Kobane: The Kurds in the quagmire of the Middle East

The dramatic battles to gain control of Kobane – a city in the north of Syria adjoining the Turkish border mainly inhabited by Kurds and other ethnic minorities – are between the Syrian Kurds and the jihadists of Islamic State. They have placed on the agenda the national aspirations of the Kurds and their demand for ethnic recognition, and they are represented by a multitude of parties, the most important of which are: in Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), still considered a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Union. Their branch in Syria is the Democratic Union Party (PYD). In Iraq there is Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic party (KDP) and Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) (Talabani was president until July 2014). All of them are in competition with one another.

Kurdish demands for independence emerged during the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, when the victorious powers, in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920, promised an independent Kurdish State. The promises were not kept, and the territory was divided between the new states of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Persia. These four countries, in perpetual conflict with one another, have utilised the national and ethnic ambitions of the Kurdish parties within their territories to subsidise an enervating guerrilla war on each others’ soil (Iran-Iraq, Iraq-Turkey, Syria-Turkey) or, during times of reconciliation, have all allied against them.

The Kurds are not a united, homogeneous people. Out of the 35 million or so Kurds around half of them are to be found in Turkey, and many others in Germany, France and Great Britain. In Syria there are between 1 and 2 million, making up around 10% of the population. Around 4-6 million Kurds have established themselves in the north of Iraq, and around 7 million live in Iran.

They speak different dialects and have different religions. Most of the Kurds are Sunni, but some are Sufi, Shi’a (in Iran) or Yazidi. They are divided also by their geographical origin and their history is marked by numerous tribal conflicts; in fact they have never managed to unite in a centralised political sense. The Kurdish princes under the Ottomans fought seperately against the Sultan. Since then the differences between the various sheikhs and the different Kurdish parties have continually been exploited by the States within whose borders they live: some tribes participated in the massacre of the Armenians contrived by the Young Turks in 1915, others fought the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria on behalf of Hafez al Assad.

Kurdish revolts, repressions and betrayals, internal struggles and reconciliation, continued over the decades and are re-emerging today against the tragic background of a Middle East where the great imperialist powers (the USA, Russia and China) and the regional powers (Turkey, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, the Iraqi State being currently in total disarray) are all at each others throats.

Today it is the Kurds in Syria who are in a critical situation, with those in Iraqi Kurdistan receiving the protection of the United States, and also of Turkey. In Syria the Kurds live mainly in the north and north-east of the country. At the beginning of the seventies the Syrian government thought they could Arabize the territories along its border with Iran and Iraq, inhabited mainly by Kurdish and Christian minorities. This region, which is highly fertile and rich in oil, had known independence movements during the French mandate as well. But when Hafez al Assad assumed power in 1971 he put an end to the forced arabization and sought an alliance with the Kurds against the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Kurds accepted to the extent that in 1982 they took part in the bloody repression of the revolts organised by the latter. Hafez’s bodyguard was often composed of Kurds, and of Christians, towards whom he extended the same policy of protection. The Kurds of Syria didn’t enjoy any political or cultural rights but they weren’t officially persecuted, at least as long as they refrained from advancing any political demands.

The PKK, founded in 1974, got rid of any internal opposition (an armed repression that led to massacres that included women and children) before commencing its guerrilla war against the Turkish State. Its funding was obtained by drugs trafficking, arms dealing, bank robberies, and extorting money from Kurds both at home and abroad, and it also received material and financial support from Syria. This party was therefore tolerated there and its troops were allowed to train in Syria and in Lebanon, sometimes alongside the Palestinians of the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). The head of the PKK, Öcalan, with the Turkish army after him, was able to take refuge in Syria from 1979 and 1988. The PKK also collaborated with the Alaouite regime in order to contain the influence of the other Kurdish parties. Between 1980 and 1990 numerous Syrian Kurds went off to fight in Iraqi Kurdistan after it was attacked by the Turkish army. But in 1998, during a period of rapprochement between Turkey and Syria, Damascus began to persecute the PKK militants and expelled Öcalan, who took refuge in Italy, and then in Kenya where he was arrested and then handed over to Turkey in 1999.

The formation of an autonomous Kurdish region within Iraqi territory in 2003, supported by the United States, provoked clashes between Arabs and Kurds in Syria.

In October 2011 the Kurdish parties in Syria, with the exception of the PYD-PKK, founded the Syrian Kurdish National Council, which aligned itself with the part of the Arab population opposed to Bashar al-Assad. Meanwhile the militants of the PYD-PKK didn’t participate in the demonstrations against Syrian government and in certain cases tried to prevent them.

