The Kurds vow to defend themselves—alone if necessary—against Syria, Turkey and Russia.
A fighter in the Syrian Democratic Forces in Qamishli, Syria, Nov. 19. Photo: Jonathan Spyer
The sound of Turkish artillery breaks the silence of the morning in the village of Umm Kaif, less than 2 miles from Tal Tamr near the Syrian-Turkish border. Despite the proclamation of a cease fire last month, the Turkish army and its Syrian rebel allies are still clashing with the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces, and lately also the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Kurdish mortars return fire a minute or so after the shelling starts. Umm Kaif’s defenders burn tires and oil, creating a cloud of black smoke intended to obscure the vision of the Turkish drones. It doesn’t work. The drones extract a steep price from the defending forces.
The road rapidly fills with vehicles as the remaining civilians in these front-line villages make for the relative safety of Tal Tamr and towns farther south. Cars and trucks overflow with whatever a family can carry—mattresses, bedding, tables, blankets.
The Turkish assault that began on Oct. 9 has carved out a 75-mile-long, 20-mile-deep zone of control between the towns of Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ain. The traditionally Christian (but now largely deserted) town of Tal Tamr stands in the way of further Turkish advances.
“Erdogan wants to attack further,” says SDF Gen. Mazloum Abdi. I interviewed the Kurdish commander at an SDF base near the town of Hasakah. “Everything now depends on the U.S. and the international community. If they apply pressure, the Turks won’t dare attack again.”
The conflict here has metastasized several times since hostilities began during the Arab Spring of 2011. From the chaos and fragmentation of the war between the Assad regime and various Sunni Arab rebel groups came the Islamic State. The U.S.-led war against ISIS, in turn, enabled the advance of Kurdish power in northeastern Syria, which has now led to a Turkish war to reverse Kurdish gains. Seven armies of various kinds are currently active in the triangle of Syrian soil east of the Euphrates River.
When President Trump announced the withdrawal of U.S. forces from northeast Syria in October, a Turkish invasion swiftly and predictably followed. The Syrian Kurds were faced with the choice of meeting the Turkish onslaught alone, or inviting regime and Russian forces into their area. They chose the latter course. This appeared initially likely to herald the rapid demise of the Kurdish autonomous authority in Rojava, which had been carved starting in mid-2012.
The current reality on the ground, however, belies this simple picture. The Assad regime is decrepit and lacking in manpower. The Kurdish-led SDF, meanwhile, remains vigorous and strong. For this reason the regime has yet to attempt to establish control on the ground in cities such as Derik, Hasakah and Qamishli, where checkpoints and daily security control remains in the hands of the Kurds and their allies.
In the front-line areas, Mr. Assad’s troops are poorly equipped, their uniforms threadbare. I watched in a village outside Tal Tamr as a regime medical officer petitioned representatives of an American nongovernmental organization for a long list of basic medicines that he lacked. SDF fighters report that regime soldiers beg for food because their rations are so meager.
Mr. Assad’s forces aren’t the conquering army of a powerful state. Rather, it is a force whose survival depends on the power of its allies. In northeast Syria, the real power is Russia, which is mediating between the Assad regime and the Kurds, and between the regime and the Turks.
Moscow would prefer to see Damascus re-exert control over all of Syria. But Russia’s considerations are complex. It also wants to widen the wedge between Turkey and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But Moscow has no special animus toward the Syrian Kurds, and sees no benefit in a renewed and bloody conflict between Mr. Assad’s forces and the SDF.
“The Russians are mediating,” says Gen. Mazloum, the Kurdish commander. “They are trying to induce us to move closer to the regime by using Turkey as a threat.” That is, Moscow is trying methodically to induce Kurdish acquiescence to a growing role for the Assad regime east of the Euphrates by threatening to permit a further Turkish assault on Kurdish population centers if the Kurds prove recalcitrant.
Gen. Mazloum is having none of it. “If the regime insists on a return to 2011, there will be a conflict,” he says, meaning the situation as it was before the emergence of the Kurdish autonomous authority. “We hope they don’t insist.”
In Brussels last week, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the Oct. 17 cease-fire agreement has “yet to be fulfilled,” by which he meant that SDF forces are still present in the area. Elsewhere, the foreign minister said that, “If we do not achieve any result, as we had started the operation before . . . we will do whatever is necessary in northern Syria.”
The Kurds remains defiant. “If the Turks attack again, we will fight. And depend on our forces. We know it will be hard. But we’ll fight,” says Gen. Mazloum.
It may be a long time before displaced people from Umm Kaif, Ras al-Ain, Tal Tamr and the other border towns can return to their homes. Normal life remains a distant dream here. Syria’s civil war, now in its ninth year, is far from over.
Mr. Spyer is director of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis and a research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and at the Middle East Forum. He is author of “Days of the Fall: A Reporter’s Journey in the Syria and Iraq Wars.”
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