[Midden-Oosten] Michael Karadjis 1/2 - The Turkish invasion: Latest step in the Russian-led destruction of the Syrian revolution

[Jeff]

Part 1
The Turkish invasion: Latest step in the Russian-led destruction of the 
Syrian revolution

How Erdogan handed northeast Syria to the Assad regime without it firing 
a shot

https://mkaradjis.wordpress.com/2019/10/23/the-turkish-invasion-latest-step-in-the-russian-led-destruction-of-the-syrian-revolution/

By Michael Karadjis


On October 6, the Turkish regime of Tayyip Erdogan launched its 
long-heralded invasion of northeast Syria, aiming to expel the 
Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from a 30-kilometre border 
region, and then to dump some its 3.5 million Syrian refugees into 
territory from which the local population has been expelled. Erdogan’s 
deal with Russian president Putin consecrates a victory for both Erdogan 
and Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad, who will divide SDF-held territories 
between them.


Turkey and the Kurds

Turkey, along with Iran, Iraq and Syria, have long oppressed their 
Kurdish populations. In their resistance to Turkish oppression, the 
Kurdish people in southwest Turkey faced extraordinary state violence 
under the decades of military regimes, forcing them to take the path of 
armed struggle in the 1980s, led by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). 
Over the next two decades, some 40,000 people were killed, 
overwhelmingly by the Turkish state’s brutal counterinsurgency war.

However, the PKK, like many just struggles in the context of 
state-terror, also often operated in a ruthless fashion, earning it the 
same “terrorist” label as the Syrian rebels, the Palestinian resistance, 
the Irish freedom fighters and others in the oppressor’s discourse. Yet 
while ultra-hypocritical when this label is used by defenders of Turkish 
state-terror, the crimes of the PKK (including silencing rival Kurdish 
organisations) did contribute to its alienation from a much of the 
Turkish working class who are therefore more easily manipulated by state 
propaganda.

The main force in the SDF in Syria is the Democratic Union Party (PYD), 
the Syrian branch of the PKK, and its militia, the People’s Protection 
Units (YPG). The Syrian Kurds were brutally oppressed under the Assad 
dictatorship and hundreds of thousands denied citizenship. Although 
Turkey’s claim that the YPG-SDF represents a “threat” to Turkey’s 
security is laughably false – the YPG has never fired a shot across the 
border – it is true in the sense that the Kurdish autonomy achieved by 
the SDF in northeastern Syria is a “threat” via the example it sets for 
the Kurds in Turkey.


Just one part of the Syrian massacre …

This brutal aerial and land attack on the Kurdish and Arab civilian 
population is simply one more theatre of terror within the genocidal 
massacre that has engulfed Syria for 9 years, some 95 percent of which 
has been perpetrated by the fascistic dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, 
backed by his Russian imperialist masters who have joined Assad in 
raining death from the skies, and the death squads sent by the Iranian 
theocracy. Most of the remaining killing was carried out by ISIS and by 
the US bombing that helped the SDF drive ISIS from eastern Syria.

Indeed, the last 6 months of particularly brutal mass homicide and 
dispossession carried out by Assad and Russia in northwest Syria has 
been barely noticed by the international media; many seem to have only 
just noticed that Syrians are being bombed.


War crimes

Turkey’s aggression has driven at least 160,000 people from their homes, 
while Kurdish health authorities claim some 218 people have been killed 
as of mid-October. Although most media talk of the victims being Kurds, 
the region under SDF control is multi-ethnic, so the victims are Kurds, 
Arabs, Assyrians and others. The main theatre of the Turkish operation 
is the largely non-Kurdish region along the border between the mostly 
Arab city of Tal Abyad and the mixed Arab-Kurdish town of Rays 
al-Ayn/Serekanye. However, Turkish bombing has also targeted the SDF in 
heavily Kurdish cities like Kobani and Qamishli, killing and maiming 
dozens of civilians.

