Campbell on the fallout from the selling out of the Kurds
Less than a week can seem like a long time in politics…Reportedly, the US betrayal of the Kurds in northern Syria has not only trashed the Kurds’ bold experiment in egalitarian self-rule, but has also pushed them into the arms of the Assad regime. Yesterday, the Kurdish administration in the formerly autonomous region announced that it would be allowing Assad’s Syrian Army forces to be deployed along the Syrian/Turkish border, in an attempt to fend off the Turkish offensive.
The move, announced on Sunday,
represents a major shift in alliance for Syria's
Kurds…..The Kurdish-led administration in a statement on
Facebook said it had brokered the agreement with Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad's government to counter
Turkey's ongoing push, which has drawn widespread
condemnation.
"In order to prevent and confront
this aggression, an agreement has been reached with the
Syrian government ... so that the Syrian army can deploy
along the Syrian-Turkish border to assist the Syrian
Democratic Forces (SDF)," the statement said.
Clearly this move - while understandable - will
serve to strengthen Assad’s grip on power. It will also
create a serious risk of direct fighting between the Syrians, the Turks and the
murderous local militias who are allied to Turkey.
Should the Syrian Army come off badly in these exchanges, there is an added risk that Assad’s allies (Russia and Iran) could be drawn in. If which case, Israel would probably not remain on the sidelines…
In less than
a week, the conflict has already cost hundreds of lives, including the murder by a Turkish-backed
miitia of a leading female Kurdish politician, Hevrin
Khalaf.
This blood is on the hands of Turkish
president Recep Tayytip Erdogan, but the spiral into chaos
has been the direct result of US President Donald Trump’s
removal of US troops from northern Syria. The US presence
had provided a layer of protection long promised to the
Kurds, in return for them doing the bulk of the fighting
(and the dying) on the battlefield against Islamic State.
Their efforts saved American lives.
The US has now thrown
its Kurdish ally under the bus. It has done so mainly in
order that the Psychopath-in-Chief can brag on the election
campaign trail next year that it was he who brought
America’s soldiers home from Syria, safe and sound.: Trump’s decision has been met with shame
and revulsion by some of the US troops
involved.
….Some of the Special
Forces officers who battled alongside the Kurds say they
feel deep remorse at orders to abandon their allies. “They
trusted us and we broke that trust,” one Army officer who
has worked alongside the Kurds in northern Syria said last
week in a telephone interview. “It’s a stain on the
American
conscience.
History As
A Flat Circle
Sadly, even those who clearly
remember the lessons of history can be forced to repeat
them. As this article points out, this is the
fourth time in living memory that the United States has
betrayed the Kurds, and their fighters. The US sold them out
to Saddam Hussein in the mid 1970s after Saddam suddenly and
surprisingly signed a pact with the Shah of Iran. The US
then stood quietly by in 1988 as Saddam gassed thousands of
Kurds with chemical weapons in the city of Halabja– and
after Saddam ceased to be a reliable American ally, the
Kurds were sold out yet again when they rose up in rebellion
after the First Gulf War, in the belief that the Americans
had been encouraging them to do so. Instead, the Americans
sat on their hands as Saddam regrouped, and slaughtered
them.
As that disaster unfolded in the early 1990s, the
world’s conscience was briefly stirred by the sight of
thousands of Kurdish refugees fleeing across the mountains
from Saddam’s wrath. Ultimately, very little of the funds
raised in May 1991 by Lord Jeffrey Archer’s rock star-
laden “Concert for the Kurds” ever reached them. At
best, 250,000 pounds reportedly got to the Kurdish people on
the ground in Iraq, from an event that claimed at the time
to have raised 57 million pounds.
The Kurds are the world’s fourth largest ethnic group. All logic would indicate that they should have had a homeland long ago, after the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War One. Instead, the victors of the Great War divvied up the spoils between themselves as they created new countries in the Middle East by drawing arbitrary boundary lines that are still sources of conflict now, a century later. The Kurds lost out heavily during this process. Bits of what should – arguably - have been a unified Kurdistan were parcelled out to French and British puppets in Syria, Iraq and Iran, and the Kurds have been at the mercy of a succession of neo-colonial oppressors ever since. In the 1920s, the birth of a fiercely nationalistic Turkey under Kemal Ataturk proved to be an especially cruel disaster for the Kurds.
Footnote One: Supposedly the Turks have launched their current offensive in order to create a’ safe zone’ free of the alleged Kurdish “ terrorists” who live on territory that’s adjacent to Turkey’s southern border with Syria. This ‘safe zone’ will function as a tool of ethnic cleansing as Kurdish villagers are driven out, and nearly a million of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees currently camped on Turkish soil get moved onto their land. As Al Jazeera has just reported (link above) the ambitions of the Turkish invaders have expanded over the past few days :
The "safe zone" Turkey had
proposed was to span a stretch of territory 120 km wide and
30km deep inside Syria. But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday the
area may be wider, running between the towns of Hassakeh and
Kobane, a stretch of 440km.
Greed is one
of the driving forces:
Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr,
reporting from Akcakale on the Turkey-Syria border, said the
withdrawal of US forces from northern Syria had put "the
whole area up for grabs". "There's more than one player in
the Syrian conflict who wants to control this territory,
which has oil and is the bread basket of Syria," she said.
The pact between the Kurds and Assad's government indicates
the end to the Kurdish-led administration's rule in Syria,
Khodr added.
Footnote
Two : The US Military Times has a
useful summary of how hundreds of the Islamic State fighters
formerly held captive in northern Syria are now free to
return to the battlefield, thanks to the turmoil generated
by this week’s outbreak of fighting. The freed IS fighters include dozens of
their most dangerous leaders:
For its part, Turkey
has never been unduly bothered by the rise of Islamic State.
It tended to treat the Sunni fundamentalists as a tool to
weaken Assad and one of his closest allies, Iran. In
Turkey’s view, it is only its enemies elsewhere in the
region and the unbelievers in the West who have any reason
to fear Islamic State’s resurrection.
Remember the
Truxtun?
Talking
of US military forces….veteran peace campaigners may
recall the visit of the US destroyer Truxtun to
Wellington in May 1982, and the protest flotilla that
greeted the ship’s arrival. The Truxtun visit was
one of the key events that helped build the anti-nuclear
movement that eventually drove New Zealand out of ANZUS.
Incredibly, the
Truxtun is still in active service. Over the past
year, it has also become the cutting edge vessel in the US
Navy’s efforts to foster more efficient use of fuel, thereby reducing the Navy’s emissions
profile.
Essentially, the Truxtun has been the first (and thus far, the only) US Navy vessel converted to run on an electric hybrid drive system that enables the destroyer to switch off its dependence on fossil fuels whenever it is sailing at lower speeds, below 13 knots.
So….the same ship that was once a catalyst for the anti-nuclear movement would probably be welcomed back here now as the prime example of the climate change prevention measures being investigated by the US Navy. On occasions, 37 years can be a short time in politics.
Summertime, livin’
easy
Summer is just around
the corner. Supposedly, there are over 25,000 recorded
versions of George Gershwin’s song “ Summertime”
from Porgy and Bess. From Ella
Fitzgerald to Norah Jones, there have been any number of
classic renditions. Yet back in 1965, the soul singer Billy
Stewart had a smash hit with an exuberant assault on the old
standard that once heard, can never be forgotten :
Stewart died in the early 1970s just before his 33rd birthday, in a car accident that also killed several members of his band. He was not just a one-hit fluke. The doowop-derived “Sittin’ In the Park” is another soul music standard :