In March 2011 Bashar al-Assad, seeking reconciliation with the Kurds, published a decree which granted identity cards to 300,000 stateless Kurds, freed some Kurdish political prisoners, agreed to a possible return of exiles and withdrew from the country’s Kurdish regions. Thus three unconnected Kurdish enclaves were formed along the Turkish frontier: the region of Afrin to the north-east of Aleppo, some small territories which spread into Turkish Kurdistan parallel with the Turkish city of Urfa and in which Kobane is also to be found, and finally the region of Djezireh, caught between the Iraqi and Turkish borders. In actual fact Assad’s tactic was to divide the regime’s opponents, and to cock a snook at Turkey by leaving some of the border provinces under Kurdish control.

In July 2012, at Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani of the KDP reconciled and reunited the various Syrian Kurdish parties, including the PYD-PKK. The latter agreed to participate in the joint management of the cities and of the population of the Syrian Kurdish areas, but refused to merge their military wing with the Syrian Kurdish Peshmerga, who wanted to join forces with the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Within the FSA there is a Kurdish battalion whose members are opposed to the PYD who they accuse of supporting Assad. There are frequent armed clashes, followed by truces, between the militiamen of the Kurdish People’s Protection Force, the military wing of the PYD, and the FSA.

And yet the attacks by the Jihadists against the Kurds have fostered a mood of reconciliation amongst the Kurdish parties. A number of factors divide the Kurds from the Jihadists: the latter consider the Kurds as bad Muslims owing to the number of Kurdish Sufis and Yasidis (Kurdish Zoroastrians), and their liberated women who don’t wear the veil, and they are against Kurdish autonomy. Today the PYD-PKK, even if detested by many Syrian Kurds, is in the front line against the jihadists of Islamic State and the al Nusra Front, another jihadist group operating in Syria.

Islamic State intervened in the civil war in Syria and then invaded Iraq, gaining control of large swathes of territory and pushing forward to the gates of Baghdad and Mosul. It enjoys the support of the Sunni bourgeoisie: Sheikhs, Baathist notables and partisans and ex-officers of Saddam Hussein’s army, who after the dictator’s fall were driven to rebel against the vexatious and repressive measures of the Iraqi government led by a Shi’a prime minister.

The Peshmerga, of Iraqi Kurdistan, have refused to support the Iraqi army and profited from its rout by the troops of Islamic State in June 2013 by occupying the city of Kirkuk, which they had been laying claim to for some time. In August, Islamic State advanced on Iraqi Kurdistan, which then appealed for international assistance. The United States responded very quickly by forming a coalition of 22 countries. And thanks to the aerial attacks of the Americans and their allies the advance of Islamic State was halted.

The Islamic State army, well equipped and well organised by professional officers (Baathists, Chechens) but with no air force, is currently attacking one of the three Kurdish regions in Syria which adjoin the Turkish border. The current bastion is Kobane, part of which, despite the resistance of the Kurdish guerrillas, is already under the control of the jihadists.

To slow the advance of Islamic State, the countries of the coalition, brought together under the United States, are engaging in aerial bombing missions, launched from their bases in Kuwait, Qatar and Iraq. But there will be “no boots on the ground’ since that could allegedly trigger a more serious conflict: the Syrian Kurdish militias with their small arms will have to be sufficient. The Turkish army is massed on the frontier but refuses to intervene, leaving the Kurdish combatants to defend the badly armed city of Kobane from the assault by the jihadists, who are armed with heavy weaponry, on their own.

It seems most of the city’s 40,000 inhabitants have now fled. By taking Kobane the jihadists would gain control of the 900 kilometre road which skirts the Turko-Syrian border. The Kurds in Iraq and Turkey can only get to Kobane by passing through Turkey because the road to Iraq is controlled by Islamic State and Sunni tribes who are hostile to Baghdad.

Many Kurdish PKK fighters set out from their base in the Quandil mountains, in the north of Kurdistan, and headed for Turkey. Here they were arrested by the Turkish army and imprisoned in a gymnasium close to the Syrian border, where over a hundred of them went on hunger strike. Turkey permitted the passage of supply convoys but not weapons or combatants.

And Iraqi Kurdistan doesn’t seem that interested in the Kobane tragedy either. This is due to its close business links with Turkey, which is investing heavily in construction and the oil “stolen” from the Iraqi state (or what’s left of it), thanks to the complicity of the KDP and the PUK, which are dividing up the government of Iraqi Kurdistan and its huge reserves of oil amongst themselves. The KDP and the PUK might not see the PKK being crushed as altogether a bad thing!

The inertia of the Turkish State, despite being a member of NATO and an ally of the United States, is to be explained by the fact that it wants the westerners to bring down the Assad regime but would rather have the black flag of ISIS flying over Kobane than the banner of the PYD-PKK.