Serious war crimes have also been committed on the ground, more 
explicitly directed against Kurds. In its October 18 report, Amnesty 
International wrote that “Turkish military forces and a coalition of 
Turkey-backed Syrian armed groups have displayed a shameful disregard 
for civilian life, carrying out serious violations and war crimes, 
including summary killings and unlawful attacks that have killed and 
injured civilians.” The slaughter of Hevrin Khalaf of the Kurdish Future 
Party, followed by the filming of the desecration of her body, and this 
field execution of a young Kurdish man, are two cases of absolutely 
shameful and sadistic crimes. Just who these gangs are will be dealt 
with below.


Against all selective solidarities

Since Turkey’s invasion, three main responses have been heard from the 
non-Assadist left and progressive world (not that supporters of Assadist 
fascism and its racist White Russian ally can be considered left or 
progressive, but unfortunately such confusion currently exists).

First, we have the voices rightly condemning Turkey’s invasion, but 
coming from people and organisations who have never, or rarely, 
condemned the slaughter carried out by Assad/Russia/Iran, or expressed 
any solidarity with its victims. This is sometimes connected to extreme 
romanticisation of the SDF (itself sometimes linked to mainstream 
western selective solidarity with Kurds as opposed to Arabs), combined 
with an extraordinary level of (often Islamophobic) demonisation of all 
Syrian rebel currents. When Syrian people called for a No-Fly-Zone to 
protect them from Assad’s genocidal bombing, they were denounced by many 
western leftists as tools of western imperialism; yet when the SDF got 
the full-scale support of the US airforce for 5 years, many of the same 
people remained quiet or even supported it, and condemn the US for 
withdrawing; meanwhile, demonstrations condemning the Turkish invasion 
are calling for a No-Fly-Zone! This is highlighted by the complete 
silence of many over the last 6 months of the murderous aerial bombing 
of rebel-held Idlib by the Assad regime and Russia. Many Syrians who 
have watched the global left ignore their plight for 9 years find this 
nakedly selective solidarity unbearable.

Unfortunately, this leads to the mirror-image error among some Syrian 
oppositionists and their supporters: supporting the invasion. Part of 
this derives from Turkey’s past role as a strong supporter of the Syrian 
uprising (largely been abandoned as Erdogan became best mates with Putin 
around 2016), to Turkey being the recipient of 3.5 million refugees from 
Assad’s slaughterhouse (who Erdogan, now in alliance with his former 
opponents, the fascistic MHP, wants to dump back anywhere in Syria) and 
to the SDF’s own transgressions (which leads to wrongly demonising them 
as ‘Assadists’). But even if we were to grant all this without the 
provisos, what of basic solidarity with the civilian population fleeing 
in their tens of thousands? Has the Turkish regime, a historic oppressor 
of Kurds, come to “liberate” the Syrian Kurds from “SDF oppression”?

The third reaction is that of those who have stood in solidarity with 
the Syrian people against Assad for years and who now condemn Turkey’s 
attack from the point of view of consistent solidarity, “in solidarity 
with the civilians there and against the barbarian Turkish attacks 
against them,” in the words of Syrian revolutionary Firas Abdullah. As 
leading Syrian revolutionary and political prisoner under Assad, Yassin 
al-Haj Saleh, declared:

“The Turkish “Peace Spring” war is a continuation of the Assadi, 
Iranian, Russian, American and Israeli wars in Syria, and by no means a 
rupture with them. ِActually, it is a new spring of war and an 
additional tomb to the aspirations to a new viable Syria. The Syrian 
vassals of Turkey’s new war are in continuation of the Assadis and their 
protectors’ wars, not to the crushed revolution of Syrians. Not in our 
names, you scumbags!”

A global left and progressive movement is nothing if its solidarity 
cannot be consistent.


A little background

Arabs and Kurds in their tens of thousands joined mass rallies against 
Assad throughout northern Syria in 2011, but this solidarity came apart 
for a complex array of reasons that this article cannot do justice to. 
Political limitations of both the main Arab-led rebel and opposition 
groups, both secular-nationalist and Islamist and the Free Syrian Army 
(FSA) leadership, and of the main Kurdish groups, especially the 
PYD-YPG, derailed this unity against the regime.

