BATTLE FOR KOBANI: AS THE WORLD WATCHES, TURKEY LOOKS AWAY
By Christoph Reuter
Emin Ozmen/ Le Journal/ DER SPIEGEL
For weeks now, the world has grown worried as Islamic State jihadists
have tried to take the Kurdish city of Kobani in Syria. As the US
has stepped up airstrikes, Turkey’s actions have revealed that it is
pursuing its own contradictory political agenda.
Just a few kilometers away from the Turkish border, the war is raging.
In the Kurdish city of Kobani, US jets bomb Islamic State positions
while the town’s last defenders, equipped with more grit than guns,
fight the jihadists on the ground .
As the Turkish army impassively watches the deadly battle from its
side of the boundary with Syria, it has opened its own mini-front on
the outskirts of Suruc, a Turkish border city. A young policeman,
his finger on the trigger of his automatic weapon, stands in front
of the town’s sports club, a second officer next to him holding a
grenade launcher for tear-gas cartridges. Behind them are two dozen
soldiers and policemen, and armored vehicles bearing mounted machine
guns and crates of ammunition.
Since Oct. 6, the jittery unit has been detaining a number of Kurdish
civilians who fled across the border from Kobani. In the beginning,
they numbered 160 — most of them were young men, though there were
also women and children. The guards in front of the gate are not
allowed to say why the civilians are being held and they point their
weapons at everyone who approaches.
Suddenly, a group of boys from a local team appears. A boy of about 10
explains that they’re arriving for weekly soccer practice, held on the
field next to the gymnasium. A man in uniform searches through their
gym bags, one after the other, while the others look on nervously.
The scene is prosaic and absurd. But it is, for that very reason,
symbolic of what is taking place on the Turkish side of the border
these days. The fight for Kobani — which, thanks to its proximity to
the border, is being filmed and watched around the world in real time
— is no longer exclusively about control of the city. The desperate
defense mounted by the Kurds embodies their decades-long struggle
for an independent country.
Kobani was a city where a Kurdish government sprouted and flourished,
a fulfillment of dreams in miniature. Now that the city is being
threatened with destruction by Islamic State Ankara is doing nothing
to prevent it, and thus putting the future of Turkish-Kurdish
reconciliation in danger — and domestic peace along with it.
Incomparable Triumph
The fight for Kobani also of outsized importance for the jihadists.
Should Islamic State win despite US airstrikes, it would be an
incomparable triumph.
>From a geopolitical perspective, the town’s strategic importance is
limited. But because camera teams can easily monitor Islamic State
advances — machine-gun bursts and mortar strikes can be heard from
across the border, and the clouds of dust and smoke from the airstrikes
are easily visible — Kobani has become a stage and the entire world
its frightened audience.
Turkey, however, is primarily concerned with chasing away onlookers.
Last Wednesday afternoon, a column of army vehicles sped to the top of
a hill west of Kobani where residents and journalists were watching
events unfold across the border. The first Jeep came to a halt at
the summit and a man clambered through the rooftop opening, cocking
his teargas launcher like a shotgun. The soldiers then proceeded to
chase everybody off the hill.
The security personnel behave like manic town sheriffs. On Wednesday
evening, 15 armored vehicles rolled into Mahasir, a border town
populated by Turkish Kurds. The soldiers announced via loudspeaker
that the village was being cleared and that all residents had 10
minutes to leave their homes. Those who refused would be fired at
with teargas. After an hour, the soldiers left.
The high-strung behavior of Turkish security personnel stands in direct
contrast to their moderate approach to Islamic State, which is on
display 60 km east of Suruc, at the next border crossing in Akcakale.
Two years ago, the town on the Syrian side, Tell Abiad, was home
to a functioning town council comprised of opposition leaders and
representatives of several rebel groups. But now the black flag of
the Islamic State is flying on the Syrian side of the border. The
Islamist fanatics have controlled Tell Abiad for almost a year and
have murdered or driven out all of their opponents. The town council
is gone, replaced by a dictatorship that keeps the population in its
place by way of spies and capriciousness.
‘They Won’t Pay Any Attention’
Turkey seems to prefer a neighbor like Islamic State to the Kurds. The
border gate to the sleepy town opens at 9 a.m. “Syrians may come and
go,” says the Turkish official manning the guard house. For everyone
else, there is a trafficker standing in plain sight a few meters away.
“How many? Two men? Three? No problem,” he says, without inquiring
about nationality. “They won’t pay any attention.”
There isn’t much going on at this particular entrance to the caliphate,
just a couple of women fiddling inexpertly with the required face veil
as they prepare to cross the border. But after about half an hour, a
truck arrives and unloads some pallets loaded with first-aid supplies:
bandages, rubber gloves, disposable drape sheets and collapsible
wheelchairs.
An elderly man with a long beard monitors the reloading operation
as the supplies are packed onto handcarts. Just before he crosses
the border with his cargo, a young man rushes up to him, hands him a
Saudi Arabian passport and asks him to take it across for a friend,
who will be waiting. The older man takes it and, together with his
four companions, pushes his load of medical supplies across the border
into the caliphate.
Such a delivery would be a godsend for the Kurds of Kobani. They
have been begging the Turkish authorities to open the border
crossing near the town and to allow medical supplies to pass, with
no success. Here in Akcakale, however, those kinds of crossings are
no problem whatsoever.
That is one of several reasons Kurdish distrust of the Turkish state
is growing. The almost 100,000 refugees from Kobani and surrounding
villages have thus far been almost exclusively provided for by
private aid organizations, which have set up tent camps in and near
Suruc. The municipality, led by the Kurdish party BDP, has transformed
the community center into an emergency shelter. One aid worker from
Diyarbakir says that the state is doing almost nothing compared to
agencies from Kurdish-governed cities. Indeed, many Kurds, including
parliamentarians and city officials, firmly believe that Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is working together with Islamic State.
