On 9 October Turkish armed forces and their mercenary auxiliaries invaded Rojava/northeast Syria. They used fighter jets, tanks and heavy artillery. President Trump had given the green light for the onslaught by withdrawing US troops from border positions. Within two weeks over 180,000 people, including around 80,000 children, had been driven from their homes. By 20 November nearly 300,000 people had been expelled and over 700 killed. Trump said that Turkey ‘had to have it cleaned out’, referring to the predominantly Kurdish area adjacent to Syria’s border with Turkey. Trevor Rayne examines the background to the invasion.
President Erdogan and the Turkish government intend to ethnically cleanse the Kurds and others living in Rojava and replace them with their auxiliaries, Syrian refugees and Turkic people from Central Asia currently living in Turkey. Turkey has used chemical weapons and terror to clear the region of Kurds; it is now destroying water supplies to towns and villages, burning down houses and killing hundreds of people to achieve its objectives. Britain, the US, European Union and Russia do nothing to stop this crime.
While much of the ruling class media has stopped coverage of the invasion there are exceptions. Swiss television channel RTS broadcast evidence of the war crimes committed by the invaders, including the murder of Christian Orthodox and Catholic priests. RTS said that Turkey’s mercenary groups are drawn from Islamic State (IS) and Al Nusra (formerly Al Qaeda). Patrick Cockburn in The Independent (15 November 2019) cites an internal memo written for the US State Department by its regional representative William V Roebuck. Roebuck states that Turkey intends to expel 1.8 million Kurds from Rojava: ‘Turkey’s military operation in northern Syria, spearheaded by armed Islamist groups on its payroll, represents an…effort at ethnic cleansing, relying on widespread military conflict targeting part of the Kurdish heartland along the border and benefiting from several widely publicised, fear-inducing atrocities these forces committed.’ Roebuck notes that the auxiliaries, called the Syrian National Army, are drawn from IS and Al Qaeda. Cockburn reports how, on 12 October, Hevrin Khalaf, General Secretary of the Future Syria Party, was ambushed, taken from her car and shot dead. Auxiliaries filmed the murder to terrorise the local population. Health workers have been abducted and killed. Churches have been attacked and plundered.
This calculated crime and systematic slaughter is an extension of the carnage inflicted on the Kurds in Turkey and on Afrin, also in northeast Syria. Afrin is the westernmost canton of Rojava. In January 2018 Turkish state forces and auxiliaries attacked Afrin. Since then, Afrin has been subjected to terror and ethnic cleansing; at least 150,000 people have been driven into exile and over 500 civilians killed. This took place without a murmur from the US, Britain, EU, Russia or the United Nations. On 24 September 2019 President Erdogan told the UN General Assembly that he wanted to create a buffer zone 400km long and 30km deep in northern Syria. The disaster this would entail for the people living in the zone brought no complaint from the major powers, no end to the arms supplies with which the invasion could be mounted and no threat of sanctions. Erdogan will have been confident that he could do what he wanted to the Kurds and their allies in Rojava.
British supplied phosphorous
When Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces killed 5,000 Kurds at Halabja in 1988, British firms were among those that supplied the ingredients for the nerve gas. Within days of the invasion of Rojava, medical staff reported Turkish forces using chemical weapons in civilian areas. Around 30 victims were admitted to Heseke’s main hospital ‘with these severe and unusual burns…the burn types I have witnessed are very different to those I would expect to have been caused by anything other than a chemical incendiary weapon like white phosphorous’, said one doctor. On 27 October 2019 The Sunday Times reported that British ‘ministers have issued more than 70 export licences for military products that can contain phosphorous in the past two decades’.
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. Over 100 firms in Britain supply the Turkish military machine; they include BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and Cobham – all among the world’s largest arms companies. After the invasion of Rojava, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab announced that the UK had suspended granting arms export licences to Turkey, but refused to revoke existing licences. No one should be fooled: unless they are stopped, British governments will arm Turkey, no matter what crimes it commits.
Kurdish struggle is critical
The Kurdish people’s struggle for self-determination is critical for the future of the Middle East and the world. The Kurds, like the Palestinians, are victims of the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire by British and French imperialism after the First World War. The Kurds were offered a land at the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 but were betrayed by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which partitioned the Kurdish people and their lands between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Ever since then, the Kurds have been denied self-determination and democracy, but they have continued to resist. They have had to confront both the local powers and imperialism that have sought to defend the regional status quo and control the Middle East’s resources. There can be no progress towards democracy and socialism in Turkey, Iran, Iraq or Syria without rights for the Kurdish people in these countries. Since the 1970s the Kurdish freedom movement has gathered in strength. The Turkish state has tried to annihilate it. More recently, US imperialism has attempted to control it and subordinate the Kurds to US regional interests.
