A Briefing on The Complexities of the Kurdish Landscape in the Middle East

ETHNIC KURDS

The Kurdish Peshmerga, many of them veterans, are spearheading the defence against IS militants in Iraq.

Conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Turkey have unleashed a tangle of political and military organisations among the Kurds. This is an article concerning who’s who in a struggle that is shaping the Middle East.

Up to 35 million ethnic Kurds are spread across Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran and are at the forefront of multiple conflicts reshaping the Middle East. In Syria and Iraq, US-backed Kurdish forces are leading the fight against the so-called “Islamic State” (IS).

However, “the Kurds” are riven by intra-Kurdish rivalries both within their respective states and across greater Kurdistan. As the United States backs Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, it has found itself in the middle of these rivalries and at odds with NATO ally Turkey.

The main intra-Kurdish fault line is between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – and its affiliates – and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) led by Masoud Barzani, the president of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq (KRG).

A divided Kurdish quasi-state

The KRG has many characteristics of a state – an executive, legislature, judiciary and security forces – all recognised under the Iraqi constitution’s federalist structure. The United States, as well as European states including Germany, provide assistance to their long-time Iraqi Kurdish allies.

However, the Iraqi Kurdish army, known as peshmerga, or “those who face death,” are not united under the same command even though they cooperate. Barzani’s KDP and its main political rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), each have separate peshmerga forces.

The PUK is closer to the PKK, the Iraqi central government and Iran. These rivalries play out in Syria and with Turkey, which is close to Barzani and his KDP.

US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces

In Syria, the United States backs the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with weapons, airstrikes and about 900 Special Forces. Considered the best fighters against IS, the SDF is a roughly 50,000 strong force composed of Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen and Christian militia. It was formed in 2015 with US encouragement and in part to address Turkey’s concerns over the dominance of the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

The YPG and the all-female Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) are the armed wings of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a left-leaning Kurdish political party in Syria. Together they make up about half of the SDF.

Kurdistan Communities Union

The PYD, in turn, is a part of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), a pan-national umbrella political group established in 2005 by Kurdish parties. Alongside the PYD, the KCK comprises the PKK, the Iranian branch Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK) and the much smaller Iraqi affiliate, Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party (PCDK).

The KCK and its subset political parties are composed of various political, social and military subunits. They subscribe to the ideology of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has been in a Turkish prison since his capture in 1999.

Though Ocalan continues to be the PKK’s nominal head, the de-facto leader of KCK is its co-chair, Cemil Bayik, one of the five founders of the PKK and a top leader of the group.

The PKK has carried out a nearly four-decade long armed struggle against the Turkish state resulting in the death of about 40,000 people. Turkey, the United States and European Union consider the PKK a terrorist organisation.

Turkey considers the YPG/PYD, as well as the SDF terrorist organisations for their ties to the PKK. This view stems in part from the fact that from the 1980s to late 1990s, the PKK and Ocalan operated out of Syria and Lebanon with the support of former Syrian President Hafiz Assad.

Syria kicked out the PKK in 1998 after Turkey threatened to invade, but then essentially handed over parts of northern Syria to the PYD shortly after the onset of the Syria civil war in 2011.

PKK under a different name?

The PKK and PYD deny that they have organic organisational ties. The PKK and PYD say they have a different substructure, command and ultimately different goals in their respective countries, Turkey and Syria, given the different political situation in each with regards to the Kurds.

Unlike the PKK, which primarily fights the Turkish state, the PYD/YPG is focused on fighting IS and on occasion Turkish-backed Syria rebel groups. The PYD/YPG has not sided with Assad, with whom they have a tacit understanding. It also has not aligned with either Islamist rebel factions or Turkish-backed opposition, saying it has no designs on Turkey and wants to avoid conflict.

But the YPG counts hundreds of Turkish Kurds within its ranks, including PKK fighters who transferred to the fight in Syria. The PKK has traditionally drawn about a third of its fighters from Syria, raising further questions over its links to the YPG.

Meanwhile, the United States has said it sees enough difference between the PYD and terrorist-categorised PKK to back the YPG and SDF units fighting in Syria. And, as that relationship has grown over the past two plus years, the PYD/YPG has sought to publicly distance itself from the PKK.

