Syria’s Kurds: The new frontline in confronting Iran and Turkey
By James M. Dorsey
US President Donald J.
Trump’s threat to devastate Turkey’s economy if Turkish troops
attack Syrian Kurds allied with the United States in the wake of the announced
withdrawal of American forces potentially serves his broader goal of letting
regional forces fight for common goals like countering Iranian influence in
Syria.
Mr. Trump’s threat coupled with a call on Turkey to create a
26-kilometre buffer zone to protect Turkey from a perceived Kurdish threat was
designed to pre-empt a Turkish strike against the People’s Protection Units
(YPG) that Ankara asserts is part of the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK),
a Turkish group that has waged a low-intensity war in predominantly Kurdish
south-eastern Turkey for more than three decades.
Like Turkey, the United States and Europe have designated
the PKK as a terrorist organization.
Turkey has been marshalling forces for an attack on the YPG
since Mr. Trump’s announced withdrawal of US forces. It would be the
third offensive against Syrian Kurds in recent years.
In a sign of strained relations with Saudi Arabia, Turkish
media with close ties to the government have been reporting long before the
October 2 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in
Istanbul that Saudi Arabia is funding the YPG. There is no independent
confirmation of the Turkish allegations.
Yeni Safak reported in 2017, days after the Gulf crisis
erupted pitting a Saudi-UAE-Egyptian alliance against Qatar, which is supported
by Turkey, that US, Saudi,
Emirati and Egyptian officials had met with the PKK as well as the Democratic
Union Party (PYD), which Turkey says is the Syrian political wing of
the PKK, to discuss the future of Syrian oil once the Islamic State had been
defeated.
Turkey’s semi-official Anadolu Agency reported last May that
Saudi
and YPG officials had met to discuss cooperation. Saudi Arabia
promised to pay Kurdish fighters that joined an Arab-backed force US$ 200 a
month, Anadolu said. Saudi Arabia allegedly sent aid to the YPG on trucks that
travelled through Iraq to enter Syria.
In August last year, Saudi
Arabia announced that it had transferred US$ 100 million to the United States
that was earmarked for agriculture, education, roadworks, rubble removal and
water service in areas of north-eastern Syria that are controlled by the
US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces of which the YPG is a significant part.
Saudi Arabia said the payment, announced on the day that US
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in the kingdom, was intended to fund stabilization
of areas liberated from control by the Islamic State.
Turkish media, however, insisted
that the funds would flow to the YPG.
“The delivery of $100 million is considered as the latest
move by Saudi Arabia in support of the partnership between the U.S. and YPG.
Using the fight against Daesh as a pretext, the U.S. has been cooperating with
the YPG in Syria and providing arms support to the group. After Daesh was
cleared from the region with the help of the U.S., the YPG tightened its grip
on Syrian soil taking advantage of the power vacuum in the war-torn country,”
Daily Sabah said referring to the Islamic State by one of its Arabic acronyms.
Saudi Arabia has refrained
from including the YPG and the PKK on its extensive list of terrorist
organizations even though then foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir
described in 2017 the Turkish organization as a “terror group.”
This week’s Trump threat and his earlier vow to stand by the
Kurds despite the troop withdrawal gives Saudi Arabia and other Arab states such
as the United Arab Emirates and Egypt political cover to support the Kurds as a
force against Iran’s presence in Syria.
It also allows the kingdom and the UAE to attempt to thwart
Turkish attempts to increase its regional influence. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and
Egypt have insisted
that Turkey must withdraw its troops from Qatar as one of the
conditions for the lifting of the 18-month old diplomatic and economic boycott
of the Gulf state.
The UAE, determined to squash any expression of political
Islam, has long led the autocratic Arab charge against Turkey because of its
opposition to the 2013 military coup in Egypt that toppled Mohammed Morsi, a
Muslim Brother and the country’s first and only democratically elected
president; Turkey’s close relations with Iran and Turkish support for Qatar and
Islamist forces in Libya.
Saudi Arabia the UAE and Egypt support General Khalifa
Haftar, who commands anti-Islamist forces in eastern Libya while Turkey
alongside Qatar and Sudan supports the Islamists.
Libyan
and Saudi
media reported that authorities had repeatedly intercepted Turkish arms
shipments destined for Islamists, including one this month and another last
month. Turkey has denied the allegations.
“Simply put, as Qatar has become the go-to financier of the
Muslim Brotherhood and its more radical offshoot groups around the globe, Turkey
has become their armorer,” said Turkey scholar Michael Rubin.
Ironically, the fact that various Arab states, including the
UAE and Bahrain, recently reopened their embassies in Damascus with tacit Saudi
approval after having supported forces aligned against Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad for much of the civil war, like Mr. Trump’s threat to devastate the
Turkish economy, makes Gulf support for the Kurds more feasible.
Seemingly left in the cold by the US president’s announced
withdrawal of American forces, the YPG has sought to forge relations with the
Assad regime. In response, Syria
has massed troops near the town of Manbij, expected to be the
flashpoint of a Turkish offensive.
Commenting on last year’s two-month long Turkish campaign
that removed Kurdish forces from the Syrian town of Afrin and Turkish
efforts since to stabilize the region, Gulf scholar Giorgio Cafiero
noted that “for the
UAE, Afrin represents a frontline in the struggle against Turkish expansionism
with respect to the Arab world.”
The same could be said from a Saudi and UAE perspective for
Manbij not only with regard to Turkey but also Iran’s presence in Syria.
Frontlines and tactics may be shifting, US and Gulf geopolitical goals have
not.
Dr. James
M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International
Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture,
and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast.
James is the author of The Turbulent World
of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored
volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and
the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting
Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa
and just published China
and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom
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