Kurdish insurrection gathers steam against Ankara’s ‘inaction to protect Turkey’ as well as against Islamic State incursion

The sense of betrayal is palpable. The Kurds on Turkey’s southern border with Syria are embittered as the tragedy of Kobani unfolds before their eyes on the other side of a wire fence.

In Syria, Kurdish fighters of the YPG militias are beleaguered. They were unaided, apart from the pin pricks of occasional western air strikes, until Tuesday when the US-led allies started to bomb Islamic State positions during the day, slowing their advance.

Many now fear that without a more substantial ground offensive, YPG forces will be unable to prevent the fall of Kobani.

The forces might be in the terminal stages of failing to prevent a massacre, but Ankara refuses to allow Kurdish fighters to cross into Syria to relieve the neighbouring city.

As Turkish troops and tanks stand guard at the border, many Kurds are desperate and angry, assaulted by Turkish teargas, water cannon, and police violence.

“Isis are inhuman, they are the terrorists. The YPG is fighting not only for the Kurds and their land, but for all of humanity,” said Nesrattin from Siirt. “We’re protecting Turkey, too. Why can’t they see that? We are Turkey’s friends.”

He is surrounded by a throng of other Kurds from Siirt who have come to the border “to make sure that Turkey does not support Isis”.

The rancour on the border is giving way to recrimination across Turkey as an incipient Kurdish insurrection gathers steam, as much against Islamist extremism in Syria as against the Turkish authorities, in what appears to be payback for years of Turkish blundering in its policies towards the region.

Turkey’s perceived inaction vis-à-vis the situation in Kobani and the conviction of many Kurds that Ankara directly supports Islamic State militants against Kurdish fighters seems to be the final straw.

“Why do they use so much force against us?” asked Hatice, 38. “Many of our friends were hurt in clashes with the police on this side of the border. They use teargas and water cannon, some of our cars were damaged. We’re not doing anything bad, we just want to stand here to support the YPG fighters in Kobani.”

More than three years into the Syrian war, the Kobani crisis has all the makings of a watershed moment for Turkey and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has dominated national politics for more than a decade.

Turkey’s aloofness a few miles from Kobani has outraged the Kurds. There have been clashes and killings in a dozen towns across the south-east in recent days, in Istanbul and Ankara as well as in western Europe, leaving at least 19 dead. Countless buildings are being torched and curfews imposed, including in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in the south-east.

The fall of Kobani to the Isis extremists represents a huge threat to Erdoğan, not just from the Sunni militants increasingly controlling his border points, but from Turkey’s Kurds, who make up about 20% of the population, and their outlawed army, the PKK or the Kurdistan Workers’ party, which, until a couple of years ago, had been effectively at war with the Turkish state for 30 years.

“Erdoğan hates the Syrian Kurds. He thinks they’re worse than Isis. Turkey has many problems with this and has always been ambiguous,” said a European diplomat involved in the effort to build an anti-Isis coalition.

That view appeared to be vindicated this week when Erdoğan equated the Kurds of Kobani and their defenders with the jihadi assailants. “It is wrong to view them differently, we need to deal with them jointly,” he told journalists in Istanbul.

Gilles de Kerchove, the EU’s counter-terrorism coordinator, said: “The Syrian Kurds are a big concern for Erdoğan because he is not done with the PKK.”

Erdoğan’s policy on Syria, fixated on the overthrow of the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, is a litany of failure. Turkey’s long and porous border with Syria became the main gateway to the war for the regional and European jihadis who flocked to the ranks first of al-Nusra, then Isis, while southern Turkey became the main marketplace for the oil- and fuel-smuggling rackets that form a primary source of revenue for Isis.

EU officials and diplomats say that when the west presses Erdoğan to get a grip on his borders and stem the flow of foreign fighters to Isis, Ankara angrily dismisses the complaints, arguing that the foreign fighters are a European security issue and that the west refuses to share intelligence on the problem with the Turks. Western diplomats in Ankara agree that Erdoğan has a point.

The president, meanwhile, has wasted three years seeking to gain western support for what he still believes to be the central aim on Syria – Assad’s overthrow.

In Washington and Europe, heavily criticised too for their inaction on Syria in the past three years, governments are exasperated at what they regard to be Ankara’s cynical calculations in seeking to play one enemy off against another - the Sunni extremists of Isis and the Kurdish militants of the PKK, long identified by the Turkish state as its number-one enemy.

“There’s growing angst about Turkey dragging its feet to act to prevent a massacre less than a mile from its border,” a US administration official told the New York Times. “After all the fulminating about a humanitarian catastrophe, they’re inventing reasons not to act to avoid another catastrophe ... This isn’t how a Nato ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from their border.”