What binds the PKK and PYD, they say, is an adherence to Ocalan’s Marxist-Leninist ideology and a shared desire to beat back jihadist forces. Ocalanism incorporates women’s rights, human rights, environmentalism, communalism and ”democratic autonomy,” a grassroots form of federal governance viewed by its followers as a model for democracy in Middle East.

This political model contrasts with that in Iraqi Kurdistan led by Barzani. There, the system is based on family and tribal ties, crony capitalism and patron-client relationships.

Facts on the ground

Off the battlefield, the PYD has set up an autonomous political structure based on Ocalan’s ideas in areas under its control in northern Syria, known as Rojava. By creating facts on the ground, the PYD hopes to bolster Kurdish political claims in any future settlement in Syria.

Turkey fears Syrian Kurdish gains will embolden its own Kurdish population and create a PKK statelet on its southern border. This has created strains in Ankara’s relations with Washington, including setting up the prospect that Turkey could clash directly with the United States in one of the many attacks it has carried out against the YPG.

A sustained conflict between the SDF/YPG and Turkey would undermine a key US goal, namely defeating IS and rooting it out of its self-declared capital Raqqa.

The PYD’s detractors, including other smaller Syrian Kurdish parties, accuse it of monopolising power and repressing dissent. They also accuse it of allying with the Assad regime.

As a result, Barzani’s KDP has supported other Syrian Kurdish factions and, similar to Turkey, implemented a border embargo over PYD controlled areas, fuelling intra-Kurdish tensions.

The next conflict

Adding to those tensions, the PKK has created armed units among the ethno-religious Yezidi population in Iraq in their heartland around Sinjar to defend against IS. These Yezidi units pose a direct challenge to Barzani, whom many Yezidis accuse of abandoning them to genocide when IS swept through in 2014.

For the PKK, Sinjar is strategic geography. With the retreat of IS, Sinjar will provide the PKK with a potential land corridor and transportation hub linking Syria to the Kurdish group’s headquarters in Qandil. This route would cut south of KDP controlled areas, through Iraqi government territory and onto friendlier PUK dominant territory in the eastern part of the KRG.

Turkey seeks to prevent the PKK from establishing a second headquarters based in Sinjar. To this end, it bombed Sinjar last month and has threatened a military operation to root out the PKK from the area.

The bloody shambles in Iraq…

IRAQ

Amid the despicable violence and rising tide of horror stories emanating from Iraq, there seems to be little constructive thought emerging from Western politicians on how to solve the political and humanitarian issues that are directly confronting the country.

Politicians have become like panic-stricken rabbits caught in the headlights of an oncoming motor vehicle. What is more, they do not appear to know which way to go.

The one thing that they do know is that something must be done in curbing the barbaric savagery and advances of the Islamic State (IS). Developing a viable and effective strategy, however, against the brutal campaign of the IS has, so far, clearly been beyond their competence.

Many military commentators and strategists will strongly believe that military intervention must be instigated only as a matter of last resort. Many of them did oppose the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but the cold-blooded murder of an American photojournalist, James Foley, this week, along with the Islamic State’s continued genocidal attempts to extinguish religious minorities, will have made many to believe that there is now a powerful and practical moral case for intervening against the insurgents of IS.

What the world is witnessing is the terrible and awful consequences of the so-called Arab Spring, so naively celebrated by almost all Western leaders just a few months ago.

Many people who have watched and read news reports from this embattled and disintegrating region will be aghast and mortified as events have unfolded. Intervention must now be given a high political priority to protect the lives of Iraqis and to restrain the rising and rapacious tide of the Islamic State.

Some western interventions in the past have proved highly successful and were no-doubt of an enormous benefit to civilians caught up in war torn countries. For any intervention to succeed there must be clear direction from the politicians. Sadly, though, this is distinctly lacking within Iraq as the West’s leaders seem to stumbling over themselves as they try to configure exactly what they want to achieve.

Given our recent involvement in two bloody and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq we should have grave fears that western politicians do not have a clear idea of what form such military intervention should now take. For it is imperative that before we even consider sending so much as one British soldier back to Iraq, our government strategists must decide with absolute clarity and precision the objective of the mission.

They must commit sufficient resources to ensure the job is done with as little risk as is possible to the lives of those who are sent to a land that is fraught with danger. If our intervention is based on half-thought-through plans and weak intelligence, this risks not only further treasure being plundered in terms of financial resources and human lives expended but could embroil us in another almighty mess of a war.

