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Title: The Threat to Rojava Author: CrimethInc. Date: 28th December 2018 Language: en Topics: Rojava, Trump, Syrian civil war Source: Retrieved on 12th October 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2018/12/28/the-threat-to-rojava-an-anarchist-in-syria-speaks-on-the-real-meaning-of-trumps-withdrawal
I’m writing from Rojava. Full disclosure: I didn’t grow up here and I
don’t have access to all the information I would need to tell you what
is going to happen next in this part of the world with any certainty.
I’m writing because it is urgent that you hear from people in northern
Syria about what Trump’s “troop withdrawal” really means for us—and it’s
not clear how much time we have left to discuss it. I approach this task
with all the humility at my disposal.
I’m not formally integrated into any of the groups here. That makes it
possible for me to speak freely, but I should emphasize that my
perspective doesn’t represent any institutional position. If nothing
else, this should be useful as a historical document indicating how some
people here understood the situation at this point in time, in case it
becomes impossible to ask us later on.
Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria is not an “anti-war” or
“anti-imperialist” measure. It will not bring the conflict in Syria to
an end. On the contrary, Trump is effectively giving Turkish President
Tayyip ErdoÄźan the go-ahead to invade Rojava and carry out ethnic
cleansing against the people who have done much of the fighting and
dying to halt the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS). This is a deal
between strongmen to exterminate the social experiment in Rojava and
consolidate authoritarian nationalist politics from Washington, DC to
Istanbul and Kobane. Trump aims to leave Israel the most ostensibly
liberal and democratic project in the entire Middle East, foreclosing
the possibilities that the revolution in Rojava opened up for this part
of the world.
All this will come at a tremendous cost. As bloody and tragic as the
Syrian civil war has already been, this could open up not just a new
chapter of it, but a sequel.
This is not about where US troops are stationed. The two thousand US
soldiers at issue are a drop in the bucket in terms of the number of
armed fighters in Syria today. They have not been on the frontlines of
the fighting the way that the US military was in Iraq.[1] The withdrawal
of these soldiers is not the important thing here. What matters is that
Trump’s announcement is a message to Erdoğan indicating that there will
be no consequences if the Turkish state invades Rojava.
There’s a lot of confusion about this, with supposed anti-war and
“anti-imperialist” activists like Medea Benjamin endorsing Donald
Trump’s decision, blithely putting the stamp of “peace” on an impending
bloodbath and telling the victims that they should have known better. It
makes no sense to blame people here in Rojava for depending on the
United States when neither Medea Benjamin nor anyone like her has done
anything to offer them any sort of alternative.
While authoritarians of various stripes seek to cloud the issue, giving
a NATO member a green light to invade Syria is what is “pro-war” and
“imperialist.” Speaking as an anarchist, my goal is not to talk about
what the US military should do. It is to discuss how US military policy
impacts people and how we ought to respond. Anarchists aim to bring
about the abolition of every state government and the disbanding of
every state military in favor of horizontal forms of voluntary
organization; but when we organize in solidarity with targeted
populations such as those who are on the receiving end of the violence
of ISIS and various state actors in this region, we often run into
thorny questions like the ones I’ll discuss below.
The worst case scenario now is that the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army
(TFSA), backed by the Turkish military itself, will overrun Rojava and
carry out ethnic cleansing on a level you likely cannot imagine. They’ve
already done this on a small scale in Afrin. In Rojava, this would take
place on a historic scale. It could be something like the Palestinian
Nakba or the Armenian genocide.
I will try to explain why this is happening, why you should care about
it, and what we can do about it together.
The system in Rojava is not perfect. This is not the right place to air
dirty laundry, but there are lots of problems. I’m not having the kind
of experience here that Paul Z. Simons had some years ago, when his
visit to Rojava made him feel that everything is possible. Years and
years of war and militarization have taken their toll on the most
exciting aspects of the revolution here. Still, these people are in
incredible danger right now and the society they have built is worth
defending.
