Al-Qaeda: A Force for “Good”

 

Trouble is ominously brewing in the once-quiet, northeastern Kurdish corner of Syria where violent terrorist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusrah and Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) have begun cold-bloodedly attacking the Kurds. 

Bloodthirsty beheadings, reminiscent of Nick Berg, the American cruelly carved up in Iraq in 2004, horrifically bloat today’s Kurdish news. 

Kurds are alarmed.

Americans should be too. But America is closing its eyes—and closing its embassies around the world in the face of Al-Qaeda inspired terrorist threats.

Puzzled Kurds have asked me why America is so indifferent to the Kurdish beheadings, especially when these same “disciples of enforced ignorance” attacked Americans only a decade ago.  I wonder too, and paraphrase Heraclitus who said, “Character is destiny,” and tell them: “Geography is destiny.” 

 

It’s as if I’m speaking in a foreign tongue.

It should not be. When Winston Churchill and his post-World War I colleagues carved up the Middle East in a Cairo hotel in 1921, they used parts of a railroad tract, supposedly trying to connect Berlin to Baghdad, to separate the newly established state of Syria from Turkey, heir of the dying Ottoman Empire.

The city of Sere Kaniye, which in Kurdish means “Head of the spring,” was divided in half, the northern part was given to Turkey and the southern portion to Syria.  The virulently anti-Kurdish Kemalists in Ankara called their half Ceylanpinar.  Not to be outdone, the supremely practical Arab nationalists quickly translated Sere Kaniye to Arabic, Ras Al-Ain, and started calling it an Arab city.

The Kurds have come of age.  They smile at you when you try to say Ras Al-Ain or Ceylanpinar.  They politely correct you with their city’s proper name, Sere Kaniye.  If they knew their Shakespeare, they would add, “Don’t mind the ideologies of yesterday —Turkish Kemalism or Arab Baathism—which are “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”’

The same applies to the newest Kurdish foes in Syria: Jabhat al-Nusrah and Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).  They will continue beheading innocent Kurds, blowing up their buildings, and violently raining rockets on their villages, towns and cities.

But they cannot hide the ghastly truth of their hideous brutality, or shroud the ruthlessness of their inhumane tactics, or mask the nihilism of their heartless ideology, or conceal the blindness of their masters and sponsors.

One of these devious sponsors is Turkey, still cunningly lulling its Occidental partners into believing that it supports democracy in Syria—while blatantly operating as a transit point for the al-Qaeda killers.

But this “democracy exporting” Turkey, as Andrew Finkel of the New York Times recently put it, is quick to mobilize its state directed media to cover the pro-Morsi protests in Egypt, live, while looking the other way when anti Erdogan protests are held in Turkey.

Ronald Reagan, one of the most memorable champions of freedom, helped the original al-Qaeda bring the Soviet Union to its knees in Afghanistan, but forgot the admonition of the old man of republic, Benjamin Franklin: “He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.”  That tragic mistake came back to haunt Americans when thousands of them were slaughtered by the fighters of the same group on what is tragically called “9/11” in 2001.

 

Turkey is playing with the same fire now and some people think it is about time.  Its leaders, habituated to violence from tradition, crippled once the robust nation of Armenians and have made it their glorious preoccupation to culturally degrade and diminish the Kurds.

When a nation threatens others existentially or feels entitled to force its culture on its conquered subjects and justifies the whole thing as a necessity of “national security,” you can’t help but surmise that if it were a person, doctors, sworn to doing no harm, would have ordered isolation in a hospital room for the dangerous individual for the sake of public safety.

The death of the Soviet Union gave birth to freedom in countries from Estonia on the Baltic Sea to Tajikistan in Central Asia.  In that burst of liberty—there is no need to be squeamish about the facts—al-Qaeda played an important role.  Its killers, once cultivated by Bashar al-Assad to kill American soldiers, have been battering Iraq and now Syria—two artificial constructs that were forced on the peoples of the Middle East by arrogant imperialists of Great Britain and France.

Will al-Qaeda and its affiliates do for Kurdistan what they did for Estonia?

When those who claim freedom as the patrimony of their forefathers can’t be bothered about its present dismal state in the Middle East, can you blame us, the Kurds, for thinking that something “good” just might, and I should emphasize the word might, come out of the violence of al-Qaeda?

It is a complicated world.  The dislike of Great Britain in France played a bigger role in the independence of America than the blood of its revolutionaries.  Perhaps the internecine wars of Arabs will do the same for us Kurds and Kurdistan at least in Syria and Iraq.