A-Infos (en) Italy, UCADI, #205 - The Liquidation of the Kurds of Rojava (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Amid public indifference and the sustained silence of the press and 
television news, yet another massacre of the Kurdish people is unfolding 
in an attempt to bury their aspirations to live in a multiethnic, 
multireligious society characterized by gender equality, institutions 
owned by individuals and social groups, and essential services such as 
schools, healthcare, and economic well-being.
A vast plateau, Kurdistan, extends between Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and 
Iran, covering an area of 392,000 km². It is inhabited primarily by 
Kurdish populations, as well as Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians, Azeris, 
Jews, Ossetians, Persians, Turks, and Turkmen.
This area is politically divided into 190,000 km² in Turkey, 125,000 km² 
in Iran, 65,000 km² in Iraq, and 12,000 km² in Syria; it is 
predominantly home to 40 million Kurds, 25 million of whom live in 
Turkey. Overall, the number of Kurds worldwide is estimated at 
approximately 40-50 million, due to the many refugees and political 
persecutors who have had to flee to avoid being killed. The languages 
spoken by the Kurds are generally those imposed by the states that 
govern them, while the use of Kurdish is hindered in every way. Kurdish 
is written in various alphabets (Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic).
In Kurdistan, various other languages of Turkish, Semitic, and 
Indo-European lineages are also spoken by small minorities. Religious 
affiliation is also diverse, with members of different faiths coexisting.
Geographically, Kurdistan is a vast plateau located in the northern and 
northeastern part of Mesopotamia. Its economic significance is immense, 
as it encompasses the upper basins of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, 
Lake Van, and Lake Uriah. Whoever controls Kurdistan effectively manages 
the region's water resources, its fertile lands suitable for growing 
cereals and livestock, as well as one of the world's richest oil reserves.
For these reasons, Kurdistan generates strong economic interests not 
only from the states that control its territory, but also from the 
United States government (see the oil fields exploited by Conoco 
(Continental Oil and Transportation Company)), now part of 
ConocoPhillips. This is also true for strategic reasons related to 
control of the entire Middle East.
From the above, it follows that making Kurdistan a state would mean 
significantly altering the borders of at least four states in an area 
undoubtedly riven by some of the most complex interethnic, cultural, and 
religious conflicts in the world. Currently, while Iranian Kurds are 
part of the complex mosaic that constitutes the Persian state and are 
among the most aggressively pushing for political openness in the 
Islamic Republic, the Iraqi Kurds have acknowledged the balkanization of 
the various areas where the Kurdish population is distributed and have 
carved out an enclave for themselves in the autonomous province run by 
Mas'ud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (Partîya 
Dêmokrata Kurdistanê). Life for the Kurdish community in both Turkey and 
Syria is particularly challenging.

