The Kurds: the largest stateless ethnic group of  the world

The Kurds are one of the indigenous peoples of the Mesopotamian plains and the highlands in what are now south-eastern Turkey, north-eastern Syria, northern Iraq, north-western Iran and south-western Armenia. Between 25 and 35 million Kurds inhabit a mountainous region straddling the borders of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Armenia. They make up the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, but they have never obtained a permanent nation state.

Today, they form a distinctive community, united through race, culture and language, even though they have no standard dialect. They also adhere to a number of different religions and creeds, although the majority are Sunni Muslims.

The estimated Kurdish population is 36 million, of which about 12-15 million are in Turkey, 6 million in Iran, about 5 to 6 million in Iraq, and less than 2 million in Syria and more than 1 million in Europe and North America.

The Kurdish languages constitute a dialect continuum spoken by Kurds in Kurdistan and the diaspora. The three Kurdish languages are Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish), Sorani (Central Kurdish), and Southern Kurdish (Palewani or Xwarig/Xwarîn). A separate group of non-Kurdish Northwestern Iranian languages, the Zaza-Gorani languages, are also spoken by several million ethnic Kurds.

Studies as of 2009 estimate between 8 and 20 million native Kurdish speakers in Turkey. The majority of the Kurds speak Kurmani-

Why don't they have a state?

long history, the Kurds have never achieved a permanent nation state

In the early 20th Century, many Kurds began to consider the creation of a homeland - generally referred to as "Kurdistan". After World War One and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Western allies made provision for a Kurdish state in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres.

Such hopes were dashed three years later, however, when the Treaty of Lausanne, which set the boundaries of modern Turkey, made no provision for a Kurdish state and left Kurds with minority status in their respective countries. Over the next 80 years, any move by Kurds to set up an independent state was brutally quashed.

urdish Peshmerga fighters have been fighting IS militants in northern Iraq

In mid-2013, the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) turned its sights on three Kurdish enclaves that bordered territory under its control in northern Syria. It launched repeated attacks that until mid-2014 were repelled by the People's Protection Units (YPG) - the armed wing of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).

An IS advance in northern Iraq in June 2014 also drew that country's Kurds into the conflict. The government of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan Region sent its Peshmerga forces to areas abandoned by the Iraqi army.

In August 2014, the jihadists launched a surprise offensive and the Peshmerga withdrew from several areas. A number of towns inhabited by religious minorities fell, notably Sinjar, where IS militants killed or captured thousands of Yazidis.

military personnel did not intervene in the battle for Kobane

In response, a US-led multinacional coalition launched aire strikes in northern Iraq and sent military advisers to help the Peshmerga. The YPG and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has fought for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey for three decades and has bases in Iraq, also came to their aid.

In September 2014, IS launched an assault on the enclave around the northern Syrian Kurdish town of Kobane, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee across the nearby Turkish border. Despite the proximity of the fighting, Turkey refused to attack IS positions or allow Turkish Kurds to cross to defend it.

In January 2015, after a battle that left at least 1,600 people dead, Kurdish forces regained control of Kobane.

The Kurds - fighting alongside several local Arab militias under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance, and helped by US-led coalition air strikes, weapons and advisers - then steadily drove IS out of tens of thousands of square kilometres of territory in north-eastern Syria and established control over a large stretch of the border with Turkey.

In October 2017, SDF fighters captured the de facto IS capital of Raqqa and then advanced south-eastwards into the neighbouring province of Deir al-Zour - the jihadists' last major foothold in Syria.e Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance captured the IS stronghold of Raqqa

The last pocket of territory held by IS in Syria - around the village of Baghouz - fell to the SDF in March 2019. The SDF hailed the "total elimination" of the IS "caliphate", but it warned that jihadist sleeper cells remained "a great threat".

The SDF was also left to deal with the thousands of suspected IS militants captured during the last two years of the battle, as well as tens of thousands of displaced women and children associated with IS fighters. The US called for the repatriation of foreign nationals among them, but most of their home countries refused. holding 70,000 civilians who fled areas once held by IS

In October 2019, US troops pulled back from the border with Turkey after the country's president said it was about to launch an operation to set up a 32km (20-mile) deep "safe zone" clear of YPG fighters and resettle up to 2 million Syrian refugees there. The SDF said it had been "stabbed in the back" by the US and warned that the offensive might reverse the defeat of IS, the fight against which it said it could no longer prioritise.

Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels made steady gains in the first few days of the operation. In response, the SDF turned to the Syrian government for help and reached a deal for the Syrian army to deploy along the border.

The Syrian government has vowed to take back control of all of Syria.

Why does Turkey see Kurds as a threat?

eader Abdullah Ocalan has been imprisoned by Turkey since 1999

There is deep-seated hostility between the Turkish state and the country's Kurds, who constitute 15% to 20% of the population.

Kurds received harsh treatment at the hands of the Turkish authorities for generations. In response to uprisings in the 1920s and 1930s, many Kurds were resettled, Kurdish names and costumes were banned, the use of the Kurdish language was restricted, and even the existence of a Kurdish ethnic identity was denied, with people designated "Mountain Turks".

In 1978, Abdullah Ocalan established the PKK, which called for an independent state within Turkey. Six years later, the group began an armed struggle. Since then, more than 40,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.

Image copyrightAFPImage captionMore than 40,000 people have been killed since the PKK launched an armed struggle in 1984

In the 1990s the PKK rolled back on its demand for independence, calling instead for greater cultural and political autonomy, but continued to fight. In 2013, a ceasefire was agreed after secret talks were held.

The ceasefire collapsed in July 2015, after a suicide bombing blamed on IS killed 33 young activists in the mainly Kurdish town of Suruc, near the Syrian border. The PKK accused the authorities of complicity and attacked Turkish soldiers and police. The Turkish government subsequently launched what it called a "synchronised war on terror" against the PKK and IS.

Since then, several thousand people - including hundreds of civilians - have been killed in clashes in south-eastern Turkey.

Image copyrightAFPImage captionThe city of Cizre was devastated by fighting between Turkish forces and the PKK

Turkey has maintained a military presence in northern Syria since August 2016, when it sent troops and tanks over the border to support a Syrian rebel offensive against IS. Those forces captured the key border town of Jarablus, preventing the YPG-led SDF from seizing the territory itself and linking up with the Kurdish enclave of Afrin to the west.

In 2018, Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels launched an operation to expel YPG fighters from Afrin. Dozens of civilians were killed and tens of thousands displaced.

Turkey's government says the YPG and the PYD are extensions of the PKK, share its goal of secession through armed struggle, and are terrorist organisations that must be eliminated.

What do Syria's Kurds want?

nion Party (PYD) is the dominant force in Syria's Kurdish regions

Kurds make up between 7% and 10% of Syria's population. Before the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in 2011 most lived in the cities of Damascus and Aleppo, and in three, non-contiguous areas around Kobane, Afrin, and the north-eastern city of Qamishli.

Syria's Kurds have long been suppressed and denied basic rights. Some 300,000 have been denied citizenship since the 1960s, and Kurdish land has been confiscated and redistributed to Arabs in an attempt to "Arabize" Kurdish regions.

When the uprising evolved into a civil war, the main Kurdish parties publicly avoided taking sides. In mid-2012, government forces withdrew to concentrate on fighting the rebels elsewhere, and Kurdish groups took control in their wake.G has emerged as a key ally of the US-led coalition battle against IS

In January 2014, Kurdish parties - including the dominant Democratic Union Party (PYD) - declared the creation of "autonomous administrations" in the three "cantons" of Afrin, Kobane and Jazira.

In March 2016, they announced the establishment of a "federal system" that included mainly Arab and Turkmen areas captured from IS.

creation of a federal system in Kurdish-controlled northern Syria was announced in 2016

The PYD says it is not seeking independence, but insists that any political settlement to end the conflict in Syria must include legal guarantees for Kurdish rights and recognition of Kurdish autonomy.

President Assad has vowed to retake "every inch" of Syrian territory, whether by negotiations or military force. His government has also rejected Kurdish demands for autonomy, saying that "nobody in Syria accepts talk about independent entities or federalism".

deal agreed by the KDP and Iraq's government in 1970 collapsed four years later

Kurds make up an estimated 15% to 20% of Iraq's population. They have historically enjoyed more national rights than Kurds living in neighbouring states, but also faced brutal repression.

In 1946, Mustafa Barzani formed the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) to fight for autonomy in Iraq. But it was not until 1961 that he launched a full armed struggle.million Iraqi Kurds fled into Iran and Turkey after the 1991 rebellion was crushed

In the late 1970s, the government began settling Arabs in areas with Kurdish majorities, particularly around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, and forcibly relocating Kurds.