To survive, the Kurds have had to use divisions between the different local and imperialist powers. Just as in the early 20th century Irish revolutionaries said ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’, when the Syrian civil war began in 2011 the Kurds established the autonomous administration of Rojava in 2012. Just as Lenin taught the Bolsheviks that the Russian revolution needed to use divisions between the imperialist powers if it was to survive, so the Kurds in Syria formed a tactical alliance with the US to defeat IS, which was backed by Turkey among others, and which was trying to annihilate them. When IS was besieging Kobane in 2014 Turkey prevented any support reaching Kobane across its border and Erdogan predicted the fall of Kobane to IS, as Turkish troops looked on. The Kurdish resistance accepted arms from the US. Salih Muslim of the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD) explained, ‘I said when I was in Istanbul on 4 October [2014] that if Turkey allowed us to transit arms, we would not need others.’
Some on the British left have criticised the SDF for being ‘proxy foot soldiers for the US’; this was never the case. Throughout the Rojava administration’s existence, the Kurds’ representatives in Syria have maintained relations with the Syrian government, in defiance of the US, and have never sought to partition Syria. While understanding that the US, Britain and the EU would ultimately side with Turkey, which is a member of NATO, has NATO’s second largest army and hosts US nuclear missiles, the Kurds sought to use relations with the US to restrain Turkey’s war of annihilation.
US and Russia legitimise Turkey’s invasion
Following outrage at the Turkish invasion, including from US opponents to President Trump, the US government was obliged to make a gesture of disapproval and imposed minor sanctions on Turkey. On 17 October 2019 the US and Turkey agreed that Turkey would pause its offensive for 120 hours to facilitate a withdrawal of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), constituents of the SDF, from a Turkish-controlled safe zone. US sanctions were removed. This gave the Turkish invasion legitimacy.
Russia has acted as an intermediary for Syria and Turkey and for the Syrian government and the Kurds. It seeks to protect the Syrian state and to assert its influence in the region at the expense of the US. On 22 October 2019 Turkey and Russia reached an agreement whereby the YPG and YPJ were to withdraw 30km from the Turkish-Syrian border. Turkey would control an area between two towns, Tell Abyad and Ras Al Ayn. Turkey agreed to withdraw from Syria ‘eventually’. The agreement included provisions for joint Russian-Turkish military patrols, which began in early November, and it reactivated the 1998 Adana Treaty between Syria and Turkey. This treaty stated that Syria was to designate the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as a terrorist organisation. It resulted in the closure of PKK bases in Syria and the expulsion of its leader Abdullah Ocalan, before his capture in 1999. Turkey claims the YPG/YPJ are PKK affiliates. Addressing a rally on 22 October Erdogan said, ‘This agreement opens the way for Turkey to enter those territories if any adverse events were to take place.’ Turkey and its mercenary militias have not abided by either of the deals reached with the US and Russia; they have continued attacks on towns and villages in order to expand the territory they control and have done so without US or Russian criticism.
US troops have relocated away from the border to Deir Ez Zor, Syria’s main oil field, in eastern Syria. Apart from taking the oil, their purpose is to maintain US leverage in Syria and counter Russian and Iranian influence. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that keeping US troops in Syria under the pretext of protecting the oil fields is ‘tantamount to robbery’.
The Kurds’ political and military representatives in Syria seek federal solutions to the Kurdish and other ethnic issues. When Turkey attacked Rojava, the SDF invited the Syrian state forces to join them against the invaders. Syrian soldiers have been killed fighting the Turkish forces. However, Syria’s President Assad and his Ba’athist government do not want Kurdish autonomy or a federal Syria. Interviewed on Russia Today on 10 November, Assad said that the SDF withdrawal of 30km southwards from the border was ‘to remove the pretext of the Turks to invade Syria’. He added ‘We invited them [SDF] to join the Syrian army, some said yes, others said no.’ He described elements of the PYD as ‘US agents’. The SDF seek a degree of autonomy for their armed forces within the Syrian state.
Dissolve the base of reaction
The Kurds will be able to sustain a guerrilla resistance against the invaders. However, for as long as Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have a base in Turkey they will be able to wage war. That base must be dissolved. The Turkish state treats any expression of the Kurdish people’s desire for rights or representation as terrorism. On 21 October the Turkish police arrested three elected mayors in predominantly Kurdish municipalities. Six other mayors from the same Kurdish region of Turkey were arrested in October. 21 Turkish municipalities which were run by the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) have had officials seized and AKP sympathisers appointed as governors. Approximately 10,000 HDP members and supporters have been imprisoned in Turkey, including 13 MPs. Within days of the invasion over 100 people in Turkey had been arrested for critical social media posts. The HDP is Turkey’s third largest political party. In 2019’s local elections the AKP lost control of Turkey’s major cities, including Istanbul and Ankara. Erdogan and his government are fighting a war that threatens to spread and consume them. It is economically and politically unsustainable.
In Britain we must demand that Turkey withdraws from Syria and an end to arms sales to Turkey. End all British military collaboration with Turkey. Boycott tourism to Turkey and Turkish products, as the Kurds request. Lift the ban on the PKK and end the criminalisation of the Kurdish community.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 273 December 2019/January 2020
