Russian victory in Syria: Pax Russica in the Middle East
‘Fifty years ago, the Leningrad street taught me a rule: If a fight is inevitable you have to throw the first punch,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in October 2015. It was better to fight “terrorists” in Syria, he explained, than to wait for them to strike in Russia. This behavior proved to be the strategy with the highest return to control Syria.
Former KBG agent Putin is entitled to huff and puff as the new czar of the Middle East, alongside his vassals, the sultan of Ankara and the Iranian ayatollahs. He has won the war over Syria, against the US and the West. Hooray! The West, after abandoning Crimea, has shown its full cowardice to its opponents in abandoning the Kurds, its best allies in the civilizational fight to defend our common values.
In the Dante-esque Syrian inferno, the betrayal of Kurdish allies, sees us touch new depths of purgatory in the most vulgar and immoral way possible: by a Trumpian tweet. In a way not seen before, the decision by the billionaire president to abandon the Kurds has provoked a strong reaction by the normally discrete senior military figures of the American institutional system. It has divided NATO, the armed guarantor of the free world.
Can Turkey really remain in NATO; a Turkey that has weaponized the refugee plight, used them to blackmail the EU and which has purchased Russian S-400 missiles; a Turkey that has joined forces with jihadist mercenaries, a mixed bunch of Daesh and al-Qaeda, accused of war crimes by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as they invaded Syria’s Kurdish regions?
The invasion took place to cries of “Allahu Akbar” and the recital of koranic verses praising conquest in 90,000 mosques across Turkey. This is the same Turkey that has declared openly again and again its intention to change the demography of the region through a process of ethnic cleansing. The “discomfort” and highly critical public reaction of the American military apparatus would have resulted, in any other country than the US, in a coup d’etat against such an unpredictable and impulsive president.
Senior figures have vocally condemned Trump’s decision: Gen. David Petraeus, former director of the CIA and commander of the American Armed Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; Gen. Josef Votel, former head of US Central Command – Centom – and with extensive knowledge of the Syrian terrain and the key actors in this part of the country; and former secretary of state and defense, Gen. James Mattis.
It’s impossible not to consider that the future of a people has been sacrificed for the profitable investments of a billionaire president. “Thank you [Turkish President Recep] Erdogan for joining us yesterday to celebrate the launch of Trump Towers Istanbul!” declared Ivanka Trump as she inaugurated the Istanbul twin towers in 2012. Trump went on to admit in a 2015 radio interview, “I have a little conflict of interest, because I have a major, major building in Istanbul... it’s called Trump Towers. Two towers, instead of one. Not the usual one, it’s two. And I’ve gotten to know Turkey very well.”
HOWEVER, THE shock waves resonating by this cowardly betrayal of the Kurds, the people forgotten by history, goes far beyond a commercial deal agreed between Trump and Erdogan. It’s the sign of a strategic defeat when faced with anti-Western powers impatient to fill a vacuum: Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Assad regime, ISIS and al-Qaeda.
Trump’s frantic high-speed tweets on strategic issues commits de facto the Western world, making its extremely slow and bureaucratic reactions totally ineffective. The reactions of the European Council and European Parliament condemning the Turkish invasion and demanding its retreat, or Germany’s idea to send troops and establish a security zone, come at a time when Turkish invading troops and their jihadist mercenaries already occupy a 32 km. by 120 km. (20 mile by 75 mile) zone. With their backs to the wall, the Kurds have no choice but to accept first a Trump-Erdogan agreement and then a Putin-Erdogan agreement. In the meantime, war crimes have been committed, civilians killed and thousands displaced.
Until now, where Western superiority was based on military and economic might, it was above all, based on common liberal and democratic values, upheld by institutions. What we knew as the “Free World,” a model admired by the rest of the world. These are the same universal values pushing thousands onto the streets of Beirut and Baghdad, opposing Hezbollah’s takeover and the Shia militias loyal to Iran. These are the same values that saw Sudanese women and youths overthrow the regime of Omar Al-Bashir, a dictator supported by the Muslim Brotherhood and Erdogan’s Turkey.
Abandoning the Kurds, who have established these universal values in their regions, permanently undermines the credibility of the West, sending a negative signal to these demonstrators who want to join the liberal camp.
Having shown the total absence of a strategic vision, and in what feels like a video war game, Trump orders some of his soldiers to return to Syria to protect oil fields, having recently evacuated the previous week, leaving them to Iraq. But now the area is also patrolled by Russian military and Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime.
Surrendering the Kurds is not only cowardly but also a nail in the coffin of what we had called the Western-dominated international community. This was the world admired by the countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Until recently American presidents treated, for good reason, if arrogantly, the dictators of the Middle East as thugs: a Saddam Hussein, a Gaddafi or an Assad.
Now we have the thuggish tweets of an unpredictable American president, ignoring historical facts and reproaching the Kurds for not participating in the allies’ Normandy landings on D-Day in 1944.
The US president’s over-the-top al-Baghdadi show reveals the former realty-show TV presenter, and reminds us of the image of former president Barack Obama witnessing Osama bin Laden’s elimination eight years ago, announcing that the world would be a better place. Al-Qaeda is far from gone. This is the same Obama who left Iraq in a rush, abandoning it to Iran, and creating the conditions that led to the birth of ISIS. And for more irony, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi was hiding in the region of Idlib, under the control of militias dominated by a branch of al-Qaeda, al-Nusra Front, benefiting itself from Turkish protection.
With the Kurds now abandoned, the Israelis should be seriously worried. As survivors from Auschwitz and Russian pogroms, and forced to abandon their homes in the Arab-Muslim countries where they had lived for millennia, they are without a doubt the best-placed to grasp the significance the surrender of the international community means at such defining moments in history.
The writer is a researcher and former director of the Representation of the Regional Government of Iraqi Kurdistan in Paris.