The policy was accelerated in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, in which the Kurds backed the Islamic republic. In 1988, Saddam Hussein unleashed a campaign of vengeance on the Kurds that included the chemical attack on Halabja.

When Iraq was defeated in the 1991 Gulf War, Barzani's son Massoud and Jalal Talabani of the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) led a Kurdish rebellion. Its violent suppression prompted the US and its allies to impose a no-fly zone in the north that allowed Kurds to enjoy self-rule. The KDP and PUK agreed to share power, but tensions rose and a four-year war erupted between them in 1994. and Jalal Talabani's PUK shared power after the fall of Saddam

The parties co-operated with the US-led invasion in 2003 that toppled Saddam and governed in coalition in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), created two years later to administer Dohuk, Irbil and Sulaimaniya provinces.

Massoud Barzani was appointed the region's president, while Jalal Talabani became Iraq's first non-Arab head of state.

In September 2017, a referendum on independence was held in both the Kurdistan Region and the disputed areas seized by the Peshmerga in 2014, including Kirkuk. The vote was opposed by the Iraqi central government, which insisted it was illegal.

More than 90% of the 3.3 million people who voted supported secession. KRG officials said the result gave them a mandate to start negotiations with Baghdad, but then Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi demanded that it be annulled.

The following month Iraqi pro-government forces retook the disputed territory held by the Kurds. The loss of Kirkuk and its oil revenue was a major blow to Kurdish aspirations for their own state.

After his gamble backfired, Mr Barzani stepped down as the Kurdistan Region's president. But disagreements between the main parties meant the post remained vacant until June 2019, when he was succeeded by his nephew Nechirvan.
Reference:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29702440

The Kurds threaten the United States in joining the Syrian Government forces

The Syrian Democratic Council is the political wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the de facto autonomous Democratic Federation of Northern Syria.

The SDF is militarily led by the People's Protection Unites (YPG), a mostly Kurdish militia.^[108] Founded in October 2015, the SDF states its mission as fighting to create a secular, democratic and federal Syria.The updated December 2016 constitution of the -Democratic Federation of Northern Syria names the SDF as its official defence force.

A top Syrian Kurdish official visiting Washington today said US-backed fighters would consider integrating with Bashar al-Assad’s forces after the United States completes its pullout from the war-torn country.

“The Syrian Democratic Forces can be part of the new Syrian army,” Ilham Ahmed, a leader in the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), said through an interpreter at the Middle East Institute today. “This is an alternative path for us.”
The news

Syrian Kurds tell Washington they may join forces with Assad if US pulls out of Syria

Ahmed, who leads the executive council of the SDC, the political wing of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, said the Donald Trump administration had not objected to Syrian Kurds opening up negotiations with Damascus.

“They did not object clearly. They always tell us this is a Syrian affair,” she said. “But they urged us, when you negotiate, you should come from a strong position.”

Even as the United States appears to have slowed down its pullout from Syria, a turn by Kurdish forces toward Damascus could frustrate the Pentagon’s plans to stabilize former Islamic State-held areas.

Speaking to reporters today, acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan indicated that the Pentagon is still on track with plans to integrate US-supported Kurdish forces into towns and cities along the Middle Euphrates River Valley, the one-time heart of the Islamic State caliphate, even as the United States proceeds with a “deliberate, coordinated, disciplined withdrawal.”

"How do you sustain local security?” Shanahan said. “That’s where these partnerships are so critical."

Shanahan said the Islamic State had lost 99.5% of its former caliphate in Syria. But Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said the group still commands "thousands of fighters" in Iraq and Syria in a report released today.

A US official told Al-Monitor that the withdrawal is conditions-based, and US-led airstrikes will continue, giving the coalition some wiggle room to deny the return of Islamic State fighters, even as American ships have already moved into the region to withdraw troops.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the USS Kearsarge, an amphibious assault ship, will head to the region to provide backup to American forces as they depart Syria.

Shanahan is not slated to meet with the visiting Syrian Kurdish delegation, according to a senior defense official. At the Pentagon briefing, his first formal press conference since assuming the acting role, he did not elaborate on any possible US plans to protect the Kurds. Ahmed said the trip to meet US officials will be centered on getting clarity from the Donald Trump administration on the US withdrawal timeline.

Ahmed’s trip made a splash Monday night when her delegation ran into President Trump at Trump International Hotel, where he was dining with members of the administration and Congress.