While the Syrian revolution liberated significant parts of Syria from 
the regime, the PYD-YPG launched its own ‘Rojava revolution’ in the main 
Kurdish centres of northern Syria, which Assad withdrew from in order to 
focus on crushing the bigger revolution. While the Rojava project has 
been both romanticised and demonised, in brief it combines a number of 
highly progressive aspects with blemishes and limitations – as did other 
theatres of the Syrian revolution. It is both an act of Kurdish autonomy 
and the expression, whatever its problems, of the Kurdish people’s part 
of the broader revolution. However, the PYD-YPG never saw it that way, 
and it stood aloof from the conflict between regime and rebels from the 
outset. These divisions ultimately opened both rebel and Kurdish 
leaderships up to increasing pressures by the various outside powers 
intervening in Syria with their own agendas, including Turkey, Russia, 
the US, Iran and the Gulf states.

Turkey became one of the main backers of the FSA and the Syrian rebels, 
especially since Assad’s savagery drove 3.5 million refugees into 
Turkey; but this also allowed Turkey to pressure its rebel allies with 
its anti-Kurdish agenda. Meanwhile, when the US entered the war against 
ISIS in 2014, it chose the YPG as its ground partner, despite the Syrian 
rebels also being at war with ISIS; the US wanted them to fight ISIS 
only and not the Assad regime, whereas the rebels fought both. The SDF 
was formed by the YPG with a number of small Arab rebel groups who 
agreed to this US demand. This led to increasing conflict between Turkey 
and the US, and Turkey turned increasingly towards a diplomatic track 
with Russia and Iran, despite being on opposite sides within Syria.

Trump’s precipitous withdrawal from northeast Syria and betrayal of the 
US’s SDF allies in the face of Turkey’s threat to invade may have been 
partially aimed at patching up this US-Turkish rift, but as explained 
below, this move was at odds with most of the US ruling class.


The deal: A Putin-sponsored partition of Rojava between Assad and Turkey

It was fairly clear from early in the  conflict what was happening: the 
territory controlled by the SDF (the North Syria Federation, often 
called ‘Rojava’) was being divided between Turkey and the Assad regime; 
the master of ceremonies is Vladimir Putin, who is tightly allied to 
both Assad and Erdogan. But anyone not convinced only had to wait for 
the historic Russia-Turkey agreement which came out of the Putin-Erdogan 
meeting of October 22.

Map of Russia Turkey agreement
Source: https://twitter.com/CizireCanton/status/1186733201437409284


The partition looks like this:

*    Turkey gets to keep its troops in the largely Arab-populated border 
strip between the mainly Arab city of Tal Abyad, east to the smaller, 
mixed Arab-Kurdish town of Ras al-Ayn (Serekanye), to a depth of 30 
kilometres.
*    Assad regime and Russian troops will control the rest of the 
northeast border, both to the west (Kobane, Manbij) and east (Qamishli, 
Hasake) of this Turkish-occupied section, clearing the SDF away from the 
border to a depth of 30 kilometres, already consecrated under the deal 
the SDF earlier made with the regime; thus the regime will control all 
the main Kurdish population centres, as well as the non-Kurdish Raqqa 
region further south.
*    Once the SDF is expelled, Turkish and Russian troops (representing 
the regime) will patrol a 10-kilometre border zone along the northeast 
border, outside of the Turkish-controlled zone.
*    Both sides reaffirm the importance of the Adana Agreement, ie, the 
1998 agreement between Turkey and Syria allowing Turkey to temporarily 
enter Syria when in pursuit of “terrorists.” Turkey thereby essentially 
recognises the Assad regime.

Just to make things clear, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov told the 
SDF that if it did not withdraw from the border region, Syrian borders 
guards and Russian military police would withdraw and leave the Kurds to 
be dealt with by Turkey. The Assad regime welcomed the agreement and 
blamed “separatists” for the crisis.