What is happening in Rojava is not anarchy. All the same, women play a
major role in society; there is basic freedom of religion and language;
an ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse population lives
side by side without any major acts of ethnic cleansing or conflict;
it’s heavily militarized, but it’s not a police state; the communities
are relatively safe and stable; there’s not famine or mass food
insecurity; the armed forces are not committing mass atrocities. Every
faction in this war has blood on its hands, but the People’s Protection
Units (YPG/YPJ) have conducted themselves far more responsibly than any
other side. They’ve saved countless lives—not just Kurds—in Sinjar and
many other places. Considering the impossible conditions and the
tremendous amount of violence that people here have been subjected to
from all sides, that is an incredible feat. All this stands in stark
contrast to what will happen if the Turkish state invades, considering
that Trump has given ErdoÄźan the go-ahead in return for closing a
massive missile sale.
It should go without saying that I don’t want to perpetuate an
open-ended Bush-style “war on terror,” much less to participate in the
sort of “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West that bigots
and fundamentalists of both stripes have been fantasizing about. On the
contrary, that is precisely what we’re trying to prevent here. Most of
the people Daesh [ISIS] have killed have been Muslim; most of the people
who have died fighting Daesh have been Muslim. In Hajin, where I was
stationed and where the last ISIS stronghold is, one of the
internationals who has been fighting Daesh longest is an observant
Muslim—not to speak of all the predominantly Arab fighters from Deir
Ezzor there, most of whom are almost certainly Muslim as well.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll oversimplify and say that today, there are
roughly five sides in the Syrian civil war: loyalist, Turkish, jihadi,
Kurdish,[2] and rebel.[3] At the conclusion of this text, an appendix
explores the narratives that characterize each of these sides.
Each of these sides stands in different relation to the others. I’ll
list the relations of each group to the others, starting with the other
group that they are most closely affiliated with and ending with the
groups they are most opposed to:
Loyalist: Kurdish, Turkish, jihadi, rebel
Rebel: Turkish, jihadi, Kurdish, loyalist
Turkish: rebel, jihadi, loyalist, Kurdish
Kurdish: loyalist, rebel, Turkish, jihadi
Jihadi: rebel, Turkish, Kurdish and loyalist
This may be helpful in visualizing which groups could be capable of
compromising and which are irreversibly at odds. Again, remember, I am
generalizing a lot.
I want to be clear that each of these groups is motivated by a narrative
that contains at least some kernel of truth. For example, in regards to
the question of who is to blame for the rise of ISIS, it is true that
the US “ploughed the field” for ISIS with the invasion and occupation of
Iraq and its disastrous fallout (loyalist narrative); but it is also
true that the Turkish state has tacitly and sometimes blatantly colluded
with ISIS because ISIS was fighting against the primary adversary of the
Turkish state (Kurdish narrative) and that Assad’s brutal reaction to
the Arab Spring contributed to a spiral of escalating violence that
culminated in the rise of Daesh (rebel narrative). And although I’m
least sympathetic to the jihadi and Turkish state perspectives, it is
certain that unless the well-being of Sunni Arabs in Iraq and Syria is
factored into a political settlement, the jihadis will go on fighting,
and that unless there is some kind of political settlement between the
Turkish state and the PKK, Turkey will go on seeking to wipe out Kurdish
political formations, without hesitating to commit genocide.
It’s said that “Kurds are second-class citizens in Syria, third-class
citizens in Iran, fourth-class citizens in Iraq, and fifth-class
citizens in Turkey.” It’s no accident that when Turkish officials like
Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu list the “terror groups” they are most
concerned about in the region, they name the YPG before ISIS. Perhaps
this can help explain the cautious response of many Kurds to the Syrian
revolution: from the Kurdish perspective, regime change in Syria carried
out by Turkish-backed jihadis coupled with no regime change in Turkey
could be worse than no regime change in Syria at all.
I won’t rehash the whole timeline from the ancient Sumerians to the
beginning of the PKK war in Turkey to the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the
Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS. Let’s skip forward to Trump’s
announcement on December 19: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only
reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”
Let me be clear: Daesh has not been defeated in Syria. Just a few days
ago, they took a shot at our position with a rocket launcher out of a
clear blue sky and missed by only a hundred yards.
It is true that their territory is just a fraction of what it once was.
