Writing in the Guardian this week, columnist David Graeber compares the plight of Syria’s Kurds and the besieged town of Kobane to the Spanish Civil War: “Amid the Syrian war zone a democratic experiment is being stamped into the ground by ISIS. That the wider world is unaware is a scandal.” Just as Spanish revolutionaries empowered women and fielded female combatants, so too do the People’s Protection Units (YPG) of the Syrian Kurds. The lightly armed YPG partisans now fight house to house against much more heavily armed fascists of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS). They fight to protect their land and an attempt at local democratic governance – an attempt that provided refuge to and empowered not just Kurds, but Turkmen, Christians, Arabs and others. The main political party directing the YPG forces in Syrian Kurdistan is the Democratic Union Party (PYD). Like the Spanish and many other revolutionaries, the PYD are of course not angels, and they stand accused of shutting out rival Kurdish parties promoted by Turkey, the United States and the Iraqi Kurds. They have strong organic links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Nonetheless, the Syrian Kurds have not attacked anyone but the Islamists trying to take over their lands. They have not even asked for a Kurdish state or secession from Syria. Rather, they proclaimed local self-government in the three cantons of Kobane, Cizre and Afrin. The three cantons emerged as tolerant, somewhat democratic islands amidst the grim maelstrom that is the Syrian civil war. By the PYD’s own rules, all the administrations must have male and female leaders and include all the ethnic and religious groups of the area within their decision making structures. Yet since they established their autonomous cantons in 2012, the United States, Europe and even most independent “progressives” of the world seem to have studiously ignored the Syrian Kurds. Graeber also asks, “If there is a parallel today to Franco’s superficially devout, murderous Falangists, who would it be but ISIS? If there is a parallel to the Mujeres Libres of Spain, who could it be but the courageous women defending the barricades in Kobane? Is the world – and this time most scandalously of all, the international left – really going to be complicit in letting history repeat itself?” That seems to be the intent of many, judging by the deceptions that government officials in Washington and Ankara keep trying to peddle to us. They say they are “arming moderate Syrian rebels,” yet many of the “moderates” they are arming appear only a bit less Islamist than ISIS. If the secular Syrian Kurds want arms, on the other hand, they are told by Washington and Ankara that they must drop their demands for autonomy, local government and Kurdish and other minority rights. No doubt this will make them “moderate” so they can join the fight to replace an Allawi Arab dictatorship with a Sunni Arab one. When the United States began its bombing campaign in Syria, it appeared to be targeting ISIS everywhere except where they were besieging the Syrian Kurds. ISIS drove its captured Iraqi and Syrian tanks around Kobane with impunity, even though armor can be easily targeted by Western aircraft. News reporters just across the border in Turkey filmed the whole thing, at least until Turkish soldiers tear gassed them out of the area. When finally U.S. aircraft targeted ISIS around Kobane this week, as the city began to fall to the Jihadi onslaught, the public was told that Turkey had asked the Americans to do something to help the besieged city. In all likelihood the Americans finally decided to do something contrary to Turkey’s wishes. In Kobane ISIS is about to win yet another major victory, and this will not make Mr. Obama’s campaign look good. They likely just told the Turks they could pretend they had asked them. If Ankara really wanted ISIS forces around Kobane targeted, they could have done so themselves as they watched the Jihadis just a few hundred meters away from the border. A few artillery rounds could have done wonders, or Ankara could have allowed Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga to transit through Turkey and reinforce Kobane in much the same way PYD fighters helped in Iraq recently. There are much better options to help Kobane, in other words, than an embargo or Turkish ground troops setting up a buffer zone. The buffer zone would likely be designed to squash Kurdish autonomy in Syria more than anything else. Yet Ankara claims that it opposes ISIS, even as the organization recruits in Turkey, transits through Turkey and sells its smuggled oil through Turkey. Every year hundreds of Kurds get imprisoned in Turkey for smuggling cigarettes across the mountains on the Iranian and Iraqi borders, yet we do not hear of any ISIS smugglers getting caught on the flat terrain of the Syrian-Turkish border. Instead Turkey prevents food and water from being sent to Kobane’s defenders, at the same time that it pretends it does not wish to see Kobane fall. In March 2013, the PKK also ended its fight with Ankara and entered into peace negotiations with the government. Yet last week President Erdogan said that for Turkey, the terrorists of ISIS and the PKK “are the same.” If only that were true – Kurdish fighters might be better supplied and not prevented from crossing into Syria to defend Kobane. David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).
