Turkish Invasion of SyriaThe Background

By Lord Hylton

To understand this, it helps to know the origins of the Kurdish people and some recent history in Turkey, Syria and nearby.

The Kurds are an ancient national and cultural group, not Arab and not Turkish.

They claim descent from the Medes, who were well-known to the classical Greeks and Israelites as allies of the Persians.

Their language is akin to modern Iranian or Dari, but divides into several main dialects. Their traditional villages were built back to back against cliffs or mountains, with pale blue as the favourite house colour.

This is a physical refection of the old saying “The mountain is the only friend of the Kurds.”The total Kurdish population of Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria may exceed 30 million. (There are no reliable census fgures.) They constitute the world’s largest national group, without a state to protect them. Many émigré Kurds live in Germany and Scandinavia, with a substantial group in Britain, mainly in London and the south-east.

In history, the Kurds, along with the Armenians, often found themselves squeezed between the rival empires of Rome (later Byzantium) and Persia. This pressure continued after the Ottoman Turks came to power in Istanbul, and later Iranian dynasties ruled in Isfahan or Tehran. The Kurds never developed a royal family, but were ruled by powerful tribal chieftains.

The end of the First World War saw the emergence of a republican Turkey under Ataturk, with new artifcial states in Syria and Iraq, under French and British short-term control. Iran fell under the sway of the new Pahlevi dynasty. In all of these countries the educated, commercial and ruling class was relatively small, with a large mainly illiterate rural population.

After 1945 secular Arab national governments emerged in Syria and Iraq, led by Baath parties, while Turkey swung between parliamentary and military rule. Ataturk had succeeded in establishing a central- ized unitary state, where all inhabitants were considered to be Turks, who must use and be educated in the national language.

This attempted suppression of Kurdish identity led to frequent but unsuccessful revolts in the 1920s and 1930s. There was also a failed attempt to set up a republic of Madabah in western Iran in the late 1940s. Kurdistan Peoples’ Party

By 1980 a new player had appeared in the form of a left-wing, somewhat Marxist political party, the PKK, or Kurdish Workers’ Party, with a strong armed wing. When attempts at political progress failed, they took to physical force. With the connivance of President Assad senior, they mounted armed attacks from Syria into Turkey.

They established cells in mountain villages and in the main cities of south-east Turkey, where the bulk of the Kurdish population lived.

The Government responded with martial law in ten provinces, together with much alleged torture of prisoners. A brutal counter-insurgency policy included concentrating country people into villages protected by armed guards, barbed wire and land mines.

As a result many fed to Diyarbakir, Mardin and other towns, while large numbers moved to Ankara, Istanbul and Smyrna. Others were accepted as refugees in Western Europe. Much of the countryside was left barren and fears were evident in the towns.

When I frst went with the late Lord Avebury to Turkish elections in 1994, the situation was quiescent, though with sporadic guerrilla fghting in spring, summer and autumn.

The PKK were guilty of murdering some Turkish teachers and other offcials drafted into the south-east. They also set off bombs in Turkish sea-side tourist resorts. It was therefore not unreasonable to list them as a terrorist organization.

This label was all the more convincing, when the PKK attempted bank robberies and extortion from businesses in Europe.

In 1999 the situation changed again, when Abdullah Oçalan, the founder and leader of the PKK was captured in Nairobi and sent back to Turkey.

There he was sentenced to life imprisonment and held on Imrali, a small island in the sea of Marmara, usually in solitary confnement. In this harsh environment, he appears to have dropped his Marxism (which had by then lost power in the former Soviet Union). Instead he developed a new brand of political thought, based on local and regional communities, common citizenship and full rights and participation by women. To my mind this new thinking, sometimes called “democratic confederalism” is neither Marxist nor Islamist, even though the great majority of Kurds belong to the Sunni Muslim tradition. It could provide a model for the many mixed cultures and ethnicities of the Middle East.

Oçalan has clearly infuenced the PKK. Between 2000 and 2010 they tried hard to achieve ceasefres inside Turkey, which would allow the return of their combatants, who had taken cover in the predominantly Kurdish area of the Candil mountains, in northern Iraq. Before and after 2000 the Turkish army launched cross-border attacks, in not very successful attempts to root out the would-be insurgents.

The fact that these attacks were hardly criticized by the outside world, may now encourage Turkey to expect that it can disregard the recognized frontiers of Syria, by setting up a so-called “buffer zone” on the south side of the international border.

In Syria, Oçalan’s new thinking has had a major impact on the Kurdish people, concentrated in the north-east and north of the country.

They had suffered severely under the rule of the Assads, rather and son. Many had been deprived of full citizenship, while Arab families had been settled on some of the best farmland near the frontier with Turkey. There were restrictions on the Kurdish language,