Turkey’s decade-long belligerency with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad dictatorship appears to be approaching a denouement, leaving Turkey and the United States at loggerheads over Kurdish militants’ fate in northern Syria. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, supported the ill-fated Arab Spring uprising against Assad and led a faction of Syrian opposition forces to overthrow the brutal dictator.
Recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin had a phone conversation with his Turkish counterpart and signaled that he’s making progress in pushing for meetings between lower-level Turkish and Syrian officials, and finally between the presidents of the two countries.
Erdogan had wanted to launch a ground offensive against the Kurdish militants in northern Syria, whom Ankara views as anti-Turkish terrorists. Russia, and especially the United States, opposed his move. The Biden administration has warned the Turks sternly against any land invasion against the Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG) because the U.S. has been using the Kurdish militia to fight Islamic State terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
Ankara considers the YPG a branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been fighting Turkish armed forces for 38 years to carve out an independent Kurdish statelet in the Kurdish-majority southeastern Turkey. The United States and the European Union, too, brand the PKK a terrorist organization. So America, Turkey’s NATO ally, is hard-pressed to explain the YPG’s links to the PKK, and hence, in 2015, gave the Kurdish militant group a civilian façade. It got the YPG to rename itself Kurdish Democratic Forces (SDF) and had some Arabs enrolled in the organization.
In Turkey, “the Kurdish problem” seems intractable. During three research trips, I found out that many Kurds there want wide “autonomy” for Turkey’ Kurdish-majority area. They grumble about Turkish “persecution” of Kurds and suppression of their cultural rights. Kurdish intellectuals also castigate the “betrayal” by Western powers who, at the end of World War I, had promised them a state of their own but later reneged on it and split their territory among four states, including Turkey and Syria.
Among everyday Turks, anti-Kurdish sentiments run high, mainly because of continual Kurdish terrorist attacks. Six Turkish opposition parties have forged an alliance known as the “Table of Six” to challenge Erdogan and his party at the elections set for June, but they all support Erdogan’s plan to drive the YPG militants out of a 30-kilometer Syrian strip on the Turkish border. They know opposing his fight against the YPG would be politically suicidal.
In August 1998 Erdogan, just fired as mayor of Istanbul, told me in one of my interviews, that the Kurdish problem stemmed from ultra-liberal Turkish governments’ insensitivity to the Kurds’ “cultural rights.” It could be resolved in an atmosphere of Islamic “brotherhood,” said the deposed Istanbul mayor, then an Islamist activist. He was packing his belongings in cardboard boxes to leave the mayor’s office and prepare to go to prison. He had been given a 10-month sentence (commuted later to four months) by a secularist court for reciting an Islamic poem at a public meeting.
In 2012, as Turkish prime minister, Erdogan engaged Kurdish militants in a “peace process.” After three years of arduous negotiations, he stopped the talks, realizing, he said, that the Kurdish militants won’t give up on their secessionist plans.
Biden has been openly hostile to Erdogan since before coming into the White House. He apparently shares many other Americans’ and Europeans’ antipathy for Erdogan because of his long association with Islamists, although the Turkish leader has since dissociated from the Islamists and leads a secular conservative political party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP).
During the 2020 U.S. presidential election campaign, Biden denounced Erdogan as an “autocrat” and proposed that the United States help Turkish opposition parties “take on and defeat Erdogan” at the next Turkish presidential election.
Erdogan is unlikely to back down on his widely publicized plans to drive the YPG militants out of a Syrian “security belt” along the Turkish border, especially in an election year. A peace deal between Ankara and Damascus could facilitate his plan. But Erdogan’s brazen defiance of U.S. warnings against an assault on the YPG would enrage Biden, and probably NATO. There’s speculation in Washington that Biden administration could then try to kick Turkey out of NATO. Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are already calling for it.
Without Muslim Turkey, though, NATO would overtly become the military arm of the white-Christian West. In that case, China would be spreading its security umbrella over much of the rest of the world. Chinese President Xi Jinping has just returned from a significant trip to Saudi Arabia, after calling for an “independent Palestinian state.”
Would Biden want to rip the world into two rival armed camps? And would other NATO members go along with it? I’m hoping to see cooler minds nudging him and Erdogan back from the precipice.
- Mustafa Malik is an American researcher and retired journalist, who conducted fieldwork in Turkey and five European countries as a journalism fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He researched the outlook for Turkey’s accession to the European Union.