Any ill-conceived plan would be both dangerous for our already depleted military and, in the longer term, precarious for Britain’s standing on the world stage.

Crucially, any cogent plan must involve our intelligence services providing the information on which highly-targeted and heavy air strikes can be launched. The success of these should mean that few boots will be required on the ground and that our involvement be over in a matter of months.

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As the situation deteriorates in Iraq, the country where the current unravelling of security across the Middle East started with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, we owe it to the Iraqis to halt the advance of extremists and then help to restore peace and order.

Furthermore, our credibility in the West depends on us doing something more than just launching pin-prick air strikes or dropping bags of rice to help the thousands of innocent people caught up in this appalling civil war.

We have faced similar problems before, most notably in Afghanistan in 2001 when the Americans, supported by the British, launched a highly successful campaign against the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist group that had ruled the country for five years.

At the time, the Taliban were as brutal and powerful as the Islamic State are today and they, too, wanted to drag the country back to 7th Century-style rule.

But, within just six weeks, the US-led invasion, which had the simple objective to eliminate the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, had been successfully completed.

The strategic key to this successful campaign was that much of the fighting on the ground was not done by Western forces but by Afghans themselves.

The U.S. and UK restricted their military involvement to providing intelligence, air power and Special Forces on the ground, who worked alongside local people.

Unfortunately, military success in toppling the Taliban was not followed up by any coherent plan, and President George W. Bush transferred his attention, along with most military and economic resources, away from Afghanistan to Iraq.

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Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein we must learn from our failings.

In 2007, an insurgency by Sunni extremists threatened to overwhelm the country. Washington realised that the only way to prevent civil war was to gain the support of the country’s Sunni minority by making the Shia-run government include them in Iraq’s political process.

And so, with that bipartisan approach, the U.S. cleverly set about winning the support of the Sunni tribal leaders and helped to arm their militias.

Yet, today’s Western leaders seem unable to learn from that experience nor understand the basic principles that could lead to any kind of stability in Iraq. Unless the Sunnis feel involved in the political process, there will never be peace in the country.

With this in mind, the key to any solution now is for the West to offer military support to the Sunni tribal leaders, who, in return, must dissociate themselves wholesale from the Islamic State. This could well materialise as the majority of Sunnis have been alienated by the organisation’s fundamentalism and extreme brutality.

The fact is that the Islamic State, which is tactically exposed and lacks both sustainability and popular support, is no match for a combination of U.S. intelligence, close combat air support and Special Forces operating on the ground, who would work with local militias.

As we see, the present, albeit somewhat limited, U.S. military intervention is already demonstrating what can be done in the north of Iraq. Not only have the insurgents been halted in their advance towards the Kurdish capital of Irbil but the strategically important Mosul Dam and several villages have now been recaptured by the Kurdish Peshmerga with the help of U.S. air strikes.

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The question for strategists is whether Barack Obama and David Cameron can get their act together by setting clear objectives – and, most crucially promise the Iraqi people that they won’t be abandoned in the same way the Afghans were in 2001. If such objectives can be set then there is every chance that the terrorist organisation running amok in Iraq can be destroyed.

But, we should fear, the signs are not good.

It was, for example, extremely unwise of the prime minister to limit his military options by declaring that he will never have ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq. By saying this, he was excluding the possible involvement of our own Special Forces, who have worked tirelessly and successfully with their U.S. counterparts in similar situations before.

Sadly, also, any combat air support provided by the RAF is likely to be only token, given the disastrous defence cuts that have so significantly reduced the number of combat squadrons.

In any case, military action by itself cannot solve the underlying problems of Iraq.

The election of a new prime minister probably does bode well for Iraq’s future than what it did under his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki, who deeply divided the country.

Elsewhere, neighbouring countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan and Kuwait will universally support the return of the Sunnis to the political arena. They were never comfortable with the idea that the Shias should permanently rule Iraq.

Some of these countries may, indeed, have once backed the Islamic State in the hope that Iraq might one day be ruled by the Sunnis. But as events have shown they now don’t have any proper control of an organisation that has become savagely inhuman in its actions.

Ultimately, it will not be the extremist Islamic State which decides the future of Iraq. That will be for the Iraqi people themselves and for their neighbouring countries.

After the turbulent years following the negligent and wrong decision of George W. Bush and Tony Blair to invade their country, that’s the very least the Iraqis deserve from the two men’s successors in Washington and London.