Turkey and Iran Attack the Kurds

Parsing Concerning News from Kurdistan

Source: Wikipedia

What’s happening?

Over the past few days and weeks, there’s been a bevy of concerning news from Syrian, Iraqi, and Iranian Kurdistan. Since November 20, Turkey has been carrying out a campaign of airstrikes against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in Syria and the PKK in Northern Iraq. These strikes are ostensibly in response to a November 13 bombing in Istanbul that the Turkish government blames on the PKK. The PKK and its Syrian counterpart the YPG have denied being involved in the bombing. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that he will soon launch a land operation across the Syrian border. In a rare moment of alignment, both Russia and the United States have issued calls for deescalation. The Pentagon is particularly concerned about the proximity of Turkish strikes to U.S. special forces troops in Northern Syria, sent to assist the SDF against ISIS.

Meanwhile, Iran has targeted Kurdish opposition groups across its border with Iraq with missiles and drones. Within Iran, security forces have been particularly focusing their crackdown on the Kurdish region since the outbreak of the nation-wide protests sparked by the death of the 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini. On Wendesday, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard confirmed the deployment of ground forces to the Kurdish region and have even threatened an incursion across the border into Iraq. According to the official regime line on the protests, they are being coordinated by Kurdish groups in Iraq.

Why the Kurds?

In the case of Iran, the answer appears relatively straightforward: as noted I noted above, Iran is blaming Kurdish groups for the unrest that it has failed to get under control and would like to turn its unfolding domestic crisis into a security operation focused against a clear-cut enemy. In an interview with France 24, researcher Adel Bakawan explains:

Despite ferocious repression, the Iranian government has not been able to subjugate the protest movement that emerged on September 16. The Islamic Republic has tried to present it as an agitation for independence in parts of the country inhabited by the Kurdish minority; it is trying to present the movement in ethnic terms. The regime has even tried to claim that the protests are a Sunni uprising championed by Saudi Arabia, Western countries and the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq to destabilise Shiite Iran.

All of these attempts to present the movement as a divisive ethnic force have failed because the protests are clearly nationwide. It’s not like they are only happening in Kurdish or Baluchi cities. And the demonstrators have taken the young Kurdish victim, Mahsa Amini, as a national symbol of their struggle, a unifying reference point for the country’s youth.

So because this attempt to sow domestic division has failed, the Islamic Republic is looking to its foreign enemies: Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Kurdistan Regional Government. Of course, it’s easiest to attack Iraqi Kurdistan, where the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) and the revolutionary Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan have both had camps for the past three decades. Iran accuses both of those groups of stirring up protests on its territory.

In a less drastic way, Turkey is also dealing with domestic issues through an attack on Kurdistan:

The closer we get to next year’s presidential elections, the more Erdogan will need to unite his supporters by singling out an enemy that threatens Turkey’s security, stability and national cohesion. This will allow him to present himself to the electorate as Turkey’s saviour, distracting attention from his shoddy economic record. Hence he has designated an enemy in the Syrian Kurds, whose territory is controlled by the local affiliate of the PKK, which is classed as a terrorist organisation by the EU and the United States as well as by Turkey.

Erdogan is also keen to make use of growing discontent with the presence of 3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, which people are expressing increasingly vociferously. The Turkish president is trying to turn this issue to his electoral advantage. In particular, Erdogan wants to fulfill his promise – made well before the Istanbul attack that he’s using to justify his current offensive in Syria – to create a buffer zone between Turkey and the various territories in northern Syria controlled by Kurdish groups. By launching a ground offensive on the symbolic city of Kobane, he will be able to create an unbroken strip of land out of the zones already occupied by the Turkish army and allies. And he wants to send Syrian refugees to that part of northern Syria currently occupied by Kurds.

Both regimes are also taking advantage of the war in Ukraine to carry out their agenda. Turkey is a NATO member and their need to ensure their continued support for Ukraine, as well their possible mediating role in the war, limits what pressure the United States and its European allies can bring to bear. In the long-term, the strange, contradictory situation that the U.S. is allied with the YPG in Syria, which its NATO-ally Turkey designates as a terrorist group, is probably untenable. In the case of Iran, the West is too focused on the situation in Eastern Europe to make too much of a fuss about the Middle East.

The war in Ukraine also provides another context: here authoritarian states are following Putin’s lead by escalating their attacks against any stirring of democracy and self-determination along on their borders. The various movements for Kurdish independence have been among the most democratic and progressive in the region. Iraqi Kurdistan is a functional parliamentary democratic republic. And in Rojava, there’s something more radical afoot: an experiment in libertarian socialism, direct democracy, and federalism. The continued existence of autonomous Kurdish regions and political organizations close alongside their regimes serves a dangerous “bad example” that inspires both ethnic populations within their borders and, as we’ve seen in the case of Iran, broader-based national revolts. This is the kernel of truth at the core of the Iranian regime’s conspiracy theory of Kurdish coordination of the national protests: the mere example of Kurdish political success on any level is appears as intolerable existential threat to the regimes. Like Putin, both regimes want to “punch the revolution on the snout.”

CORRECTION: As commenters have pointed out, it’s a bit of a stretch to say Iraqi Kurdistan is a “functional” democratic republic. “Partially functional” or “dysfunctional” is more like it. On paper, there’s a democratic republic, but the state is dominated by two rival clans.