The commander-in-chief raised the possibility of a safe zone to protect Syrian Kurds in their brief encounter, according to the Kurdish leader.

“Of course we’re asking the US government for alternative plans, to slow the withdrawal,” Ahmed said today. “What we are asking is to keep the safety and stability of the area.” She said there was no agreement with the Pentagon to return weapons handed over to the Syrian Democratic Forces during the campaign against the Islamic State, although defense officials once said that was a condition of US armed support.

But it’s not clear that Ahmed’s message is being heard in Washington. A source familiar with her plans said Ahmed hopes to meet with officials from the Pentagon and State Department, as well as members of Congress, but did not provide further details.

Ahmed met with Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., earlier this week, according to a spokesman for her group. Meanwhile, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., has offered an amendment to a pending Middle East legislative package that would authorize Trump to use force to protect the Syrian Kurds. 

Back in Syria, she said, there are no signs that Assad will accept any form of Kurdish self-governance in Syria or changes to the constitution.

“We are not at the negotiating table,” she said. “We are excluded.”
 By Jack Detsch
Reference:

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/01/syria-kurds-join-forces-assad-us-withdraw.html

The Kurds fighting for their survival, Turkey is not helping much

Over the past decade, Turkey has pursued a "break and dent" strategy against the Kurds, by which the Turkish government seeks to dismantle Kurdish groups and push resistant factions into neighboring Syria and Iraq. Turkey has now come to rely on this strategy outside its border, particularly in the northern Syrian region of Afrin.  Based on this approach, Ankara aims to “cleanse” all northeastern Syrian territories held by the People’s Protection Units, or the YPG. Yet this "break and dent" strategy is futile, and the Mahkmour refugee camp in Iraq, set up by Turkish Kurds banished from their native villages more than two decades ago, is an example of its futility.

On Dec. 13, a day after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced plans for a military operation east of the Euphrates in Syria, Turkish jets targeted Sinjar and Makhmour in Iraq. According to Ankara, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) — considered a terrorist organization by Turkey and much of the international community — is using the Makhmour camp as a base. Officials of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the dominant political force in Iraqi Kurdistan, pointed out that UN rules require the camp to not harbor armed elements.

The camp is hardly an ordinary camp. Discussing its links with the PKK is meaningless, for its residents are families who have lost children fighting in PKK ranks. Armed units have taken up positions in self-defense in the area to protect residents from the Islamic State (IS). The Makhmour camp is essentially a lab demonstrating the failure of Turkey's security-centered policies.

More than 12,000 Kurds live in the camp, located on a slope of the Qarachokh Mountains. How they ended up there is a long and tragic story, which began in the '90s, when Turkey emptied 4,000 Kurdish villages as part of a military campaign to “root out” the PKK.

The story of Sakir Tong, a 37-year-old resident of the camp, is more or less the story of the camp itself. In an interview with Al-Monitor, the father of six, who makes a living as a construction worker in Erbil and Sulaimaniyah, recounted how his family fled their village in 1993 and crossed into Iraq.

Tong was born in 1981 in southeastern Turkey, in the small village of Isikveren, known as Bileh in Kurdish, located a stone’s throw from Uludere and the Iraqi border. In the early '90s, the Turkish government escalated its extrajudicial killings of PKK members and sympathizers in the region. During that period, the PKK raided a military outpost in the nearby village of Tasdelen, which marked the onset of a harsh government crackdown, Tong recounted.

The Turkish government “branded everyone terrorists,” he continued. “The road to Uludere was already closed for a year. We were meeting our needs from Zakho [in Iraqi Kurdistan]. The villages were shelled almost every night. We could not sleep and people got killed. Once a week, they would surround our village and search the houses for [PKK] guerrillas.”

The villagers, Tong said, came under pressure to join the village guard, a government-armed militia backing the army against the PKK. “They would keep people out in the snow and torture them. ‘You’ll choose either the mountain or the state,’ they would press. When the villagers refused to join the village guard, they said, ‘Then you go away.’ The village had 75 households, and all of them, except seven or eight, fled in September 1993. Bileh was the first village to be emptied,” he said, adding that other villages shared the same fate the following year.

The villagers went to Zakho across the border, where two camps were set up to harbor them, with the United Nations providing aid, Tong said. The refugees, he explained, had to move four more times until May 1998, when they settled outside Makhmour, a town 62 miles south of Erbil.