The heightened suspicion means that the peace process between Turkey
and the Kurds — which aims to resolve the decades of violent animosity
between the two groups — could very well have come to an end.
Another source of the intensifying tension between Kurds and Ankara:
the Kurdish media’s tendency to exaggerate Turkey’s dubious behavior.
Police buses, which often have tinted windows and lack license plates,
are filmed from afar and described as “Islamic State transports.”
Lacking Ammunition
In Kobani itself, the war against Islamic State is being waged by
just over 1,000 guerilla fighters and the most powerful air force in
the world. The US planes fly more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles)
from bases in the Persian Gulf and are refueled mid-air before they
arrive in Kobani. According to Kurdish claims, target coordinates
are then radioed in by Kurdish commanders on the ground. Indeed,
the fact that the Kurds have been able to hold out, and even to win
back some territory, is entirely due to these US airstrikes.
US strikes in Kobani have thus far largely focused on the thousands
of Islamic State foot soldiers in the city, and not on the Islamist
convoys in the surrounding countryside or their approaching tanks. In
recent days, columns of smoke have been rising from strikes on the
heart of the dense city center. The fact that US strikes last Wednesday
night hit a position held by Kobani’s defenders, apparently killing
several Kurdish fighters, was as tragic as it was inevitable.
By the end of last week, the defenders of Kobani were lacking
ammunition for almost all of their weapons. “We are now sharing a
single Kalashnikov, each person fights for two hours and then it is
the next fighter’s turn,” one Kurdish fighter said over the phone. “We
have pushed our Dushka” — a heavy machine gun — “into a garage and
hidden our anti-tank weapons. We don’t have any more ammunition for
them. We only have shells for the Kalashnikovs.” The situation was so
dire that the US began air-dropping weapons, ammunitions and medical
supplies for Kurdish fighters over the weekend.
Turkey, though, continues to prevent the Americans from using
their nearby base in Incirlik for airstrikes. Last week, Ankara and
Washington arrived at a bizarre compromise instead, permitting the US
to only use the base as a take-off and landing site for drone flights.
It was only on Monday of this week that a fisrt shipment of weapons,
ammunition and other supplies was dropped from US planes and that
Ankara saw fit to budge slightly from its increasingly untenable
position, announcing that it would allow Iraqi Kurds to cross into
Syria to help defend Kobani.
Primary Enemy
Turkey also wants to help the US arm and train moderate Syrian rebels
to fight against forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad. But Ankara remains
opposed to any move that could strengthen PKK, which it continues to
see as its primary enemy in the region, alongside the Syrian president.
It is doubtful that Kobani can be saved with airstrikes alone and
even more unlikely that the Islamic State can be defeated from above.
Exhibit one remains the Sinjar Mountains in northern Iraq, where tens
of thousands of Yazidis sought safety fromthe Islamic State onslaught
in August before being rescued there by troops from YPG, the Syrian
offshoot of PKK. Today, hardly anyone is paying much attention to
Sinjar, where Islamic State managed to take control of the last access
road two weeks ago, despite occasional airstrikes. Now, the jihadist
group is besieging well over 1,000 fighters — a group made up of
troops from YPG as well as the recently-formed Yazidi militia “Angel
Peacock” and the Peshmerga, the fighting force of Iraqi Kurds — there.
As the world looks to Kobani, the jihadists in Iraq have been able
to advance toward the western Iraqi towns of Hit and Ramadi. Iraqi
informants also say Islamic State is currently gathering fighters
for a possible assault on Kirkuk, the oil rich city in northern Iraq
under Kurdish control.
Islamic State now controls an area stretching to within 25 kilometers
of Baghdad and the Sunni group is also responsible for a series of
attacks that killed more than 70 people in the city’s Shiite quarters
last week. A political solution to the conflict remains remote.
Indeed, instead of making concessions to the Sunnis, new Iraqi Prime
Minister Haidar al-Abadi has nominated a leader of the Shiite militia
Badr Corps for the post of interior minister.
Waiting
The sparse US airstrikes have thus far had minimal effect, to the
point that top US military officials have reportedly been pressuring
US President Barack Obama to increase the number of sorties flown from
the current five to seven per day to 150 or more. Some also say that
Special Forces are needed on the ground to assist with targeting. But
so far the US has only significantly increased its engagement in
Kobani itself, partly due to massive international pressure.
Significant assistance from the Turkish side, though, remains
unlikely. On the contrary: Last week, the Turkish military flew
airstrikes against PKK positions in southeastern Turkey, the first
such attacks in some time. It seemed to be sending a clear message
as to who Turkey sees as being the worse terrorists.
Last week, a group of fathers gathered in front of the sports club in
Suruc. Some of them were the fathers of those being held inside, and
all of them, aging farmers with deeply furrowed faces, had the same
story to tell: At first, Turkish officials had told them they would
be able to bring their cars, tractors and other vehicles across the
border when they fled Kobani. Aside from their land, these vehicles
were their most important possessions.
But at the border crossing, they were told they could only come
across by walking, so their sons stayed behind to keep an eye on
the vehicles. Ultimately, though, they too had to flee on foot —
and were arrested when they arrived in Turkey.
“We are farmers, damn it. What do they want from us?” implores Salih
Nuri, who is standing together with his two youngest sons. “Why are
they tormenting us like this? They should at least give us a reason
why they are holding my son and the others. One reason.”
Nuri isn’t alone in waiting for an explanation from Turkey. The rest
of the world is too.