NO FRIENDS BUT THE MOUNTAINS: The Fate of the Kurds
Author(s): Terry Glavin
Source: World Affairs , MARCH / APRIL 2015, Vol. 177, No. 6 (MARCH / APRIL 2015),
pp. 57-66
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43555270
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NO FRIENDS
BUT THE MOUNTAINS
The Fate of the Kurds
Terry Glavin
It is out of the Middle East's current nightmare that the old dream
of a united Kurdistan is drawing new breath. Kurdish independence,
if not in whole then at least in some combination of its disconnected
parts, may well be the one thing worth salvaging from the region's killing
fields. A firmer alignment on the part of the US with Kurdish interests
would certainly salvage something from the shambles of American foreign
policy in the Middle East, too.
But if the Kurds' time has at long last arrived, their own pragmatism
and a distincdy Utopian strain of politics are combining to confound
even their most fervent overseas champions. It's not at all certain that
anything like statehood is what the Kurds immediately want or need,
and in any case, President Obama's opaque and haphazard approach to
the Middle East, having already cost him the confidence of so many of
his key administration officials, has also cost him the trust of the Kurds.
Numbering perhaps twenty-five million people throughout their
homelands in the mountainous region that lies astride the borders of
Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria, the Kurds are arguably the most populous
Terry Glavin is a Canadian author and journalist. He writes a regular column for the
Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. His most recent book is Come from the Shadows: The
Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan.
MARCH/APRIL 2015 57
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NO FRIENDS BUT THE MOUNTAINS
people on earth without a nation-state to call their own.
interest, given the detachment of US policy toward them, th
been far more favorably disposed to the United States than
in the region outside of Israel.
Still, their old expression "the Kurds have no friends but
tains" has regained such value among them lately that it is w
ing where it comes from, why it persists, and why the Kur
Americans foremost in mind when they say it.
Th e last time the Middle East was in a disarray compara
current bedlam was during the chaotic aftermath of the Firs
and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In the 1920 Treaty
which was to establish the borders of Syria and Iraq, the
offered their own country. The promise of a sovereign and
Kurdistan was then broken by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne
cumscribed the territorial sovereignty of Turkey.
What followed was a macabre progression of persecuti
cleansing, and wars of extermination waged to recurring an
degrees, sometimes consecutively and sometimes concurren
of the four nation-states (Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey) whe
ended up as captive populations. The Kurds responded b
protracted uprisings and insurrections, sometimes even figh
ies for one or the other of those same countries during th
wars with one another.
The greatest Kurdish misfortune at the moment, however, is to be
situated at the intersection of an increasingly bloody and dystopian
Arab world, the outward-reaching ruthlessness of Khomeinist Iran, and
the belligerent Islamist nationalism of Recep Erdogan's Turkey. As if to
compound the Kurds' burden of bad luck, Sunni-Shia hatreds are sending
seismic shocks through fault lines that lie directly beneath their feet.
Most Kurds happen to be Sunni Muslims.
The United States remains committed to its policy of a unified Iraq,
but within the Kurdish leadership itself there are forces in play that have
produced a panoply of strategies that do not depend on any US effort in
the cause of cross-border statehood.
At one end, Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP)
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Terry Glavin
dominates Iraqi Kurdistan and controls the semi-autonomous Kurdistan
Regional Government. Its history includes a stint as a de facto Soviet
client against Iran and another brief stint as a Khomeinist proxy during
"Their old expression 'the
Kurds have no friends but
the mountains' has regained
such value among them lately
that it is worth noticing where
it comes from, why it persists,
and why the Kurds now have
Americans foremost in mind
when they say it."
the Iran-Iraq War, for which
the Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein later viciously punished
the Kurds, slaughtering
tens of thousands in
his Anfal campaign, most
notoriously in his nerve-gas
bombing of Halabja.
Over the years, the KDP
has evolved into a populist
and nationalist party. It has
eclipsed the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan of Barzani's
lifelong adversary Jalal Talabani,
who was Iraq's first
democratically elected president
in 2005. The KDP's
lukewarmness toward pan-Kurdish independence comes from a
about the compromises its success would require vis-à-vis Iraqi K
neighbors, not least the Kurds' belligerent Turkish adversaries in
At the other pole is an array of parties and armed groups in
by Abdullah Ocalan, the charismatic insurrectionist whose K
Workers' Party (PKK) led an armed uprising that spiraled out of
during the dark days following Turkey's military coup in the ea
and carried on intermittently until 2013.
Because the PKK is outlawed in Turkey, NATO countries list t
nization as a terrorist entity, and indeed some of the PKK's earl
would fit the description of "terrorism." This complicates m
well for the Syrian Kurds, whose dominant Democratic Union P
Local Protection Force (YPG) guerrillas are intimately linked w
PKK Ocalan also enjoys the loyalty of a militant constituency i
Kurdish underground.