At the same time, by any account, they still have thousands of fighters,
a lot of heavy weaponry, and probably quite a bit of what remains of
their senior leadership down in the Hajin pocket of the Euphrates river
valley and the surrounding deserts, between Hajin and the Iraqi border.
In addition, ISIS have a lot of experience and a wide array of
sophisticated defense strategies—and they are absolutely willing to die
to inflict damage on their enemies.
To the extent that their territory has been drastically reduced, Trump
is telling a bald-faced lie in trying to take credit for this. The
achievement he is claiming as his own is largely the work of precisely
the people he is consigning to death at the hands of Turkey.
Under Obama, the Department of Defense and the CIA pursued dramatically
different strategies in reference to the uprising and subsequent civil
war in Syria. The CIA focused on overthrowing Assad by any means
necessary, to the point that arms and money they supplied trickled down
to al-Nusra, ISIS, and others. By contrast, the Pentagon was more
focused on defeating ISIS, beginning to concentrate on supporting the
largely Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG/YPJ) during the defense
of Kobane in 2014.
Now, as an anarchist who desires the complete abolition of every
government, I have no love for the Pentagon or the CIA, but if we
evaluate these two approaches according to their own professed goals,
the Pentagon plan worked fairly well, while the CIA plan was a total
disaster. In this regard, it’s fair to say that the Obama administration
contributed to both the growth of ISIS and its suppression. Trump, for
his part, has done neither, except insofar as the sort of nationalist
Islamophobia he promotes helps to generate a symmetrical form of Islamic
fundamentalism.
Up until December, Trump maintained the Pentagon strategy in Syria that
he inherited from the Obama administration. There have been signs of
mission creep from US National Security Advisor John R. Bolton and
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who ultimately hope to undermine Iran on
account of it supplying oil to China. This far—and no further—I can
understand the concerns of a pseudo-pacifist “anti-imperialist”: war
with Iran would be a nightmare compounding the catastrophe brought about
by the war in Iraq. So yes, insofar as the YPG and YPJ were forced to
coordinate with the US military, they were working with unsavory
characters whose motivations were very different from their own.
To sum up: what has brought about the by-now almost total recapture of
the territory ISIS occupied isn’t rocket science. It’s the combination
of a brave and capable ground force with air support. In this sort of
conventional territorial war, it’s extremely difficult for a ground
force without air support to defeat a ground force with air support, no
matter how fiercely the former fights. In some parts of Syria, this
involved the YPG/YPJ on the ground with US backing from the air.
Elsewhere in Syria, it must be said, ISIS was pushed back by the
combination of Russian air support and the loyalist army (SAA) alongside
Iranian-backed militias.
It would have been extremely difficult to recapture this territory from
ISIS any other way. The cooperation of the YPG/YPJ with the US military
remains controversial, but the fact is—every side in the Syrian conflict
has been propped up and supported by larger outside powers and would
have collapsed without that support.
People employing the Turkish, loyalist, and jihadi narratives often
point out that Kobane would have fallen and YPG/YPJ would never have
been able to retake eastern Syria from Daesh without US air support.
Likewise, the Syrian government and the Assad regime were very close to
military collapse in 2015, around the time Turkey conveniently downed a
Russian plane and Putin decided that Russia was going to bail out the
Assad regime no matter what it took. The rebels, on their side, never
would have come close to toppling Assad through military means without
massive assistance from the Turkish government, the Gulf states, US
intelligence services, and probably Israel on some level, although the
details of this are murky from where I’m situated.
And the jihadis—Daesh, al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, and the others—would never
have been able to take control of half of Iraq and Syria if the US had
not been so foolish as to leave an army’s worth of state-of-the-art
equipment in the hands of the Iraqi government, which effectively
abandoned it. It also helped them that a tremendous amount of resources
trickled down from the above-mentioned foreign sponsors of the rebels.
It also helped that Turkey left its airports and borders open to jihadis
from all over the world who set out to join Daesh. There also appears to
have been some sort of financial support from the Gulf states, whether
formally or through back channels.
The Turkish state has its own agenda. It is not by any means simply a
proxy for the US. But at the end of the day, it’s a NATO member and it
can count on the one hundred percent support of the US government—as the
missile sale that the US made to Turkey days before the withdrawal tweet
illustrates.
