Kurds seethe as idle Turkey watches
Opinion: Battle of Kobani shows the divides that remain despite common goal
There are as many Kurds as there are Canadians.
That is something to ponder as Kurds from Turkey, Iran and Iraq — who have no country to call their own — helplessly watch live television images of fellow Kurds in the besieged Syrian town of Kobani. Inside the town, Kurdish forces are trying to fend off a brutal, co- ordinated artillery, tank and infantry onslaught by Islamic State. The jihadists got their potent U. S. and Russianmade weapons when they seized armouries after capturing a wide swath of Syria and Iraq.
What Islamic State is doing along a 1,000- kilometre front in Syria and Iraq is a deeply emotional issue for Kurds across the region and in Kurdish communities from Australia to Germany and Britain.
Even stronger has been the Kurds’ rage against Turkey, which has several squadrons of heavy tanks and other armoured vehicles idly watching the battle of Kobani from a hillside a couple of hundred metres away.
Turkey’s parliament voted last week to become part of the U. S.- led coalition trying to eliminate Islamic State. However, the most powerful army in the region has done nothing to counter the extremists because of convoluted political strategies that have much to do with Ankara’s long- restless Kurdish minority, and its intense fixation on toppling Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Kurds believe Turkey knowingly allowed hundreds of Islamic State recruits from countries such as Canada to cross its territory on their way to Syria and Iraq. They are also convinced Turkey prevented weapons and other supplies from reaching Syria’s Kurds.
So it’s no reach to conclude that the long peace process that Turkey has carefully nurtured with its Kurds is in mortal peril.
As Patrick Cockburn, a highly respected old hand in the Middle East, wrote Wednesday in Britain’s Independent newspaper: “The likely fall of Kobani may mark an irrevocable breach between Turks and Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq.”
A clear sign of that was that at least 18 Kurds have died in rioting this week in Turkey over what has been happening in Kobani.
“Kobani has become an international symbol that embodies the way the world has reacted to the Arab Spring over the past few years,” said Dlawer Ala’Aldeen, president of the Irbil- based Middle East Research Institute.
“When the U. S. left here a couple of years ago, it left a vacuum where Islamic State has tried to fill the void and become the new monster because the regional powers — Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia — have had no interest in nation- building. Paying the price have been communities such as Kobani.”
Countries act in their own interest. But Turkey’s decision to stand aside — thereby helping a global pariah on a rampage so close to its own frontiers — is incomprehensible. It takes the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend to an entirely new level.
Ankara’s inaction has already had serious negative consequences on its historically fragile relationship with Kurds. It is also likely to badly damage its wider reputation in the Middle East and with its bewildered and exasperated putative allies in Europe and North America.
But don’t think the Kurds sitting transfixed in horror in their coffee houses in Iraq’s quasi- independent Kurdish autonomous region are happy with the Americans, either. They are bitterly disappointed in Washington, too, because U. S. airstrikes on Islamic State positions in the town only began in earnest earlier this week, when the battle for Kobani seemed to have already been lost.
Even at this late hour, U. S. President Barack Obama’s approach has been to only permit a limited aerial bombardment, while conducting diplomacy from a great distance.
The tragic situation on the Turkish frontier is another setback for Obama and the coalition that he was assembling to try to roll back at least a few of Islamic State’s many sudden conquests. Iran, which is an unlikely unofficial member of this coalition, loathes Islamic State and backs Assad. Saudi Arabia, which is a formal part of the coalition, hates Iran and Assad and has mixed feelings about Islamic State, which draws much of its ultraconservative jihadist philosophy from Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia.
The only possible way out of this quagmire is for all those with competing agendas to talk to each other about their only common goal — defeat Islamic State — rather than try to find an advantage for themselves in the current situation.
“There are all these fires everywhere and none of the stakeholders effectively talk to each other,” Ala’Aldeen, who is Kurdish, said. “People are trying to intervene but they are paralyzed because there is no co- ordination.”
With animosity between Turks and Kurds suddenly reaching a new high, another colossal problem has been added to the raging pyre that engulfs the Middle East today.