Up north the Kurds have carved out a proto state of their own which they call Rojava. It is being violently squeezed by ISIS from the south, and it’s jammed up against the wall of the Turkish border to the north. It is split into three besieged non-contiguous cantons, the most endangered of which is based around the city of Kobani.
Yet Syrian Kurdistan, spliced and diced though it may be, stubbornly continues existing.
ISIS says Rojava is an atheist entity that must be destroyed. Turkey says it’s a left-wing terrorist state that must at least be resisted.
The United States quietly considers Rojava an ally.
Darius Bazargan produced a short documentary about Kurdish Syria for the BBC’s Our World called Rojava: Syria’s Secret Revolution, where we see Commander Redur Khalil, spokesman for the armed forces: If the American and European plans are to succeed, he says, “they will need allies on the ground.” He and his people are it. There is no one else.
Their ideology is quasi-Marxist, which is hardly ideal, but it’s vastly preferable to the Assad regime and ISIS. At the very least it ensures there is no religious repression. Women, men, and people from all religious backgrounds—secular or otherwise—have the same rights. Apostates from Islam and converts to Christianity face no persecution. Jews wouldn’t suffer much either if there were many around. An Israeli woman recently volunteered to fight alongside them and she is most welcome. Rojava is also not a ethnocracy. Arabs live there too, and many fight in the armed forces against ISIS.
The quasi-Marxism of the proto state’s leaders may be a potential problem for the region’s long-term prosperity, but it poses no threat to the West whatsoever and is likely just a transition phase anyway.
Bazargan says two million people make up the area. Terry Glavin reports in the Ottawa Citizen that the refugee crisis has swollen the population to a bursting 4.6 million. No one can really know for sure what the number is. Some of the refugees may return to where they came from at some point, or they might continue to swell and become permanent.
The Turks are supremely unhappy about this. Roughly a fourth of Turkey’s own population is Kurdish. The nightmare scenario, from Ankara’s point of view, is an independent Turkish Kurdistan and a loss of even more post-Ottoman territory. But the human right of self-determination is not contingent on whether or not Turks find it convenient.
Turkey is nominally an American ally, but it steadfastly refuses to help in any meaningful way whatsoever. The Kurdish entity known as Rojava doesn’t even exist on the map, but it’s a better ally than the one Middle Eastern nation in NATO.
The Kurds can’t possibly extinguish the Islamic State or the Assad regime, but given enough support and time they may be able to carve out a functioning contiguous autonomous region with secure borders like the one that already exists in Iraq.
Making it so should be the first order of business for American foreign policy in Syria. It would make a clear definable objective and help keep ISIS in a box for the time being.
Saving or fixing all of Syria is impossible, but a partial victory is better than nothing. If you doubt this, consider how Seoul would look today if North Korea had swallowed the south at the end of the Korean War.
What’s happening in Syria is an echo of what happened in Iraq during the 1990s and 2000s. The Kurds first broke away from Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian rule, then shored up their defenses against Al Qaeda in Iraq, the precursor to ISIS that the Kurds in Syria are facing today.
What the Kurds achieved in Iraq is permanent. Never again will that region be lorded over by Baghdad. Its independence from Iraq has been achieved in all but name. It’s a fait accompli. Nor will ISIS ever control it. The Kurds will fight ISIS with kitchen knives and even their own teeth if they have to.
Rojava’s leaders publicly say they don’t want to partition Syria, but only because it’s the safe thing to say. The Turks might invade otherwise. It’s Washington’s job to guarantee the Kurds their safety and freedom and to make it clear to Turkey that if it invades and fights on the wrong side of this war that its membership in NATO would be in serious jeopardy.
There is nothing holy about borders in the Middle East or anywhere else. Kosovo recently broke off from Serbia. Scotland nearly split from the United Kingdom earlier this year. Abkhazia told Georgia to sod off. Almost everyone on earth thinks the Palestinians will have their own state in the West Bank and Gaza at some point.
The only plausible things standing in the way of a permanent de-facto independent Kurdish state called Rojava at this point are ISIS, the Assad regime, and the Turks. Two of those three will eventually cease to exist.
There can be no peace in the Eastern Mediterranean until the Assad regime and the ISIS are both erased from the face of the earth, but the Kurdish regions can be saved and strengthened right now and used as beachheads—or at the very least buffer zones—in the future.
Postscript: My new book, Tower of the Sun: Stories from the Middle East and North Africa, will be released later this week. You can pre-order the Kindle version right now for just 7.99 and it will be automatically delivered to you on Thursday.
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