In view of all this, we can see why YPG/YPJ chose to cooperate with the
US military. My point is not to defend this decision, but to show that
under the circumstances, it was the only practical alternative to
annihilation. At the same time, it is clear that this strategy has not
created security for the experiment in Rojava. Even if we set aside
ethical concerns, there are problems with relying on the United
States—or France, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or any other state
government with its own state agenda. As anarchists, we have to talk
very seriously about how to create other options for people in conflict
zones. Is there any form of international horizontal decentralized
coordination that could have solved the problems that the people in
Rojava were facing such that they would not have been forced to depend
on the US military? If we find no answer to this question when we look
at the Syria of 2013–2018, is there something we could have done
earlier? These are extremely pressing questions.
No one should forget that ISIS was only reduced to their current
relative weakness by a multi-ethnic, radically democratic grassroots
resistance movement, that incidentally involved international volunteers
from around the globe. In view of Trump’s order to abandon and betray
the struggle against ISIS, every sincere person who earnestly wants to
put a stop to the spread of apocalyptic fundamentalist terror groups
like ISIS or their imminent successors should stop counting on the state
and put all their resources into directly supporting decentralized
multi-ethnic egalitarian movements. It is becoming ever clearer that
those are our only hope.
I’m not surprised that Trump and the Americans are “betraying an ally”—I
don’t think anybody here had the illusion that Trump or the Pentagon
intended to support the political project in Rojava. Looking back
through history, it was clear enough that when ISIS was beaten, the US
would leave Rojava at the mercy of the Turkish military. If the forces
of the YPG/YPJ have dragged their feet in rooting ISIS out of their last
strongholds, this may be one of the reasons.
But it is still very surprising and perplexing that Trump would rush to
give up this foothold that the US has carved out in the Russosphere—and
that the US military establishment would let him do so. From the
perspective of maintaining US global military hegemony, the decision
makes no sense at all. It’s a gratuitous gift to Putin, Erdoğan, and
ISIS, which could take advantage of the situation to regenerate
throughout the region, perhaps in some new form—more on that below.
The withdrawal from Syria does not necessarily mean that conflict with
Iran is off the table, by the way. On the contrary, certain hawks in the
US government may see this as a step towards consolidating a position
from which that could be possible.
However you look at it, Trump’s decision is big news. It indicates that
the US “deep state” has no power over Trump’s foreign policy. It
suggests that the US neoliberal project is dead in the water, or at
least that some elements of the US ruling class consider it to be. It
also implies a future in which ethno-nationalist autocrats like ErdoÄźan,
Trump, Assad, Bolsonaro, and Putin will be in the driver’s seat
worldwide, conniving with each other to maintain power over their
private domains.
In that case, the entire post-cold war era of US military hegemony is
over, and we are entering a multipolar age in which tyrants will rule
balkanized authoritarian ethno-states: think Europe before World War I.
The liberals and neoconservatives who preferred US hegemony are mourning
the passing of an era that was a blood-soaked nightmare for millions.
The leftists (and anarchists?) who imagine that this transition could be
good news are fools fighting yesterday’s enemy and yesterday’s war, not
recognizing the new nightmares springing up around them. The de facto
red/brown coalition of authoritarian socialists and fascists who are
celebrating the arrival of this new age are hurrying us all
helter-skelter into a brave new world in which more and more of the
globe will look like the worst parts of the Syrian civil war.
And speaking from this vantage point, here, today, I do not say that
lightly.
Sadly, Kurdish and left movements in Turkey have been decimated over the
past few years. I would be very surprised if there were any kind of
uprising in Turkey, no matter what happens in Rojava. We should not
permit ourselves to hope that a Turkish invasion here would trigger an
insurgency in northern Kurdistan.
Unless something truly unexpected transpires, there are basically two
possible outcomes here.
In the first scenario, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) will make some
kind of agreement with the Assad regime, likely under less favorable
terms than would have been possible before the Turkish invasion of
Afrin; both sides would likely make concessions of some kind and agree
to fight on the same side if Turkey invades. If Russia signs off on
this, it could suffice to prevent the invasion from taking place. Either
YPG/YPJ or SAA will finish off the Hajin pocket, and the war could be
basically over except for Idlib.