Turkish President Erdoğan has stated that Turkey refuses to intervene because both the PKK and ISIS represent a danger to the country, with ISIS opposing not only the Assad regime but also the PYD, a section of the PKK which has been fighting the Turkish government since 1984. He has nevertheless offered political and material support to the Syrian opposition abroad and allowed some of the rebel groups to run arms and fighters through Turkish territory, whilst also turning a blind eye to the thousands of Jihadist recruits also passing through Turkey to get to Syria. In fact the greater part of the arms, equipment and supplies destined for Islamic State and the other Islamist groups fighting Assad has been routed across the Turkish border. In fact Islamic State would be geographically encircled were it not for Turkish Anatolia.

But Erdoğan and his Islamist party, the AKP, considered, like the Muslim Brotherhood, as apostates by Islamic State, have shown they can use the stick as well as the carrot: at the beginning of 2014 the Turkish air-force bombed a jihadist convoy heading towards a city held by the rebels, and in early Spring the Turkish government cut, and then stopped off the flow of water entirely, of the Euphrates in its descent toward Syria, causing the electric turbines in the Tichrin dam, in an area controlled by Islamic State, to shut down. Turkey maybe hopes that Islamic State, once it has disposed of the PKK, will also free it of Assad. Or maybe, once Kobane has fallen and the PKK-PYD have been disposed of, they can get rid of Assad by sending their troops into Syria.

It seems the United States have already renounced the possibility of an intervention by their troops in Syria as it would be vetoed by Russia and China. This, however, could just be a means of exerting pressure on Russia over the vexed question of Ukraine. And the United States are also in discussion with Iran, with whom they want closer ties; but Teheran is against an intervention by land troops because it could undermine its influence in the region which, through Hamas, extends from Syria through Lebanon to Palestine.

As to providing the PKK troops defending Kobane with more effective weapons, everyone (the entire bourgeoisie, that is) has agreed not to. All that remains is to sweeten the pill: on the one hand the media describe an unequal battle in which the Iraqi and Syrian population is terrorised and martyred, with the women reduced to slavery and violated by the Jihadists who are not afraid to exhibit their macabre excesses on the internet, and thus provide a justification and explanation for the “humanitarian” interventions of the western countries; on the other hand the various diplomats make cautious and querulous declarations about “not wanting to aggravate the conflict” by sending in heavy weaponry or intervening with troops on the ground! But we know well from studying the history of warfare that international diplomacy doesn’t have many scruples about abandoning badly armed soldiers to hold back armies while diplomatic negotiations run their course! We recall, for example, the battles fought, with no hope of success, by the young French recruits at Dien Bien Phu in 1954!

Thus the Kurds in Kobane have been abandoned by everybody. In Belgium, France and Germany Kurds have held protests under the black flags of the PKK. In Turkey demonstrations in numerous cities, some very violent, have been harshly repressed and the number of protestors killed there is already in double figures. Curfews have been imposed by the Erdoğan government in six of the country’s provinces where Kurds are in the majority. From prison Öcalan has called on his followers to prepare for war. The PKK has announced that if the Kurds in Kobane are massacred it would end the ceasefire declared in March 2013, after decades of guerrilla warfare, and resume the armed struggle. On 13 October, after three days of attacks by the PKK on the security forces in the south-east of Turkey, Turkish planes bombed their positions.

Once again the Kurdish people are being used as cannon fodder in a covert war between the regional and global bourgeoisies. The Kurdish proletariat has everything to lose from this war. It can expect nothing from the Kurdish governments and parties, bourgeois and collaborationist as they are, except terror, attacks on their living conditions, and a general lack of humanity in their methods. It should join instead with proletariats elsewhere, overcoming religious and ethnic differences in order to wage a common struggle against capitalism, against its wars of plunder and against the terrorist monsters they generate.

But to struggle for communist society means to struggle against all forms of oppression. With the abolition of classes there will disappear not only class oppression, but also the oppression of women by men, and the oppression of one people by another people and of minorities.

Communism is not “the night in which all cows are grey”. For a long time, alongside one or more common languages shared by the human species (languages that will evolve and change with a tendency to merge), all of the different peoples will continue to speak their own languages and, along with a propensity towards international brotherhood, there will continue to be a great diversity of cultures, costumes and sensibilities.

The Kurdish proletariat has nothing to expect from the Kurdish governments and parties, who are bourgeois and collaborationist; nothing but terror, attacks against their working conditions and a general lack of humanity in the methods they use. Only class struggle, only union organisation led but the International Communist Party will allow the workers of the world to see through the present chaos, and to act before police truncheons and the military force of the State are used against them.