Betrayal? The U.S. War Against Kurdish Revolutionaries

    What a week it’s been. The long-threatened bombardment and invasion of Rojava (Autonomous Administration of North East Syria) by the fascist Turkish regime began not long after the green light was given to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by Donald Trump.

    Intense clashes are raging in Kurdish-majority and otherwise predominately mixed Kurdish-Arab cities that straddle the Syria-Turkey border, which are being mercilessly shelled. Civilians are being indiscriminately murdered and mutilated, as a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions is brewing. 
    
    On the other hand, a heroic and historic resistance is being waged by the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and their allies, as well as armed civilians who refuse to be driven from their homeland.

    Quite ironically, the Tweeter-in-Chief who has spent such an enormous amount of time basking in self-congratulatory adulation over the ‘defeat of the Caliphate,’ i.e. the destruction of Daesh as an entity, has become the reason why the city of Kobane – synonymous with the first major defeat of ISIS in early 2015– is now encircled by Turkish forces and their Salafist proxies whose ideology doesn’t significantly differ from their Daesh brothers-in-arms. These Daesh combatants sit in prisons overseen by Kurdish and Arab SDF fighters, who are now more concerned with the new front in the war than playing prison guards.

    The YPG has very quickly gone from being “U.S.-backed” (a favourite way for the western mainstream press to make them sound very much like pawns on a chessboard who lack their own brains) to being attacked and slaughtered with the de-facto backing of the U.S. administration.

    

    Partners in an anti-fascist struggle?

    Unsurprisingly, there are a great deal of headlines in the western press about this alleged ‘betrayal’ of Kurdish forces by Trump. U.S. Commanders are dumbfounded, Republican leaders are shocked and appalled, and the European Union is far from pleased with Turkey’s unilateral action. Neoliberal hawks like Emmanuel Macron are furious, though he would vehemently oppose any of Rojava’s social policies if it came to France itself!

    Yet, for all the being up-in-arms about this new front in Turkey’s long-standing war with the Kurdish Freedom Movement, there is something glaring missing from the narrative of how Trump has ‘turned on the Kurds’.

    These western countries, many tied to the same NATO alliance that Turkey is the second largest military force in, have lauded the YPG fighters as such great ‘partners’ in the fight against Daesh. In reality, the word ‘partner’ is quite deceptive -- the SDF bore the brunt of the sacrifice, losing 11,000 fighters, while “Coalition” casualty numbers were extremely low (the U.S. lost about 71 personnel, for instance). 

    But the word ‘partner’ becomes even more problematic for another reason entirely. It obscures the fact that these western countries are fully aware that the YPG is ideologically and organisationally linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which they label as a terrorist organisation, and that while heaping praise on the former, they are responsible for policies that are literally killing their comrades in other parts of Kurdistan. If that isn’t a twisted reality!

    Let’s go back in time to 2015. It was the Obama-era, which perhaps seems like distant history given the whirlwind of Trump-ism we have endured since. This was a time when the policy of U.S. limited military support for the YPG in Syria began, during the Daesh attack in Kobane. It was also when the YPG and PKK valiantly fought for the Yezidi people trapped on Mt. Sinjar in neighbouring Iraq. The ‘saving’ of the Yezidi people became Obama’s shining moment, much as the defeat of Daesh could be basked in by Trump. But again, it was principally the Kurdish fighters who were responsible, and who died in droves when fighting on the frontline.

    The U.S. loves the Yezidis, you may chose to believe. But one case worth pointing out of a Yezidi leader who fought against Daesh during that genocide is that of Zeki Shengali, a commander in the PKK who was assassinated by the Turkish state in 2018. It was a killing done in textbook Turkish ‘counter-terrorism’ style: by warplane. U.S.-supplied F-16 warplane, to be precise. More importantly, and in fact decisively, his murder was committed because of intelligence shared with Erdogan’s government by the United States.

    Of course, Shengali’s murder is not really a unique case. American built planes fly over PKK camps in Turkey and Iraq daily, and despite whatever jabs fly back and forth between Ankara and Washington, the U.S. keeps sharing intel with their NATO ally.

    The U.S. and European countries refuse to de-list the PKK from the list of sponsors of terrorism, even if they – and their comrades in Syria – have proven to be the most faithful militants in the fight against new variants of fascism today.

    Western Complicity in the New War Front

    In light of the long-standing war on the PKK, it can’t really be considered surprising that revelations have come to light (as first reported by the New York Times on October 9^th) that the U.S. had been providing Turkey with intelligence about YPG fighters, positions and logistics since 2017.

    Now that Turkish airstrikes are hitting YPG targets and civilian areas (again, often with American aircraft), it makes this new information all the more important. According to the Business Insider’s take on the report, “Two U.S. officials told The Times that as Turkish military officials planned the assault over the past few weeks, they were provided with American surveillance video and information from reconnaissance aircraft. Information like this could prove useful in picking out targets for airstrikes.” 

    While some are applauding the decision by Trump to bring a closure to what he has called “endless wars”, the reality is quite different. U.S. imperialism is still very much on the offensive in the so-called Middle East. It doesn’t necessarily need to fire bullets itself, drop bombs itself, or even technically officially be at war itself. Boots not being on the ground doesn’t mean that imperialism isn’t at work.

    As Muhsin Yorulmaz writes in the New Socialist, “US imperialism can have no real anti-war form, because not only is imperialism aggressively expansive by nature of protecting its own direct interests, but as a stage of capitalist development, imperialism is in the service of the profit motive and the production and exchange of commodities, and cannot give up on the most shockingly valuable of commodities: war. Turkey is ready to foot the bill for a war in the northeast of Syria, and the US, headed by Donald Trump, is only happy to sell.”  

    Trump is simply lining up more firmly with his NATO ally, one that in addition to the U.S, Germany is perhaps most responsible for arming to the teeth with tanks and other essential combat weaponry. German officials and the government can wax lyrical in their opposition to Turkey’s decision to invade Rojava – it’s too little, too late, and they are still remarkably complicit, given the extent of weapons sales they have made to Erdogan’s government through companies like Rheinmetall and Mercedes.

    No Friends But the Mountains

    In short, what we’re seeing with Turkey’s war on the Kurdish Freedom Movement – above the hypocritical cries from some establishment politicians in the west – is in reality a NATO war, one that as such all countries within that alliance need to be brought to account for. It’s a crime not principally of Trump’s making, but of imperialism’s.   

    Thus, it’s delusional to celebrate the U.S. ‘pulling out of Syria’. It hasn’t done so in any real way, and even if its foot soldiers were to leave entirely, its cash flow is being renewed. This time, it’s being drenched in Kurdish blood, as well as that of Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians, and the other ethnic groups that make up this rich and diverse region. 

    There may be infighting within the palaces about when to sell out their ‘friends’, but if we recall that imperialism is a system, not a policy, and that for these blood suckers there are never permanent friends, but only permanent interests, we’ll understand something that the Kurdish movement has long known.

    The YPG – caught in a suffocating wartime nightmare – chose a lifeline over almost certain death. That lifeline was a tentative, shaky, turbulent, contradictory alliance with an imperialist power – to stave off fascist powers and militias that surrounded it. They knew they had no genuine friends but the mountains, as the saying goes. So please -- don’t call Trump's decision betrayal – to do so would imply that Washington was ever anything more than temporary allies in what has been a geopolitical irony of history.