Just as Massoud Barzani now has more important things t
about than the challenge of carving out an independent K
from the four states that enclose the Kurdish homelands, Ocalan 's
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NO FRIENDS BUT THE MOUNTAINS
thinking has also radically evolved over time. He is no long
Leader figure of a classic and brutal Marxist-Leninist third
eration movement, and has lately taken on the persona o
Kurdish Nelson Mandela.
Just as Mandela was imprisoned for eighteen of his twenty-sev
years behind bars on Robben Island off the South African Coast, O
Ian has been imprisoned since 1999 on Imrali Island, in the Sea of Ma
mara, off Istanbul. Ocalan's politics have lately drawn from such dive
sources as the works of the late American libertarian-socialist philos
pher Murray Bookchin. Ocalan's movement in Turkey has adopte
focus on a form of nonviolent democratic decentralization. And it's
working, at least in its emphasis on democratic control of munic
and regional governments and avoiding direct confrontations w
Erdogan's government in Ankara.
But the main thing that preoccupies Kurds across the political spe
trum now is a more immediate and necessary focus on the priority
survival. This isn't a historical anomaly. It is only rarely that the Kur
have enjoyed any reprieve from their calamities.
T here was the tiny, briefly lived, Soviet-backed Republic of Mahab
in the Kurdish region of Iran, in the immediate aftermath of World
II, but when the Soviets withdrew from Iran the Kurdish separatists w
massacred by Iranian government forces. During the 1979 revolu
that overthrew the shah, the Iranian Kurds sided with Ayatollah Kh
meini in the hopes of restoring some autonomy for themselves, but
Khomeinists went on to crush the Kurds, executing thousands. Ir
Kurds remain brutally suppressed, capable of only the most intermit
and small-scale guerrilla resistance.
In Turkey, several Kurdish rebellions erupted through the ear
twentieth century, and each in its turn was brutally crushed (to mer
speak the Kurdish language in public was until only very recently a cr
punishable by a prison sentence) . A truce between Ocalan's PKK
Ankara has been mostly holding since April 2013, following a threecade
uprising and counterinsurgency that took the lives of at least th
thousand people. Thousands of Kurds were summarily executed or "d
appeared." At least one hundred thousand were imprisoned. Anot
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Terry Glavin
million were uprooted while the Turkish government busied itself
destroying an estimated three thousand Kurdish villages, many of them
obliterated in bombing runs by the Turkish Air Force.
Until the events of this past summer, Iraqi Kurdistan had enjoyed
the longest and most fruitful period of Kurdish freedom. A Kurdish
safe haven began to flower in northern Iraq in 1991, owing to the
Anglo-American enforcement of a no-fly zone in the denouement of the
Gulf War. Following the "shock and awe" of 2003, every hope that the
administration of George W. Bush held out for Iraq was realized in full
in Iraqi Kurdistan.
While the rest of Iraq has descended into fratricidal Sunni-Shiite
bloodletting, the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government
(KRG) has continued to set down deep roots, almost entirely at peace,
despite Baghdad's efforts in disruption and containment. But everything
changed last June, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's Islamic State (also
called ISIS or ISIL) arose out of the ruins that Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad had made of his country and the bedlam that Baghdad's Shiite-run
death squads and Sunni suicide bombings had made of Iraq.
After Baghdadi broke with al-Qaeda and declared himself the successor
to the Prophet Muhammad and leader of the world's Muslims,
his brutal caliphate was soon in control of a third of Syria and a third of
Iraq. By September of 2014, he was commanding a jihadist army variously
estimated at up to thirty thousand front-line fighters, perhaps a third
of them foreigners, all equipped with heavy weapons, practically limitless
ammunition supplies, and fleets of tanks and armored Humvees looted
from Iraqi and Syrian military bases. Baghdadi's Islamic State was also
flush with perhaps a half a billion dollars' worth of stolen currency, on
top of daily black-market oil revenues exceeding $3 million.
A US-led multinational coalition of Arab League and NATO allies
formed to carry out airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq,
but Erdogan's Turkey, still a NATO member in good standing, thumbed
its nose at this policy. Erdogan was routinely honored in White House pronouncements
as a key US ally even while he persisted in supporting the
most unsavory, anti-American, and anti-Kurdish Islamist proxies. Erdogan
appears to be as determined as ever to keep his own boot firmly planted
on the necks of Turkey's Kurds and the Kurds of northern Syria.
The United States' decision to intervene against the Islamic State
was prompted by the rapid advance of Baghdadi's fighters across the
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NO FRIENDS BUT THE MOUNTAINS
Nineveh Plain toward Erbil, the KRG's headquarters i
were also tens of thousands of Kurdish Yazidis - followers of an esoteric,
pre-Abrahamic monotheism - who were trapped and encircled on
Mount Sinjar. They'd begun to die of exposure and thirst, and Obam
ordered some last-minute humanitarian airdrops for them.
