“No Angels”: Kurdish Militias, “Betrayal” and the Campaign to Destroy Syria
It is presently fashionable, but totally erroneous
to aver that the Kurds have been “betrayed”. The truth is that the Kurds
and the Americans have used each other for their mutual ends in the
Syrian War, a catastrophe orchestrated by the United States and its
regional allies Saudi Arabia and the State of Israel.
For the Saudis, the animus against the Assad
government is based on the fact that it is ruled by what is considered
by mainstream Sunni Muslims to be a heretical minority, the Alawites,
whose alliance with Shia Iran poses a threat to Saudi influence in the
Muslim Arab world.
And for the Israelis, it is the threat posed by the
Triple Entente of Iran, Syria and the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, an
alliance that is sometimes referred to as the “Shia Crescent”. The
destabilisation and the destruction of Syria would, from Israel’s
perspective, have achieved three goals. Firstly, the weakening of
Iranian influence in the region. Secondly, the isolating of Hezbollah,
the militant Shia group created out of the embers of Israel’s invasion
of Lebanon in the early 1980s, which was responsible for the Jewish
state’s withdrawal from the south of that country on two occasions. It
is Hezbollah that has prevented the longstanding goal of colonising
Lebanon south of the Litani River. Thirdly, a fractured Syria would from
an Israeli view mean that no successor state would make a legal claim
for the restoration of the Golan Heights, which was illegally annexed in
1981.
The object of Israel has always been to balkanise its
Arab Muslim neighbours, and the enduring influence of its lobby in the
United States is the overriding factor in this enterprise which provided
the Saudis with the role of funding the anti-Assad jihadist
insurrection begun in 2011. Israel, for its part, provided medical,
logistical and financial assistance to a number of these jihadi fanatics
and struck at Assad’s forces to weaken the Syrian effort in confronting
them.
It is useful to be reminded of a declassified U.S.
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document circulated in 2012 which
explicitly sought the creation of a declared or undeclared Salafist
Principality in eastern Syria. The so-called Islamic State (IS) and
other Islamist-orientated militias functioned as the U.S.’s proxy army
to achieve this end.
But Russian intervention with the help of Iranian
soldiers and Hezbollah — all invited onto Syrian soil by the legitimate
government of the country — beat back the threat posed by IS. The
Americans, whose presence in parts of Syria is illegal, reacted by
arming, training and supplying Kurdish militias such as the YPG to
continue the quest of creating a statelet in oil-endowed eastern Syria.
Those who are versed in the history of the region know
that the Turks will not tolerate the creation of an independent Kurdish
state on its border. Moreover, members of the Syrian-based YPG also
operate as guerrillas for the Turkish-based PKK, a group designated by
the Turks as well as the U.S. and the EU as a terrorist organisation.
The Turks are of course no innocents in regard to the
Syrian War. They were part of the original U.S.-Saudi-Israeli effort to
overthrow the Assad government. Turkey provided a route through which
jihadist fighters could infiltrate Syria’s borders. The Turkish Army
High Command furnished these mercenaries with encampments and training
facilities, and as IS began carving out its U.S. approved principality
in eastern Syria, the Turks facilitated the establishment of this
nascent caliphate by buying oil exploited from oil fields previously
developed by the Syrian national government. Indeed, many will recall
the role played by members of the Erdogan family in this illicit trade.
But while the Turks, like the U.S., the Saudis and the
Israelis are no innocents in the enterprise that was geared towards
destroying the Ba’athist government of Syria, President Donald Trump
described the Kurds as being “no angels”.
Do the Kudish militias have clean hands? An
examination of the facts reveals that they do not. For during the quest
to carve out a separate, autonomous territory in eastern Syria (Kurds
represent just 8% of the population of Syria), Kurdish militias
ethnically cleansed the region of its Arab Muslim population and
murdered Christian Assyrian communities. As noted earlier on, their
primary role was to carve out a chunk of territory and the decision to
arm Syrian Kurds taken by Trump in 2017 because it was seen as the
fastest way to seize Raqqa, the capital of the proclaimed caliphate. It
was a decision of course which drew opposition from Turkey.
The irony is that the Kurds would have been on more
secure footing had they joined forces with the legal, secular government
of Syria in fighting the locally-bred jihadists, as well as the
imported Islamist fighters of al-Qaeda, al-Nusra and IS.
But they have miscalculated. Some accuse Ottoman-era
Kurds of having facilitated the genocide of Christian Armenians in the
early part of the 20th century, as a means through which they could
obtain a state of their own. But they were denied this. And now in the
21st century, they look certain to be denied this.
The famous maxim in international relations of their
being no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent national
interests may explain Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from
this area of Syria. For while the national interests of the Turks, the
Saudis and the Israelis are clearly defined, the national interest on
the part of the United States in pursuing the policy of balkanising
Syria. If the illegal presence of the United States in Syria was indeed
to fight jihadis, then it would have logically sided with the Syrian
administration.
Those who claim that the Kurds have been “betrayed” do
so largely out of ignorance of the wider facts. And among
neoconservative figures such as US Senator Marco Rubio and former UN
Ambassador Nikki Haley, the frequent references to the Kurdish role in
fighting jihadis is to say the least disingenuous. Lindsey Graham, a
senator from South Carolina, was perhaps more honest when assessing that
the biggest losers from Trump’s decision would be the “Kurds and
Israel”.
For it has been in Israel’s interests that the
campaign to destroy Syria has been waged, and not, as Graham strongly,
albeit inadvertently implies, in the interests of the United States.
*
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog, Adeyinka Makinde.
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Adeyinka Makinde, Global Research, 2019
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