Now for the detail. While Turkish and allied militia war crimes have 
been directed against Kurds and the operation is anti-Kurdish in intent 
(and the pillaging and ethnic cleansing of Kurdish Afrin following 
Turkey’s 2018 invasion makes the current prospects clear enough for the 
Kurds), the region Turkey has conquered – and that it will be restricted 
to – is largely non-Kurdish, as these maps demonstrate:

Map: 
https://mkaradjis.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/screenshot-286.png?w=648&h=384

The ease with which Turkey walked into Tal Abyad, with little 
resistance, may be simply explained by the SDF regrouping its forces, or 
to the SDF not having the base of support among the city’s Arab 
population that it claimed to have. Moreover, at least some of the 
“rebels” entering Tal Abyad with Turkey are from the Arab refugee 
population that was uprooted by the SDF during its conquest in 2015, who 
have been across the Turkish border in refugee camps ever since, unable 
to return.

There was much more resistance in Ras al-Ayn, given its larger Kurdish 
population; but the SDF has now evacuated it under the US-Turkish 
‘ceasefire’ agreement signed five days before the far more significant 
Russia-Turkish agreement. Hence the only real confrontation – and the 
only significant SDF loss of ethnically Kurdish territory to Turkey – is 
this town bordering the two zones. Other than Ras al-Ayn, the SDF early 
made a full withdrawal from the Turkish-controlled segment.

According to the deal the SDF signed with the regime, “the SAA will be 
present in the entire region east and north of the Euphrates and in 
coordination with local military councils, while the area between Ras al 
Ayn and Tell Abyad stays as an unstable combat zone until it is 
liberated.” The Russia-Turkey agreement simply consecrated this.

Assadist and Russian forces had already moved into Manbij, as the US 
gently handed over its facilities there to Russia, even assisting 
Russian forces navigating the area (despite its largely Arab population 
and the previous US-Turkish agreement for joint patrols in the city). 
Russian forces were placed between the Turkish and Assadist militaries 
near Manbij.

Next door, the US told Erdogan Kobani is off limits, and Assadist forces 
entered the town (here we see US and Assadist forces passing each other 
along the road, in and out of Kobani). Assadist forces have also 
deployed south, in the Raqqa region; and in the heavily Kurdish region 
to the east of Ras al-Ayn (including Qamishle, Hasake etc), the regime 
will beef up its forces who have always remained present in two small 
bases.


The US-Turkish ‘ceasefire’ farce

What then of the earlier US-Turkish “ceasefire” deal signed by US 
Vice-President Pence and Erdogan on October 17? The text called for a 
“safe zone” to be “mostly” patrolled by Turkish troops, and the 
evacuation of the SDF from the border region. It appeared to hand Turkey 
everything it wants, and was rightly denounced as a sham and a betrayal, 
including by the leadership of the US Democratic Party and many 
Republicans. Even the “ceasefire” part was not respected by Turkey which 
has continued to bomb Ras al-Ayn.

In reality, however, this was largely a media stunt to save face for 
Trump and the US. The Syrian regime declared it “vague”, adding, 
ominously for the SDF, that it will never accept “another Iraqi 
Kurdistan in Syria”, and even the SDF accepted the ceasefire.

The main betrayal was handing over Ras al-Ayn to Turkey while the SDF 
was still resisting. Beyond that, however, the statement omitted any 
definition of the length of depth of this “safe zone”. Though Pence 
stated his acceptance of Turkey’s definition of the zone as 30 
kilometres deep, Turkey’s absurd claim for this to extend all 444 
kilometres along the border, from Manbij to the Iraqi border, was 
rejected by the US. US Special Envoy, James Jeffrey defined the safe 
zone “as the areas where Turkey was now operating, down 30 km in a 
central part of Northeast Syria,” that is, the 100 kilometres (of 
largely non-Kurdish territory) between Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ayn. He said 
that beyond that, “the Turks have their own discussions going on with 
the Russians and the Syrians in other areas of the northeast”.

