Dumping the Kurds – the West’s shameful betrayal

As Syria’s President Assad bombards the rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta – a densely populated suburb of Damascus – an equally one-sided battle spearheaded by Turkey’s President Erdogan is raging in Syria’s northwest, said Dominik Peters in Der Spiegel (Hamburg). Afrin district, is a Kurdish enclave and its main city (also called Afrin) is – or was – a stronghold of the YPG Kurdish militia. The YPG, which also controls a 300-mile stretch of northern Syria from the Euphrates to the border with Iraq, is the most effective military force in the region after the Syrian army. Its fighters have been trained by the US, which used them as its foot soldier against Islamic State. But Erdogan sees them as “terrorist” allies of the Kurdish insurgents in Turkey and, to prevent them bridging the gap between their two enclaves, has in the past 18 months sent in troops to occupy the intervening 60-mile stretch of land. Now those forces have seized control of the city of Afrin. With no air support, the YPG has been forced to withdraw, but it vows to wage a guerrilla war against Ankara. The horrors in Afrin could exceed anything seen in Ghouta, said Patrick Cockburn in The Independent. The Turks are allied with 25,000 Syrian rebels, many of them Islamists who fought with al Qa’eda or Isis. They detest the Us-backed Kurds, whom they blame for the Islamist defeat. “No Kurd who falls into their hands will be safe.” Some 250 civilians have already been killed in the Afrin conflict.

To prevent the return of Isis, Washington had planned to turn the YPG into a permanent 30,000-strong force in the region, said Ara Toranian in La Règle du jeu (Paris). But this enraged Erdogan. So in deference to its Nato ally, the US backtracked. It would seem that the Kurds, having served their purpose in the battle against Isis, are being abandoned to their fate. It’s “shameful”. Nato countries bear a moral responsibility for this looming catastrophe. Washington always lacked a long-term strategy for the region, said David P. Goldman in Asia

Times (Hong Kong), and Afrin may mark the point when US influence there “collapsed beyond repair”. The projected Kurdish border security force was “the last American piece on the Syrian chessboard”. But US officials, “paralysed by fear” that Erdogan might withdraw from Nato, have sacrificed it. The irony is that Turkey is a Nato member in name only. It is routinely hostile to the West: it buys weapons from Russia, and has frustrated Western support for Ukraine by letting Moscow route a gas pipeline to southern Europe through its territory, thus bypassing Ukraine.

So the YPG has had little choice but to turn to Russia (which provided cover for it to move into the town of Tell Rifaat two years ago), and to Assad, who sent troops to Afrin to fight the Turkish forces. Russia is now the key ally of both Assad and the Kurdish militias. Hardly a reliable one, said Brandon Friedman on MDC (Tel Aviv). Don’t forget it was Moscow that gave the green light for Turkey’s incursion into Afrin. Moscow wants to use Turkey to implement its vision for remaking Syria – “to harness its influence with the Sunni rebels” to stabilise Afrin and the Idlib region. It has told Assad that it supports the idea of a Turkish sphere of influence in northwest Syria, from the Euphrates River in the east to Afrin in the west.

And that is a terrifying prospect, said Patrick Cockburn. While Afrin has long been seen as Kurdish, Erdogan claims that the Arabs are in a majority there and has threatened to return it “to its rightful owners”. That could mean ethnic cleansing on a grand scale – expelling the Kurds and giving their lands to some of the 3.5 million Syrian refugees now sheltering in Turkey, thus establishing a new Sunni Arab bloc under Turkish influence. Given the gravity of such developments, it’s a mystery that the international media are paying so little attention to them.