Kurds must network proactively to weather coming storms
The tour of the US by Ilham Ahmed, a senior Syrian Kurdish politician, may not have succeeded in persuading President Donald Trump to reverse his Syria military-withdrawal plan. But it is just the kind of public diplomacy Kurds of the Middle East need to engage in if they are to secure their interests in an uncertain time and avoid being forced to link their political fortunes to those of their regional adversaries.
The latest decision by the White House regarding Syria - that the US will keep "about 200" troops in the country "for a period of time" - is no doubt an improvement on the original call for immediate withdrawal. But as with so many Trump administration orders, this one too could prove to be not worth the paper it is written on. In any case, the consultations with high-level Turkish government officials that preceded the White House announcement mean the worries and fears of the Pentagon's Kurdish allies are unlikely to be allayed.
But then again, it is not just Syrian Kurds whose fate hangs by a thread due to Trump's damaging policy flip-flops. The Kurds of Iraq, Turkey and Iran are all prisoners of geography: condemned by fate to coexist with regimes with whom they have very little in common in terms of values, norms, political culture and belief systems. The Kurds of Iraq have willy-nilly adopted an attitude of live and let live towards their domineering compatriots and unfriendly neighbors, but it has not been cost-free.
For instance, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is caught in the invidious position of having to detain Kurds who allegedly attacked one of the dozens of Turkish installations inside Iraq in protest against civilian deaths resulting from Turkish military operations. A weak federal government in Baghdad has neither the will nor the ability to defend the Kurdistan Region from raids by Turkish fighter jets. The Iraqi Kurds' richly earned reputation as one of the West's most reliable partners has not acted as a deterrent against frequent assaults by a NATO member since the 1980s.
To be sure, there is pressure on both Baghdad and Erbil to keep a lid on protests against Turkish violations of Iraqi sovereignty. Turkey is the semi-autonomous region's largest trading partner and an important export route for Iraqi oil, while Iraq as a whole was Turkey's fourth largest export partner in 2017, according to the foreign ministry. The volume of trade between the two countries, a big chunk of which is conducted through the Kurdish Region, is expected to cross the $12-billion mark in the coming years.
At the same time, there is little love lost between Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamist government and the Middle East's predominantly secular Kurds. Erdogan's military and its local Syrian Islamist proxies stormed the Kurdish-dominated Syrian canton of Afrin exactly a year ago, which displaced thousands and unleashed a wave of lawlessness, looting and ethnic cleansing. Even in the thick of battles between the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Islamic State group (ISIS), Erdogan was itching for an assault on the SDF's YPG members, who have ideological ties to Turkey's PKK, whose leader Abdullah Ocalan has just completed his 20th year in a Turkish prison.
Not that the Baghdad government has proved much of a friend of the Kurds either. It has allowed Hashed al-Shaabi, the umbrella organisation of Iran-backed Shia militias, to embed itself into the national-security apparatus. Originally formed in response to a non-sectarian fatwa of 2014 by top Iraqi Shia cleric Ali al-Sistani for defending Iraqi cities, particularly Baghdad, against ISIS, the Hashed has become a useful tool for Iran to project military power deep into ethnically mixed provinces of Iraq. According to a Thomson Reuters investigation, Hashed has "taken control of the thriving trade in scrap metal retrieved" from former ISIS strongholds and is making millions of dollars from it, a charge the paramilitaries deny.
As for Iran, the objective of keeping in check the political aspirations of Iraq's Kurds through proxies is a logical corollary of its iron-fist approach to the demands of its own ethnic Kurdish minority for greater cultural and political rights. Forty years after the Islamic Revolution, Iran is still not done with settling scores with leftist Kurdish dissidents who have taken refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. In September 2017, Tehran reiterated its hostility towards the Middle East's secular Kurds when it coordinated its actions closely with Ankara and Baghdad to foil Iraqi Kurds' attempt to claim their rightful place on the international stage with an independence referendum.
In hindsight, the lack of a considered US response to the post-referendum regional gang-up against Iraq's Kurds proved a precursor to the events of last December. Since then, Trump's curious preoccupation with a military pullout from Syria has reinforced Kurds' feeling that they have been used by their American allies as pawns that can be sacrificed on a geopolitical chessboard. As Ahmed, the co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), recently reminded a gathering hosted by the Centre for Kurdish Progress in the British Parliament in London, "We have given 8,000 martyrs during the war with Daesh and thousands wounded."
Against this backdrop of deepening insecurity and perceived Western betrayal, Kurds have no option but to draw up a coherent strategic plan by temporarily burying their ideological and tactical differences. On the upside, the mounting threats posed by assertive adversaries coupled with the growing disarray in the Western camp should concentrate the mind wonderfully. The KRG government, by virtue of its relatively firmer political and economic footing, should take the lead in building a unified Kurdish position, assuming it will be able to bring the region's fractious politicians on board first.
The storm stirred up by Trump's Syria withdrawal decision has demonstrated for the Kurds the downsides of being reactive. What has become clear in recent weeks is that the respect that Kurds command in the West because of the sacrifices they have made in the fight against Baath Party authoritarianism, religious sectarianism and ISIS barbarism knows no bounds and cuts across national boundaries. But this goodwill on which Kurds depend can atrophy unless they build strong networks with Western politicians and foreign-policy and security establishments as well as like-minded Middle East regimes.
Ahmed's tour of the US and Europe has informally, if belatedly, kicked off an effort to urge powerful American and European politicians to treat the Kurdish-led SDF not as stateless warriors who can be summoned for duty whenever necessary and then left twisting in the wind, but as the West's indispensable, all-weather allies. It is up to other Kurdish statesmen and politicians to pick up the baton from her and maintain the momentum of the public-diplomacy campaign.
Arnab Neil Sengupta is an independent journalist and commentator on the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