In other words, the US-Turkish agreement simply affirmed the existing 
unofficial Putin-led, Erdogan-Assad partition of the region, accepted by 
the SDF, now official in the Russia-Turkey agreement. The part of the 
agreement about the SDF being removed from the entire border, not just 
the limited “safe zone” part, will be taken care of by the Assad regime 
entering the region. The Pence mission and statement therefore was 
nothing but a meaningless face-saver for the US after Trump’s bungle, 
allowing it to claw back a little credibility and pretend to look 
important where Putin controls all levers.


Erdogan: Go Assad!

Is this a defeat for Erdogan? It may look like he has led Turkey into a 
trap only to get crumbs. After all, the US and Turkey had theoretically 
already established a “safe zone” along the entire border east of Manbij 
to the Iraqi border, from which the SDF had begun withdrawing. The SDF 
had accepted a 5-kilometre zone along most of the border, and 9-14 
kilometres between Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn. Turkey invaded because it 
wasn’t satisfied with this. While the zone between Tal Abyad and Ras 
al-Ayn will now be 30 kilometres deep, all the rest of the border goes 
to Assad, and while the zone within this where Turkish patrols are 
allowed extends from 5 to 10 kilometres, this is shared with Russia 
(representing Assad) rather than the US.

But really, does Turkey want to get bogged down fighting a guerrilla war 
in Kurdish population centres? Perhaps the aim was always for Assad to 
take the rest from the SDF.

Erdogan has repeatedly made clear that he has no problem as long as the 
Assad regime, rather than the SDF, controls the border; “the regime 
entering Manbij is not very negative for me. It’s their lands after all 
… what is important is that the terrorist organisation does not remain 
there,” Erdogan said. Erdogan said his operation would end once Russia 
or the Assad regime clears the border of the “terrorists.” Indeed, he 
made exactly the same statement last year when Assadist forces first 
moved nearby the Manbij region. Meanwhile, the Syrian and Turkish 
regimes have been in covert contact via Moscow throughout this campaign.


The SDF-Assad deal

Russia negotiated the SDF-Assad deal several days after Turkey’s 
invasion, allowing the regime to enter SDF territory to “defend its 
borders” against Turkey; Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov explained that 
Russia’s goal is that “all Kurdish organizations in Syria are woven into 
the country’s legal framework and constitution, so that there are no 
illegal armed units in Syria,” and thus pose no threat to Turkey, whose 
legitimate interests securing its border Russia recognises. Putin’s 
greenlight to Erdogan – more explicit than Trump’s – had the 
understanding from the outset that this would force the SDF under 
Assad’s wing.

It is futile arguing about whether the SDF made the right decision. It 
is true that the PYD/YPG has always had an opportunistic policy towards 
the regime, abstained from the anti-Assad uprising, and were always 
prepared for deals with Assad, Russia or the US. Sometimes this was 
about survival (eg, the US aid as ISIS advanced on Kobane in 2014), in 
other cases lust for territorial conquest (eg its Russian 
airforce-backed conquest of the rebel-held northern Aleppo region in 
early 2016). Completely dependent on the US, facing a precipitous US 
withdrawal, some deal with the devil was mathematically inevitable once 
Turkey launched its brutal invaded. The SDF and Rojava will be crushed 
in the Erdogan/Assad vice.

Beyond the entry of Assadist troops, the real outcome remains a matter 
of interpretation, with SDF spokespeople suggesting they will still have 
full internal control. Assad can temporarily pose as the “softer” 
alternative for the Kurds, allowing some limited autonomy to remain 
temporarily, to facilitate entry into SDF territory without conflict 
while the situation elsewhere remains unstable for the regime. But when 
all is done, Assad will finish the job of crushing all autonomy, as the 
regime has long promised. Even while doing the deal, Assad regime 
officials lambasted the SDF as traitors to Syria, making clear what 
their prospects are.

(continued)