Kurds Away

As my 2 1/2 long time readers know, for many years I maintained a blog called Today in Iraq and Afghanistan (originally Today in Iraq). During the height of U.S. involvement in Iraq we had thousands of visitors every day, and we were listed in the blogroll at Eschaton and other prominent sites. But Americans lost interest in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and even the fight against the Islamic State didn't garner much attention. I finally stopped blogging there a few months ago when the situation in both countries had turned into stagnation and the daily routine of generally low-level violence just didn't seem worth documenting.

Anyway, the result is that I know quite a lot about the situation that, rather astonishingly, has finally gotten some congressional Republicans to speak against their Dear Leader. It's more complicated than I can fully explain in this space, but I'll give the basics. The Kurds are an ethnic group that got largely screwed when the European powers carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I. They wound up divided among Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey. The history of the Kurds in Iraq is very complicated but the upshot is that over the years they achieved a degree of self-rule but during the Iran-Iraq war Saddam Hussein adopted highly repressive policies toward Iraqi Kurdistan and perpetrated the notorious Anfal genocide. Following the fall of Saddam, the Kurds gained an autonomous regional government (the KRG) in federation with Iraq.

An militant faction called the PKK (which stands for Kurdistan workers party but that's irrelevant) seeking secession of Kurdish lands in Turkey took refuge in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. Eventually, the KRG came to a tacit agreement with Turkey that it would not protect the PKK in exchange for Turkish acceptance of the KRG and trade relations. Meanwhile, in Syria, the Kurds call their territory Rojava, and they were able to attain effective autonomy in the Syrian civil war. Turkish leader Erdogan sees the Rojavan party, called the YPG or people's protection forces, as allied with the PKK and calls them terrorists. I don't know that there is any truth to this, they seem mostly interested in autonomy within Syria, but in any case Erdogan doesn't like the idea of a continuous strip of Kurdish self-rule along his southern border. (I know this is getting tiresome.)

Anyway, the Islamic state arose, first in the context of the Iraqi civil war. This was a disaster for which the U.S. is largely culpable, but  that's for another day. As Baghdad regained control of the lands to its north and west, the IS metastasized to Syria where it gained substantial territory, and then invaded the Mosul region of northwest Iraq, on the border of Iraqi Kurdistan. Rather than repeating the mistake of trying to seize territory in the region with its own forces, the U.S. chose to combat IS by providing support to Kurdish fighters, and tacitly cooperating with Iranian-backed militias in both Iraq and Syria. The YPG is the main component of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which defeated IS in Syria with the help of U.S. arms and air support. They are also responsible for prison camps where thousands of captured IS fighters and family members are now held.

Okay then. Erdogan has been threatening for a while to invade northern Syria, on the pretext that he wants to create a "safe zone" into which he can repatriate Syrian refugees who are currently in Turkey. He probably does want to do that, although there is no infrastructure there to receive them and he'd just be dumping them into the desert. But his more important motive is to push the YPG away from the Turkish border. There are a thousand or so U.S. troops there essentially as a tripwire, to discourage Erdogan from invading. In a phone call two days ago, the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW agreed to remove those troops and allow Erdogan to invade. Here is an explanation of the situation from a Kurdish channel which also discusses the reaction of the leader of the KRG. The bottom line is that this will push the YPG into the arms of Bashar al-Assad and Russia, since they will have no other protector.

The Resident has since claimed that he won't tolerate a Turkish invasion after all, after getting an earful from Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham -- apparently that took him by surprise. But with the U.S. troops gone, there won't be much he can do about it. Meanwhile, of course, the YPG will have to abandon the IS prison camps and who knows what will happen then.

As you know I am generally highly resistant to U.S. military involvement abroad, but I fully recognized the necessity of destroying IS and I also fully appreciate the debt we owe to the Kurds of Rojava. Not saying I want U.S. troops there forever but we are obliged to work out a deal. Just turning tail and leaving is a bad look from all perspectives.