A Kurdish Tragedy

Beaten back by the first shots of Turkish guns, the approximately 1,000 U.S. soldiers who had been stationed for five years in northeastern Syria finally disengaged this weekend—following the orders of Donald Trump, who, with a snap of his fingers and a telephone call, bent to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s strategy.

Here is another authoritarian strong man, this one from Ankara, who understood how to hoodwink the president of what was once called “the greatest power on Earth,” and which is today the laughingstock of the whole world.

Erdogan must have died from laughter, but the Kurds are not laughing. The Turkish president, implacable enemy of all dissidence and repeated insulter of Europe, is also the executioner of Kurds, those in Turkey as well as those in Syria.

For five years, the fighters in Syrian Kurdistan have effectively “done the job” against the Islamic State, at the forefront of the fight against modern barbarism. Meanwhile, Russia and Iran were massively intervening on the Western front, saving Bashar Assad’s regime and bombarding the civilian population as needed.

Since 2014, the Kurds have benefited from Western air cover, mostly American, but also French—crucial support. It was an effective combination, despite the serious harm to civilians during the 2017 recapture of Raqqa, the ephemeral capital of the emirate. Raqqa was where the 2015 and 2016 attacks in Europe were coordinated.

Today, Trump’s impulsive act is experienced by the Kurds as one more betrayal in the jagged history of their people.

The Kurds make up the largest stateless nation in the world: some 40 million people in five contiguous countries (including Turkey, Iraq and Syria). A people who, since promises of a state of their own were made to them exactly a century ago at the end of World War I, have received more than their share of punches.

But they are also a people of fighters, male and female, who, paradoxically, knew how to pull out of the game, on the periphery of some serious clashes.

In 1991, it was Saddam Hussein’s abortive invasion of Kuwait, followed by the Anglo-American “punishment:” after the military intervention against Baghdad, a hard regime of sanctions was put in place, doubling as a no-fly zone in northern Iraq.

It was in this protected zone that, in the 1990s, a true Kurdish autonomy was born. It developed even further after the 2003 invasion launched by George W. Bush. For years, the south and west of Iraq were ravaged by a terrible war, while, in an enormous perversely positive effect from an otherwise disastrous American invasion, Iraqi Kurdistan knew a golden age, becoming an independent quasi-state.

A similar phenomenon then occurred in Syria, where, in 2012 and 2013, the worst atrocities of the war unfolded, far from the predominantly Kurdish northeastern regions. There also, a de facto political-military autonomy developed on the margins of the atrocities of other regions of the country—until an Islamic caliphate developed, just south of the Kurdish zones.

And it was there that in 2014, President Barack Obama, long reluctant to support any intervention, decided to mobilize in a minimal way a few hundred advisers and pilots, who were to combine with the U.S. Air Force and the fighting skills of tens of thousands of Kurds—men and women on the ground, in equal measure—to bring down the Islamic State group.

A unique example of unconsciousness and incompetence at its peak, Trump’s surrender to Erdogan opens the floodgates to a kind of strategic tsunami.

It revives the war in Syria in one of the only areas that remained calm. It opens the door wide to Bashar Assad, who is returning to Kurdistan. It could resurrect the famous terrorist organization from its ashes. And it is killing a unique experience of self-government in a profoundly anti-democratic, anti-secular and misogynist region of the world.