But it was mostìy due to the efforts of Kurdish YPG guerrillas from
nearby Syria that the Yazidis were saved from the massacres and enslave
ment that had already carried off so many thousands of them in the
preceding days. The American intervention was a hesitant, reluctant
eleventh-hour affair that came only after public opinion polls had begu
to show that even his Democratic Party base was giving Obama a failin
grade on this moral and political crisis.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had revealed that she'd
opposed Obama's stubborn anti-interventionism as far back as 2011
when full-on support for Syria's pro-democracy rebels might have made
a difference. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had said much th
same thing. So had former CIA chief David Petraeus.
Robert Ford, Obama's ambassador to Syria, resigned because he
couldn't support the official White House fiction that there had never
been any anti-Assad forces worth backing. Obama's senior adviser o
Syria, Frederic C. Hof, jumped ship for strikingly similar reasons. Mean
while, Assad crossed Obama's "red line" on chemical weapons by merely
switching from sarin gas to chlorine gas, without consequence, and his
regime's air force kept on bombing its own cities as the Syrian death tol
inched closer to two hundred thousand.
When heavily armed Islamic State fighters swarmed out of Syria, Ir
soldiers abandoned their posts without a struggle, and the Kurdis
Regional Government's outgunned Peshmerga ("those who face death
were routed. It was only when the eyes of the world were on Mount S
jar, and the Islamic State's heavily armed fighters were within a coup
of hours of Erbil, the KRG capital, that Obama acted.
All this has been something less than a confidence-building exerci
among the Kurds, perhaps especially among the Syrian Kurds of Rojav
the long, narrow, and broken band of de facto Kurdish autonomy th
runs along the Turkish frontier from the smoking tombs of Aleppo in th
west to the Tigris River and the semi-autonomous KRG of Iraq in the east
The Rojava Kurds see enemies on all sides - the Assad regime, Bagh
dadi's Islamic State, Erdogan's Turkey. Even so, the Kurds' PKK-backe
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Terry Glavin
YPG guerrillas have mounted the most effective resistance of all the
region's non-state actors to both the Assad regime and to the Islamic
State's marauders. While the YPG guerrillas were fighting with black-market
weapons, moreover, the United States was giving them every indication
that they were doomed to fight on alone, helpless and friendless.
That deadening sense of betrayal had already caused the implosion
of the Free Syrian Army, even though the FSA was nominally backed by
the United States. The Kurds knew exactly what the FSA fighters were
feeling. A resignation to the prospect of American abandonment prevailed
among a cross-section of Kurdish leaders I spoke with last September
in Iraq, Turkey, and Northern Syria. It came out perhaps most clearly
during a conversation with a Kurdish guerrilla commander at a remote
hilltop post in Rojava's Jazeera Canton, in the northeastern quadrant of
Syria's Kurdish rebel zone.
The young commander, Adam Derike, had only a few days earlier led
a successful assault on an Islamic State column an hour south of where
we met. He said he had no expectation that the Syrian Kurds would
help of any consequence from the United States or from any of the W
ern democracies. "The Islamic State is fighting humanity. We take o
orders from the people, and we are fighting for humanity," he said.
all the time, if you are fighting for humanity, you are fighting alone."
Even when the US-led airpower coalition began hitting Islamic St
targets in Syria, it was only after the Arab League's coalition memb
said they were signing up to hit targets there, and not in Iraq, wh
Obama had initially intended to confine the coalition's airstrikes. A
the US approach to the Syrian catastrophe, while having shifted aw
from stubborn abstentionism, is most likely too discredited to be r
cued by a mere "reset." After three years of unrestrained war on
own people, and his heavy reliance on Tehran's Islamic Revolutio
Guards Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah, Assad has reduced Syrian soc
to a Hobbesian nightmare of "fighting-age males" engaged in mercen
combat on behalf of a multitude of Islamist militias. Syria in 2014 re
bles nothing so much as Afghanistan in 1994.
Iraq, too, is already so far gone that it is difficult to envision anythi
resembling a functioning unitary state arising from the ashes for at
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NO FRIENDS BUT THE MOUNTAINS
another generation, and only then with massive "interna
nity" intervention. As in Syria, the IRGC and its Shiite m
heaviest hands at work there.
Obama's extreme reluctance to do anything that might jeopardize
his foreign-policy priority of rapprochement with Tehran is a key factor
the Kurds are taking into account in their attempts to anticipate American
reaction to any initiatives they might undertake on their own behalf.