The Kurds between Turkey and Syria

The Kurdish community is particularly large in Turkey, where it 
represents approximately one-fifth of the country's population. The 
Kurdish question, like the Armenian question, arose from the very birth 
of the Turkish Republic, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The 
nationalist movement of the Young Turks, led by Kemal Pasha, was able to 
assert itself and establish the new state in 1922 only at the cost of 
completing the genocide of the Armenian people, begun during the war, 
definitively averting the formation of an independent Armenian state, a 
decision sanctioned by the Treaty of Lausanne. With the same treaty, it 
prevented the establishment of a Kurdistan state, resulting in the 
plateau being divided between Turkey, Syria (France as the mandatory 
state), Iraq (Great Britain as the mandatory state), and Iran (i.e., 
Persia, under British influence).
The repression of the Kurdish people in Turkey was thus able to 
continue, punctuated by numerous insurrections, until the PKK (Kurdish 
People's Party) began operating in 1971 and was finally established in 
1978. Using Iraqi Kurdistan as a base, it also waged armed struggle 
against Turkey, resorting to insurrectionary actions and, when these 
failed, even to terrorism, as the Zionists had done to build the State 
of Israel.
From then on, while a segment of the Kurds was active politically, 
forming parties and running in Turkish parliamentary elections, the PKK 
began to develop its own strategy, both political and social.
On the one hand, it aimed to establish an independent Kurdish state, but 
at the same time, aware that a nationalist movement was inherently 
structurally weak, as such a project would require significant changes 
to the borders of at least four states-in a region already balkanized 
and contested by the great powers-it believed it would need to be 
supported by a profound social revolution. This revolution, by 
restructuring the balance of power between classes and social classes, 
would simultaneously constitute a cultural, economic, and political 
revolution for the entire region, giving the political project of 
building an independent Kurdistan state its own identity. For this 
strategy to be successful, the project needed to be inclusive of all the 
peoples living in the territory.
The solution was found by gradually constructing a federal project, both 
libertarian and egalitarian, that envisioned broad territorial autonomy, 
a kind of communalism, characterized culturally and politically by 
absolute gender equality, to the point that every political and 
administrative office was held by a man and a woman. This choice 
entailed the armed mobilization of men and women and complete gender 
emancipation, and was accompanied by an attempt to build a service 
structure for the population, focusing primarily on education and 
healthcare.
This type of political project and social structure, if anything, 
accentuated the aversion of all the states in which the Kurdish people 
are distributed, due to the subversive nature of the proposed order and 
its cultural orientation compared to that prevailing in the states of 
the region. These states viewed the secular and egalitarian values 
affirmed and practiced by the Kurds as an extreme threat, especially 
given the Islamist influence of the systems, whether they were based on 
a Sunni, Shiite, or Alawite vision of Islam.
Starting from these premises, when the criminal US intervention in Iraq 
destroyed the country, dismissing the army and the Baathist officials 
who supported Saddam Hussein's government, nascent jihadism was able to 
give birth to the Islamic State, establishing the city of Raqqa as 
ISIS's capital and expanding its influence into the area occupied by the 
Kurds. At that point, for the Kurds, who in the meantime had risen up in 
arms and created their own autonomous space, taking advantage of the 
Syrian crisis, it became a natural choice to side with all those forces, 
including Western ones, that sought to oppose ISIS. This was with the 
dual objective of defending themselves from sworn enemies of their 
political and social project, and at the same time hoping that by 
offering their services to the West, the West would somehow support 
their demands, having always declared their support for the 
self-determination of peoples.
They hadn't yet understood how deceitful Westerners can be in keeping 
their promises, and that gratitude in politics and business is a 
nonexistent commodity. Above all, they hadn't understood that the United 
States doesn't have allies, but subjects, and therefore would have no 
hesitation in sacrificing them for its own interests (it's no 
coincidence that Native Americans nicknamed them "forked tongues").
So when, busy holding the survivors of the conflict prisoner and 
liquidating ISIS on the battlefield using Kurdish militias, after having 
employed them to guard the camps of the jihadists' families and the Al 
Aqtan prison, in Raqqa they have now decided to satisfy Turkey's demands 
to annihilate the Kurds, using pro-Turkish Islamist militias made up of 
jihadists recruited in the camps that have seized power in Syria, 
supported and directed by Turkey, and to evacuate the US bases in those 
territories, which were supposed to support Kurdish autonomy.
The result is the green light for 73,000 jihadists, ready to rekindle 
the violence of Islamic fundamentalism around the world and resume 
recruitment for the cause. At their disposal, these Salafist militias 
include 9,000 detained jihadist fighters, formerly held in Kurdish 
custody. Added to these are 6,500 members of Islamist militias from 42 
different countries, also now free, who will contribute to reviving 
Islamic radicalism. Completing the disengagement is the fact that the 
United States-as mentioned-withdrew from the Tanf base on February 11th. 
This base was crucial in destabilizing the Syrian government, countering 
Iranian presence, and allowing ISIS to rebuild itself over the course of 
eight years. With the fall of the Assad regime and the Iranian 
withdrawal from Syria, the United States deemed its role over and ended 
its presence in the Syrian desert of Homs, moving its forces to eastern 
Syria, where they will continue to maintain control of the oil fields 
and oversee the fragile situation in the country's northeast following 
the failure of the plan to use the Kurds. It is noteworthy that this 
withdrawal comes just days after the Russian army's withdrawal from its 
base in Qamishli, which forced them to concentrate on the coast.
The strategy developed by the United States envisions their place being 
taken by the Turks, considered the most reliable ally and capable of 
controlling the current Syrian regime led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolan, the 
former jihadist who has "cleaned up" and rebranded himself as Al-Sharaa, 
in an attempt to make people forget his past. This choice, by offering 
the Turks the final card to destroy the Kurdish entity (which is not 
unwelcome to the four states that host them) and placing Syria under 
Turkish aegis, brings that country's troops to the border of the State 
of Israel, allowing the United States to balance Israel's unchallenged 
control of the area and limit the Zionist lobby's influence on the US 
government. Once again in history, the Kurds are victims of the balance 
of power between the great powers vying for control of the Middle East 
and are being sacrificed, even more so when considering the content of 
their social, cultural, and political project. This proves that the 
West, which claims to fight in defense of the values of democracy, 
freedom, and women's participation, as well as the right to 
self-determination of peoples, when it comes to power and business, goes 
back on its word, renounces alliances, and crushes peoples.
The Kurdish leadership's (perhaps necessary) mistake was to have trusted 
the United States, to have believed in the Israeli plan to fragment the 
political order in the Middle East, and in the dream of being able to 
shatter the territorial unity of existing states to carve out their own 
independent national identity. They failed to fully grasp the 
subversive, social and cultural, scope of their goal.

Yet the fact remains that only an inclusive political project that 
provides for the equal involvement of different ethnic groups, 
linguistic groups, and religious groups can enable peaceful coexistence 
and peace in this troubled political, geographical, economic, and 
cultural area of the planet.

G.L.

The Kurdish People for the Social Revolution, Political Growth 
Newsletter, No. 156 - February 2022, Year 2022; The Flower of 
Secularism, Political Growth Newsletter, No. 127 - January 2020, Year 
2020; War on Coexistence, Political Growth Newsletter, No. 124 - October 
2019, Year 2019.

https://www.ucadi.org/2026/03/01/la-liquidazione-dei-curdi-del-rojava/
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