Both the Assad regime and the various predominantly Kurdish formations
have been extremely hardheaded in negotiating, but perhaps the threat to
both Rojava and the Assad regime is so extreme that they will choose
this option. It is possible that this is one of the objectives of the
Turkish threat, or even of Trump’s withdrawal: to force YPG to
relinquish military autonomy to the Assad regime.
YPG, PYD, and company are not in a very good bargaining position right
now, but the regime knows it can at least bargain with them, whereas if
northern Syria is occupied by Turkish-backed jihadis and assorted
looters, it is unclear what would happen next. Rojava contains much of
Syria’s best agricultural land in the north, as well as oil fields in
the south.
I can only speculate what the terms of this theoretical agreement might
be. There’s lots of speculation online: language rights, Kurdish
citizenship being regularized, prior service in YPG counting as military
service so that soldiers who have been fighting ISIS all these years can
return to being civilians rather than immediately being conscripted into
SAA, some kind of limited political autonomy, or the like. In exchange,
the YPG and its allies would essentially have to hand military and
political control of SDF areas over to the regime.
Could Assad’s regime be trusted to abide by an agreement after they gain
control? Probably not.
To be clear, it’s all too easy for me to speak abstractly about the
Assad regime as the lesser of two evils. I’m informed about many of the
atrocities the regime has committed, but I have not experienced them
myself, and this is not the part of Syria where they did the worst
things, so I more frequently hear stories from the locals about Daesh
and other jihadis, not to mention Turkey. There are likely people in
other parts of Syria who regard the Assad regime regaining power with
the same dread with which people here regard the Turkish military and
ISIS.
In any case, there are some signs that this first scenario might still
be possible. The regime has sent troops to Manbij, to one of the lines
where the massive Turkish/TFSA troop buildup is occurring. There are
meetings between the PYD and the regime as well as with the Russians. An
Egyptian-mediated negotiation between the PYD and the regime is
scheduled to take place soon.
This first scenario does not offer a very attractive set of options.
It’s not what Jordan Mactaggart or the thousands and thousands of
Syrians who fought and died with YPG/YPJ gave their lives for. But it
would be preferable to the other scenario…
In the second scenario, the Assad regime will throw in its lot with
Turkey instead of with YPG.
In this case, some combination of the Turkish military and its
affiliated proxies will invade from the north while the regime invades
from the south and west. YPG will fight to the death, street by street,
block by block, in a firestorm reminiscent of the Warsaw ghetto uprising
or the Paris Commune, utilizing all the defensive tactics they acquired
while fighting ISIS. Huge numbers of people will die. Eventually, the
Assad regime and Turkey/TFSA will establish some line between their
zones of control. For the foreseeable future, there would be some kind
of Turkish-Jihadi Rump State of Northern Syrian Warlordistan.
Any remaining Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, Christians, and other
minorities would be expulsed, ethnically cleansed, or terrorized. TFSA
and related militias would likely loot everything they could get their
hands on. In the long run, Turkey would probably dump the Syrian
refugees who are now in Turkey back into these occupied areas, bringing
about irreversible demographic shifts that could be the cause of future
ethnic conflicts in the region.
We should not believe any assurances from the Turkish state or its
apologists that this will not be the result of their invasion, as this
is exactly what they have done in Afrin and they have no reason to
behave differently in Rojava. Remember: from the perspective of the
Turkish state, the YPG/YPJ are enemy number one in Syria.
Now let’s talk about Daesh. Despite the looming threat of invasion, SDF
is still finishing off the Hajin pocket of ISIS. If it weren’t for the
fact that Turkey is throwing Daesh a lifeline by threatening to invade,
Daesh would be doomed, as they are surrounded by SDF, SAA, and the Iraqi
army. Let me say this again: Trump giving Turkey the go-ahead to invade
Rojava is practically the only thing that could save ISIS.
Trump has repeatedly said things to the effect that Turkey is promising
to finish off ISIS. To believe this lie, you would have to be
politically ignorant, yes—but in addition, you would also have to be
geographically illiterate. This describes Trump’s supporters, if no one
else.
