President has stabbed us in the back, say bitter Kurds
s Walid Shekhi, a Kurdish restaurant owner, was setting up his new falafel shop in the Syrian city of Kobane, he thought of his hero when it came to naming it.
Patrons travelled from far and wide to eat at Trump Restaurant after it opened in January 2017, such was the respect for the incoming US president among Syria’s Kurds.
“It was an opportunity to express gratitude as a Kurd to America for supporting us in the fight against Isil,” Mr Shekhi said. The Kurds had been oppressed and persecuted for decades, he went on, but their fortunes seemed finally to be about to change. He, like countless others from the ethnic minority in the region, had projected a huge amount of hope on to Mr Trump.
They figured he was a strong leader and a self-professed deal-maker who would back their fight against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and ultimately their bid for autonomy.
And for a while, as US money and weapons flowed in, it looked as if they might be proved right.
The Kurds managed in a short amount of time to seize vast swathes of territory from jihadists, land that they hoped would one day come to form part of an acknowledged autonomous Kurdish state. They set up an administration in their corner of Syria and called it Rojava, which operated in the Kurdish language they had been banned from speaking by the Assad regime.
US flags flew in shops in the administration’s de facto capital Qamishli in a sign of appreciation.
But with just one short statement from the White House on Sunday, they discovered they were expendable to Mr Trump. “The Kurds fought with us, but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so,” Mr Trump wrote on Twitter, debasing the relationship to nothing more than a transactional exchange. The proverb goes that the Kurds have no friends but the mountains, but never have they been abandoned quite so nakedly as this.
“It feels like a stab in the back,” one official with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces told me. We lost 11,000 men and women fighting this war on Isil and he did not even have the decency of telling us in person.”
More pragmatic Kurds mused yesterday that a century of betrayal by Western powers should have prepared them for the latest.
Some 35million Kurds – scattered across Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran – were left without a homeland when François Georges-picot and Sir Mark Sykes drew up their map of the Middle East. The Kurds became the stateless largest ethnic group in the world.
Over the years, they have faced genocidal campaigns at the hands of Saddam Hussein, and ethnic cleansing in Turkey. Their allies did little to stop it.
In abandoning them to an imminent onslaught from Turkish forces, Mr Trump has likely sealed Rojava’s fate, dooming their great experiment in self-rule.
“This isn’t just a betrayal,” said one Kurdish friend in Qamishli as he considered his future in Syria. “It feels like the final betrayal.”