TURKEY’S BORDER CONCERNS

In all the time I was in the northeast, since January 2018, I heard — and sometimes delivered — points that articulated appreciation about Turkey’s legitimate security concerns regarding the border with Syria. And yet that border stayed quiet on the Syrian side the entire time — over 20 months — I have been in Syria, until Turkey violated it with its October Peace Spring military operation. When quietly called on this discrepancy, a senior U.S. official explained to me, “well, it’s a perceived threat (because of ideological and other affiliations between the PYD and the PKK) that Turkey feels, so we have to take it seriously.” But eventually the talking point became reality. We began speaking as if there really were attacks across the border into Turkey, causing real casualties and damage. But these were chimerical — strongly felt perhaps — but palpable only as fears and concerns, not on the ground.

Meanwhile our SDF partners did everything they told us they would do to fight ISIS, and did it with motivation, impressive command and control, and ability to absorb casualties. They suffered over 10,000 fatalities and some 20,000 wounded. Not imagined casualties but truly dead young men and women and thousands suffering appalling, life-altering injuries.

OUR FIGHT WILL BE YOUR FIGHT

We asked these people to take on this fight. It was our fight, and Europe’s, and all of the international community’s. And yes, it was Syria’s Kurds’ fight too. They had fought ISIS to a standstill in Kobane and with our help back in 2014-2015, repulsed them. But we asked them to fight for us, for the international community, to put almost exclusively on their shoulders this burden of taking down what remained of the Caliphate. For their own reasons and calculations, they did so. One could argue that in a transactional sense, we owe them nothing. We looked after our interests and they made their own calculations.

But let’s be honest. They are a relatively small, largely local non-state actor. In some ways we, seeking a local partner to fight ISIS with us, may have inadvertently put a target on their back that did not exist before we came on the scene. At that time, while Turkey might have looked upon the PYD and its YPG militia as affiliated PKK organizations, it did not view them as an existential threat, the way Turkey has increasingly viewed them since they partnered with us. In 2015 senior PYD officials like Saleh Muslim and Elham Ahmed visited Turkey, meeting with senior GOT officials. They were not labeled terrorists or subjected to the language of extermination or other harsh rhetoric. But our military partnership with the SDF, never accepted by Turkey, over time seriously riled the Turks and seems to have caused them to see the YPG militia, the backbone of the SDF, together with the PYD political party, as an existential threat. In tandem with internal political developments in Turkey that left Erdogan beholden to a far-right political party with visceral anti-Kurd tendencies, and gave him his own reasons to demonize Syria’s Kurds, the dynamic for the current tragedy was set in motion.

OPERATION PEACE SPRING: ETHNIC CLEANSING BY ANOTHER NAME

One day when the diplomatic history is written, people will wonder what happened here and why officials didn’t do more to stop it or at least speak out more forcefully to blame Turkey for its behavior: an unprovoked military operation that has killed some 200 civilians, left well over 100,000 people (and counting) newly displaced and homeless because of its military operation targeting Tel Abyad and Ras Ayn, but also Kobane, and Ayn Isa, and dozens of Kurdish villages surrounding each of these towns. Using the threat and intense application of military force, much of it supplied by armed groups — Turkish Supported Organizations, or TSO, some of whom formerly allied with ISIS or al-Qaida — Turkey has emptied or is emptying major Kurdish population centers and Turkish officials — led by President Erdogan speaking at UNGA in September — broadcast their intention to fill these emptied areas with Syrian Arab refugees currently in Turkey. This de-populating of Kurdish areas benefited from several well-publicized, fear-inducing atrocities the TSO committed in the early days of the military operation that accelerated civilian flight.

Let’s be clear: this is intentioned-laced ethnic cleansing; it is a war crime, when proven. The US government should be much more forceful in calling Turkey out for this behavior. We should also make much clearer to Turkey, in public and private statements and with the leverage we have at our disposal, that the people run out of their homes must be able to safely return. The TSO gangs must be withdrawn. And as President Trump himself warned in a similar context, we should take steps to re-impose economic sanctions if Turkey attempts to carry out its threat of flooding this area with refugees, outside of any UN-sanctioned process.

This gets to the issue of whether we promised the Kurds we would protect them against Turkey. And it is true we did not utter those words or make that specific commitment. When the attack on Afrin occurred last winter, we told people, based on Washington’s guidance to reassure our partners “We can’t do anything about Afrin (which Turkey and its jihadi mercenaries attacked last year, dispossessing 170,000 people) because we aren’t there; no troops or air power. But we are here in the northeast. We are your close partner. Afrin can’t happen here.”