Even if the Turkish government had any intention of fighting Daesh in
Syria—a proposition that is highly doubtful, considering how easy Turkey
made it for ISIS to get off the ground—in order to even reach Hajin and
the Euphrates river valley, they would have to steamroll across the
entirety of Rojava. There is no other way to get to Hajin. If you’re
unfamiliar with the area, look at a map and you’ll see what I’m talking
about.
The Assad regime holds positions right across the Euphrates River from
both the SDF and Daesh positions, and would be willing and able to
finish off the last ISIS pocket. As far as I’m concerned, I’d rather see
the regime take the losses there to accomplish that than see YPG
overextend itself and bleed any further. But the point here is that when
Trump says something to the effect that “Turkey will finish off ISIS!”
he is sending a blatant dog whistle to Turkish hardliners that they can
attack Rojava and he won’t do anything to stop them. It has nothing to
do with ISIS and everything to do with ethnic cleansing in Rojava.
If nothing else, even if Assad allies with the Turkish government, we
can hope that the forces of the regime will still finish off ISIS. If
Turkey has its way and does what Trump is talking about, beating a path
all the way through Rojava to Hajin, they will likely give Daesh’s
fighters safe passage, a new set of clothes, three meals a day, and this
village I’m living in in exchange for their assistance fighting future
Kurdish insurgencies.
So there it is: in declaring victory over ISIS, Trump is arranging the
only way that ISIS fighters could come out of this situation with their
capacities intact. It’s Orwellian, to say the least.
The only other option I can imagine, if negotiations with the Assad
regime break down or PYD decides to take the moral high road and not
compromise with the regime—who are untrustworthy and have carried out
plenty of atrocities of their own—would be to let the entire SDF melt
back into the civilian population, permit Turkey and its proxies to walk
into Rojava without losing the fighting force of the YPG/YPJ, and
immediately begin an insurgency. That might be smarter than a doomed
final stand, but who knows.
Personally, I want to see the Syrian civil war end, and for Iraq to
somehow be spared another cycle of war in the near future. I want to see
ISIS prevented from regenerating its root system and preparing for a new
round of violence. That doesn’t mean intensifying the ways that this
part of the world is policed—it means fostering local solutions to the
question of how different people and populations can coexist, and how
they can defend themselves from groups like Daesh. This is part of what
people have been trying to do in Rojava, and that is one of the reasons
that Trump and ErdoÄźan find the experiment here so threatening. In the
end, the existence of groups like ISIS makes their authority look
preferable by comparison, whereas participatory horizontal multi-ethnic
projects show just how oppressive their model is.
Overthrowing Assad by military means is a dead project—or, at least, the
things that would have to happen to make it plausible again in the near
future are even more horrifying than the regime is. I hope that somehow,
someday, there can be some kind of settlement between the regime and
YPG/YPJ, and the regime and the rebels in Idlib, and everyone else who
has been suffering here. If capitalism and state tyranny are the
problem, this kind of civil war is not the solution, although it seems
likely that what has happened in Syria will happen elsewhere in the
world as the crises generated by capitalism, state power, and ethnic
conflicts put people at odds.
What can you do, reading this in some safer and stabler part of the
world?
First, you can spread the word that Trump’s decision is neither a way to
bring peace to Syria nor confirmation that ISIS has been defeated. You
can tell other people what I have told you about how the situation looks
from here, in case I am not able to do so myself.
Second, in the event of a Turkish invasion, you can use every means in
your power to discredit and impede the Turkish state, Trump, and the
others who paved the way for that outcome. Even if you are not able to
stop them—even if you can’t save our lives—you will be part of building
the kind of social movements and collective capacity that will be
necessary to save others’ lives in the future.
In addition, you can look for ways to get resources to people in this
part of the world, who have suffered so much and will continue to suffer
as the next act of this tragedy plays out. You can also look for ways to
support the Syrian refugees who are scattered across the globe.
