Turkey’s armed forces began bombing towns and villages in Rojava/north-east Syria on 9 October. They swiftly followed up with a land invasion, accompanied by mercenary auxiliaries. Turkey’s President Erdogan is using military force to establish a so-called ‘safe-zone’ 30km deep and 480km long (19 miles by 300 miles) inside Syria. This land is home to over three-quarters of a million predominantly Kurdish people. These people are to be killed or evicted from their towns and villages and replaced with over a million of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey. Such a plan, if carried out, violates international law and will result in enormous violence. Within three days of the attack, tens of thousands of people are reported to have fled their homes and many civilians, including children, have been killed.
Following a telephone conversation between US President Trump and Erdogan on 6 October the White House issued a statement: ‘Turkey will soon be moving forward with its long- planned operation in Northern Syria. The United States Armed Forces will not support or be involved in the operations, and United States’ forces, having defeated the IS territorial “Caliphate”, will no longer be in the immediate area.’ President Erdogan took this as the signal from the US that he had been waiting for, saying on 7 October: ‘We made a decision. We said, “One night we could come suddenly”. We continue with our determination…It is absolutely out of the question for us to further tolerate the threats from these terrorist groups.’ Prior to the telephone conversation, Erdogan had recently met with the presidents of Russia and Iran.
President Erdogan treats any manifestation of Kurdish political representation or aspiration to democratic rights as terrorism, be it in Turkey, Syria or elsewhere. The Kurdish people in Syria, their political representation in the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and their military defence in the form of the coalition of Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which includes the YPG and YPJ (People’s Protection Units and Women’s Protection Units), have made no threat or challenge to the territorial integrity of either Turkey or Syria. They have complied with US-led mechanisms to ensure that Turkey’s border is secure and in doing so have dismantled defences close to Turkey’s border. No military incursions into Turkey came from Rojava/north-east Syria before the invasion. Now, any criticism of the invasion operation made in Turkey will be criminalised. Three of the predominantly Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) MPs are being investigated for disseminating terrorist propaganda for making such criticisms.
The Kurdish people, along with the different ethnic communities that live in Rojava, insist they have the right to defend themselves if they are attacked. A SDF spokesperson said, ‘We will not hesitate to turn any unprovoked attack by Turkey into an all-out war on the entire border to defend ourselves and our people.’ The HDP calls for ‘a democratic dialogue and negotiation process inclusive of all parties towards ending the civil war in [Syria]’. The Executive Council of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) stated: ‘The goal of the Turkish regime is to achieve what Islamic State (IS) couldn’t in their aggression against Kobane on 15 September 2014.’ The PKK said that its armed wings would ‘intensify their actions against the fascist Turkish army in all areas of North Kurdistan [the Kurdish parts of Turkey]’ and that the battle would be street by street, house to house. After two days of fighting the invaders in Syria, some 272 Turkish auxiliaries were reported to have been killed.
In July 2012, the Kurdish people and others in Rojava rose up and established the Democratic Autonomous Administration. This is a democratic, gender equal, secular, ecological and non-sectarian administration with inter-ethnic cooperation. It is a beacon of hope for the Middle East – a beacon that Turkey and others want to extinguish. In January 2018 the Turkish state and it auxiliaries attacked Afrin, the western-most canton of Rojava, and occupied it. Since then Afrin has been subject to terror and ethnic cleansing; at least 150,000 people were exiled and over 500 civilians killed. Erdogan has spoken of his ambition to reclaim territories lost to the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. The attack on Afrin and the invasion of Rojava conform to realising that ambition.
Under President Trump’s agreement with Erdogan, Turkey will take responsibility for all IS fighters in the area captured over the past few years. This is diabolical; it is well documented that the Turkish state has collaborated with and armed IS, and sought to use the jihadis against both Syria and the Kurds. Some 11,000 SDF young men and women have been killed fighting ISIS. This compares with eight US soldiers and one British soldier killed in Syria since 2014. The Kurds and their allies are guarding thousands of IS captives, including about 2,500 from Europe and elsewhere and over 10,000 from Iraq and Syria. Al Hol camp in north-east Syria holds approximately 70,000 people. There remain IS sleeper cells across the region. With Turkey’s invasion the IS captives will not be secure. The PKK said that with the invasion Turkey ‘aims to revive the IS mercenaries that were defeated by the People’s YPG, YPJ and SDF and to threaten the whole world with these forces’. Senior former US and British National Security Professionals recently warned of the threat of a resurgent IS. The threat to the peoples of the entire Middle East, and the threat of repetitions of 11 September, 2001 in the US, of the Madrid commuter rail system 2004, the Bataclan theatre in Paris 2015, and the Manchester Arena 2017, have become all the more real.
The British government has said that it is ‘disappointed’ at the Turkish invasion and that it is ‘concerned’. This reprimand, like those made by the US and the European Union, are pitiable covers for complicity in the atrocity. Nevertheless, they were sufficient for Erdogan to threaten Europe with 3.6 million Syrian refugees if European governments repeated the criticisms. Turkey’s armed forces exceed 630,000 troops, NATO’s second largest army. They are equipped by the US, Germany and Britain among others. They supply the fighter jets, the tanks and heavy artillery guns that are being used by Turkey to destroy Rojava. Turkey is listed by the British government as being among the ‘priority markets’ for British arms exports. In 2017 the value of export licences issued by the British government for weapons sales to Turkey shot up to £723m. Some 112 firms in Britain supply the Turkish military machine; they include BAESystems, Rolls Royce and Cobham – all among the world’s largest arms companies. Pitted against them are approximately 60,000 lightly armed SDF soldiers. In response to the invasion, the Finnish and the Norwegian governments have said that their countries will cease arms supplies to Turkey, but they are not among the main suppliers – Britain is.
Just as in Kobane, the Kurds are once again representing humanity’s fight against barbarism. As communists the RCG demands an immediate end to arms sales to Turkey and says Victory to the Rojava Resistance!
Trevor Rayne