In the past two years, Erdoğan has attracted much international condemnation for his increasingly erratic and personalised authoritarianism. The exception has been the seeming promise of sealing a historic peace pact with the PKK and its jailed leader, Abdullah Öcalan. That prospect now appears to hinge on Kobani and on how Erdoğan chooses to react.

“It is wrong to say that the peace process is over,” said Vahap Coskun, an assistant professor at Dicle University, in Diyarbakir. “But one must understand that it is now at its most vulnerable, the most endangered it has ever been.”

Others are less lenient. The PKK harshly criticised Ankara’s stance on the Isis siege last month and warned that the government had violated the terms of an 18-month mutually observed ceasefire. The PKK’s statement said that because of the Justice and Development party’s “war against [Kurdish] people,” the PKK leadership would “step up its struggle in every area and by all possible means”.

“Does Ankara truly believe it can keep on negotiating with the PKK as if nothing has happened in Kobani?” Joost Lagendijk, a former Dutch MEP and expert on Turkey, said this week. “The pictures of the Turkish army as a spectator and bystander, doing nothing while Kurds are being killed in front of their eyes, has created a worldwide perception of Turkey as a cynical and calculating player.”

Demir Çelik, MP for the Kurdish People’s Democracy party (HDP) in Mus province, has accused the government of fraudulent double-dealing. “We have been very patient for a long time, but the government in Ankara did very little. They raised our hopes, but never fulfilled them.”

In Çelik’s home province on Tuesday evening, Hakan Buksur, 25, was reportedly shot by the police during anti-Isis protests. Kurdish protesters then torched several government buildings. Ankara imposed a curfew on Mus and five other cities, including Diyarbakir.

“This state of emergency will not produce a solution,” said Çelik. “It did not work in the past and it will not work now.”

The key request of the Kurdish fighters in Kobani is that arms, equipment, and PKK reinforcements be allowed across the Turkish border to help relieve the plight of the encircled town.

But the Kurdish fighters of the PYG are a satellite of the PKK and Erdoğan shows no inclination to arm guerrillas whom the Turks have been fighting for 30 years.

The outcome is a collapse in Kurds’ trust of Erdoğan and his ruling AK (the Justice and Development party), which has been mirrored in recent days in intra-Kurdish clashes recalling the dark times of the 1990s.

The violence in Diyarbakir was notable for the fighting between PKK loyalists and Islamist Kurds, with five of eight people killed being from the Free Cause party, or Hüda Par, according to local police.

Very conservative religiously, Hüda Par has emerged as a rival to the more secular PKK in the Kurdish south-east. The party originates in Hizbullah, a Sunni militant group from Turkey that has no connection to its namesake in Lebanon but shares that party’s sympathy for Iran.

Hizbullah gained notoriety in the 1990s when it was recruited by the Turkish “deep state” to murder and torture hundreds of PKK members and supporters in the region. For many, Hüda Par represents a Turkish government fifth column sowing intra-Kurdish conflict.

“This is extremely dangerous,” said Coskun. “This fault line between Kurdish factions is not new. It is reminiscent of the bloody conflicts in the 1990s.”

Many Kurds see Isis in Syria and Hüda Par in Turkey as representing an identical threat of Sunni extremism and view Ankara as their sponsors.

“A significant part of the Turkish public believes the Sunnis of Syria and the Middle East are fellow victims of injustice and that Isis represents a legitimate Sunni grievance,” the International Crisis Group said this week in a report from Ankara.

The group added that private polling within Erdoğan’s religion-based Sunni Muslim AK party revealed sympathy for Isis. “This makes it hard for a Turkish government to directly attack Isis.”

Coskun echoed this view, noting that PKK loyalists “see Isis and Hüda Par as one and believe Ankara supports Isis”. He added: “It’s very dangerous.”

In cities like Adiyaman and Diyarbakir, residents have been accusing Hüda Par of recruiting young, mostly Kurdish, men to fight for al-Qaida and against Kurdish fighters in Syria while the Turkish government looks the other way.

On the Turkish side of the border, the overwhelming view among the Kurds is that Erdoğan is less concerned with the extremists attacking Kobani than with the Syrian Kurds struggling to defend it.

“We will be here to stand watch that they don’t help Isis, and that is all we do, but every day [the police] uses violence against us,” said Rahman, 40, from Siirt. “Why do they do that if not to cover up their actions? They bring up the peace process whenever it suits them. They are not serious.”

• This article was amended on 9 October 2014. An earlier version incorrectly described Siirt as a border town.