Finally, you can think about how we could put better options on the
table next time an uprising like the one in Syria breaks out. How can we
make sure that governments fall before their reign gives way to the
reign of pure force, in which only insurgents backed by other states can
gain control? How can we offer other visions of how people can live and
meet their needs together, and mobilize the force it will take to
implement and defend them on an international basis without need of any
state?
These are big questions, but I have faith in you. I have to.
Here is a review of the narratives we often see from different sides in
the Syrian civil war:
rebels for their own geopolitical ends as the main cause for the
escalation of the conflict.
the wrong hands and more fundamentally as a result of the fallout of the
2003 Iraq war.
and groups like Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in order to argue they are
all part of the same problem.
legitimacy. This seems to be different from loyalist to loyalist, with
some thinking they are almost as bad as traditional rebels and others
seeing them as allies against ISIS and Turkish-supported rebels.
(relatively) peaceful protests led to an escalation of the conflict and
armed rebellion and eventually full blown civil war.
how his brutal actions and reliance on sectarian militias created an
environment in which ISIS could grow and gain support. Moreover, the
point is made that Assad’s military deliberately targeted other rebels
more than ISIS, and hence is for a large part to blame for its rise.
and radicals, and we should separate the two in honest analysis.
coushed in emphasizing cases in which the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the
SDF worked together. In milder forms, this narrative criticizes a
perceived overreliance on Kurds in majority Arab areas, while still
recognizing the legitimacy of the organization in majority Kurdish
areas.
The Turkish narrative is basically the same as the previous on most
issues, with the important exception that the hostility towards the SDF
intensifies to the extreme. Here, the links between the SDF and the PKK
are emphasized and the SDF is characterized as an illegitimate terror
organization that is a threat to Turkey and suppresses local Arabs.
peoples in their quest for nationhood. Emphasis on how Kurds were
discriminated against before the war and how they can take matters into
their own hands now.
Especially Turkey’s passivity during the battle of Kobane is
highlighted, along with accusations of direct support of ISIS and
importing ISIS oil.
Rebels (in relevant areas, anyway) are seen either as Turkish proxies or
as radical lunatics to whom Turkey can turn a blind eye. The line
between rebels and ISIS is often blurred, though they aren’t lumped in
together to the same extent as in the loyalist narrative.
otherwise characterized by bad versus bad. Both rebel and loyalist
atrocities are emphasized to support this point of view.
against their apostate Alawite overlords. Emphasis on the solidarity of
foreign fighters towards their suffering Syrian brethren.
radical groups, who see ISIS as a group that betrayed the jihadi cause.
governments and implementing non-Islamic ideals on their behalf.
Emphasis is also put on how rebels negotiate and reach deals with
loyalists, only to be betrayed and lose territory.
difference with Turkey is perhaps the emphasis on lack of religion
rather than connections to the PKK.
[1] In Hajin, where the last ISIS stronghold is, the American position
is way behind the front, in artillery range but out of range of any
weapons Daesh has, so they can sit there and pound away without being
hit back, while the risks are run by ground troops of the People’s
Protection Units (YPG) and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). This is
precisely what the Turkish army would do to us if Turkey invades Rojava.
↩
[2] In fact, there are two major parties in Iraqi Kurdistan in addition
to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). They each have their own armies
and police; they fought an actual civil war once. They do not like each
other at all. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the Barzani family
dynasty, is more closely aligned with Turkey and the US; it was more
closely aligned with Saddam Hussein before. They have bad relations with
the administration in Rojava; they are roundly despised here because
they basically stood aside and let the catastrophe in Sinjar happen in
their own backyard while the PKK scrambled to rush into the breach. The
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) has better relations with Iran, PKK,
and the administration here. There is a KDP-related militia called
Rojava Peshmerga in Rojava; again, they have a poor reputation because
they’ve spent the whole war doing very little while YPG has died in
droves fighting ISIS. All this is simply to say that there is no single
Kurdish position; there are reactionary Kurdish groups, too. ↩
[3] Mind you, the Syrian rebels were never homogenous; among them, you
can find both an element aligned to Turkey and jihadis and an element
aligned more closely with YPG/YPJ. Unfortunately, many of those who were
interested in more “democratic” solutions to the situation in Syria were
forced to flee the country years ago.