The location of the camp in Makhmour was not without reason. Turkey did not want the refugees near the border because it believed they would abet the PKK. The Kurdistan Democratic Party also saw the refugees as an extension of the PKK. The refugees then moved southward, toward Makhmour, out of the control of Iraqi Kurdistan but still within the boundaries of the US-enforced no-fly zone, which protected the Kurds from Saddam Hussein. In short, the place was a buffer zone. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which had already granted the group refugee status, was responsible for running the camp. Provisions came to the camp as part of the UN Oil for Food program. In 2011, the aid was reduced before being terminated in 2013. The Iraqi government began sending monthly flour supplies. That assistance was scaled down to once every three or four months in the wake of Iraqi Kurdistan’s independence referendum in 2017. Apart from that, charitable people continue to provide food and fuel to the refugees.

The residents of the camp, which once resembled a prison, established committees to deal with all their affairs. Thus, the “democratic self-rule” promoted by the Kurdish movement was for the first time put into practice here, rather spontaneously and under the strain of harsh conditions. The camp is run by the following entitites: a local administration based on neighborhood assemblies; a popular assembly selected every two years; a three-member council selected by the assembly; and an executive body. In other words, Makhmour became a pilot scheme for democratic self-rule, even before the effort in Rojava in Syria.

According to information Al-Monitor obtained from the Makhmour administration, nearly 3,000 pupils attend four kindergartens, five primary schools, a secondary school and a high school built by the UN. Their diplomas are certified by the Iraqi Ministry of Education. Textbooks from Turkey are used in the curriculum. Volunteers from the camp serve as teachers. Those who wish to pursue higher education go to universities in Erbil, Sulaimaniyah and Dahuk. Graduates of medical schools work in the camp’s hospital, replacing the doctors appointed by Baghdad. The imams of the two mosques are also from the camp.

The Makhmour camp came under the spotlight when Ankara expressed its desire to open up peace talks with the Kurds. In a gesture of support for the peace process, a 34-strong group, including PKK militants from the Qandil Mountains and residents of the Makhmour camp, crossed to Turkey from Iraq in October 2009. The gesture, which was coordinated with Ankara, backfired and seven members of the group were eventually sent to prison on charges of affiliation with the PKK. The incident showed how risky the way back home could be, even with a greenlight from Ankara.

Among the camp's residents, only about 20 elderly people hold Turkish passports. They managed to renew their ID cards during trips to Turkey, before the peace process collapsed in 2015. Without a passport, a series of bureaucratic and legal procedures become impossible for camp residents. The camp residents received three-year residence papers from the Iraqi government in 2013, but the documents have yet to be renewed. Many work on construction sites in Kurdistan, while others raise livestock.

When it comes to the issue of armed men in the camp, the PKK sent guerrillas from Qandil to help rescue the camp after it was captured by IS, along with the town of Makhmour, in August 2014. The camp’s liberation was followed by the creation of a 300-strong self-defense force, and the PKK took defense positions in the mountain pass. The UN, which closed its office at the entrance of the camp in 2014, is now under pressure from Ankara to crack down on the camp. Ankara argues that the camp has been taken over by terrorists.

According to Tong, Turkey’s Dec. 13 air raid hit a farming area adjacent to houses, killing a 14-year-old girl and three women, among them a woman in her 70s. “About 75% of camp residents are women and children," Tong said. "All people here are relatives. There is great pain and anger.”

Tong added that military officials came from Makhmour to examine the damage. “They promised protection and went away," he said. "UN officials are coming every other day and saying they will reopen the office. There is indignation toward the UN for doing nothing.”

According to Tong, “The guerrillas came in 2014, but they left in 2016. Camp residents are now maintaining the security. People aged 18 to 60 are keeping watch, including women without children.”

The round-the-clock watch in the camp stems from fears that IS might return. “Daesh is still active in the Gani Hazali area, which is 3 kilometers from the camp,” Tong said, using the Arabic acronym for the jihadi group. “The US forces occasionally bomb Daesh targets. In 2016, Daesh attacked again, killing two people. The Daesh threat is not over.”

The Makhmour camp holds a mirror to Ankara's failed Kurdish policies. In pursuing the break-up of the Kurdish regions in northern Syria, Ankara will reach yet another dead end.

Author:

Fehim Tastekin

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/12/turkey-iraqi-kurdistan-makhmour-camp-kurdish-policy.html