Abdulsalam Ahmad, co-chair of the Kurdish provisional government
of Rojava, told me that Syria's Kurds would welcome an invitation to
participate in the US-led coalition. "We have put up strong resistance
to ISIS, and for this we should be part of the American alliance to fight
ISIS. But the Americans are not listening."
Whatever philosophy might animate Ocalan's followers in Rojava,
they've managed little beyond establishing a provisional parliament in
2012, with elections intended to be held every two years. "For more than
fifty years, the Assad regime has suffocated the people, and now we have
been able to take a breath, to begin to take control of our territories and
make our own way here," Ahmad said. But recendy institution-building
has taken a backseat to survival against the Islamic State's onslaughts,
along with the work of handling the influx of displaced civilians who
have fled the fighting.
Rojava's population has nearly doubled since the Syrian uprising
began in 2011. The first arrivals were fleeing Assad's barrel bombs. The
more recent arrivals are fleeing the Islamic State's mass executioners. They
come from all of Syria's confessional traditions, including Chaldean Catholics,
Assyrian Orthodox, Kurdish Yazidis, and Shiite and Sunni Arabs.
For the Kurdish leadership in Iraq, the priority of survival demands
compromise and an attention to expediency that cannot be squandered
on an on-again, off-again, generations-old national liberation struggle,
with all the complex recalibration it would require of the Iraqi Kurds'
triangulated relationships with Baghdad, Ankara, and Tehran (to say
nothing of the implications for their relationship with the United States) .
Owing to the Iraqi Kurds' delicate relationship with Ankara, it has
been risky enough to provide the Rojava Kurds with bread and to main
tain commercial traffic across the floating bridge that spans the Tigris
River at Samalka, connecting Iraqi Kurdistan with Rojava's Jazeera Canton.
It was only with Ankara's last-minute approval that a contingent of
KRG Peshmerga fighters was able to pass through Turkish territory to
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Terry Glavin
make its way to Kobane, the Kurdish town on the Syrian-Turkish border
that was besieged by heavily armed Islamic State fighters last summer.
After one hundred and sixty thousand Kurds fled across the Turkish
border from Kobane and the remaining population was facing the
threat of "another Mount Sinjar," the US weighed in with airstrikes in
late September last year, weeks after the coalition bombing campaign
began and only after solidarity protests sprung up in cities all over the
world. Pro-Kurdish riots had broken out across Turkey, and US Secretary
of State John Kerry had found himself acutely embarrassed by his own
inability to explain why Kobane was not an American concern.
At the same time, back in Iraq, in the Kurdish city of Duhok - well
within the KRG's jurisdiction and at least a hundred miles from any
significant Islamic State forces - survival had become the Kurds' top
priority. The city's population had swollen by a third to about 1.7 million,
owing mostly to Kurds, Arabs, and Assyrian Christians fleeing the
tumults in the south. About a third of the new arrivals were Yazidis from
the Mount Sinjar area who had decamped to the city since August.
The refugees were housed mainly in the district's schools, community
centers, parks, mosques, and underneath highway overpasses. "Right
now, we are fighting the terrorists, and we are trying to take care of all
these people who have run away from ISIS," Duhok Mayor Mohammad
Amin Osman told me.
In July, the KRG announced its intention to conduct a referendu
on full Kurdish sovereignty and a declaration of independence. T
week before I arrived in Duhok, the referendum was called off. Barzan
said he was canceling it because of the Islamic State's onslaught
because it was necessary for the Kurds to allow negotiations with
incoming Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi.
At the headquarters of the Peoples' Democratic Congress in Diy
bakir, in southeastern Turkey, the story was the same. The multi-par
congress was established partly to implement Ocalan's radical dec
tralization alternative to armed struggle, but even so, the congress w
preoccupied with Kurdish survival. Husayin Durmaz, the senior congre
official assigned to lead its Rojava Coordination Commission, said
main work was not politics, but organizing the food and medical rel
the Rojava Kurds so desperately required.
"The priority objective is not to create a Kurdish state in Turkey
Syria. For the YPG, even Assad is not an important matter of concern rig
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NO FRIENDS BUT THE MOUNTAINS
now. There is no turning back from what the YPG has acco
Syria so far, but right now, the important thing for the YPG is
The Kurds have always considered the Americans the
Durmaz said, but those warm feelings are growing cold.
should be brought into the formula of an American strategy
very sad. You will never hear a bad word from the Kurds t
cans. No American interests have been hurt by the Kurds, in
territories. To consider the Kurds of the south [the Iraq
allies, but call the Kurds of the north [the PKK] terrorists,
is not just. And it further divides the Kurds among themsel
"When ISIS started killing Kurds, the Turkish state likes
much. Turkey sees it as being in its strategic interest to di
and to cause divisions in Kurdish society. But we expected A
be more sensitive to these matters." O
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