee on barges to the Calabrian coast, amid unknown shipwrecks and arrests for dubious accusations of human trafficking. We have seen other Syrian minorities mobilizing in recent days alongside the Kurds, including Armenians who fear the kind of ethnic cleansing already seen in Nagorno Karabakh.
By resisting terror and building a democratic and egalitarian order among endless difficulties, the Kurds have taught us perseverance. Today, it’s not just about the betrayal of their cause, but also about the betrayal of ours.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/kobane-sotto-tiro-e-la-questione-ci-riguarda on 2024-12-18