Turkey is threatening with a new offensive in Syria, invoking the danger of Kurdish terrorism. This danger appears to be low in Mardin, near the Kurdish-Syrian border, which confirms expert analyses according to which the Erdoğan regime is in fact trying to divert attention from the economic crisis it is facing.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan threatens with an intervention in Syria to divert attention from Turkey's economic problems
The key issues on today's international political agenda include the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan threatening to attack northwestern Syria. The official reason is the threat to Turkey posed by what Ankara sees as “Kurdish terrorists” in the region, specifically the Kurdish militias called the People's Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG). The connection of these militias with the PKK is quasi-known, but the YPG was also the main resistance force on the battlefield in northern Syria against the Islamic State, benefiting from Washington's support.The operation that Erdoğan is threatening with would be the fourth of its kind in the last six years, after those of 2016, 2018 and 2019. Those were used by the Ankara regime in the electoral contexts of those years but also to set up dozens of bases in the northern part of the neighboring state, at an important segment of the Turkish-Syrian border. According to statements made by the Turkish president himself , the main targets are now Manbij and Tell Rifaat, who, if the operation were to take place, should be brought under the control of pro-Turkish jihadist militias, although the population in the area is predominantly Kurdish. And the operation would mean a confrontation in Manbij with the YPG and their allies and in Tell Rifaat with the forces of Damascus and Russia. One major vulnerability of this plan is that a direct threat from the Syrian Kurds to Turkey is difficult to prove. The YPG has rarely used its positions to launch attacks on this country and when it did it was mainly in response to artillery bombardment from Turkish territory.
Experts in the matter therefore believe that Ankara's threat must be understood as part of the regime's strategy to reactivate militaristic-nationalist issues, in order to minimize its inability to solve the country's real problems: the unprecedented economic and financial crisis, marked by an accelerated rise in inflation and deficits. Under these circumstances, Erdoğan's regime chooses to act in northern Syria even against the interests of other important actors, such as the USA, Russia or Iran. They also choose to inflame the relation with Greece to an unprecedented level or oppose the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO, in a bid to strengthen the nationalist and anti-Western support base in the Turkish electorate. By the same token, Ankara undermines the position of its Western allies by persistently refusing to comply with the international sanctions against Russia, with some sources indicating that it would rather accommodate major Russian companies, including Gazprom, when they leave Europe.
A fourth Turkish military operation in northwestern Syria therefore seems to be designed to actually strengthen Ankara's control of Syria and support the important nationalist and anti-Western segment of the Turkish electorate for the current regime. This perspective, shared by many other experienced analysts, was confirmed to me by what I experienced in the five days I spent in mid-June in the Mardin area, just twenty kilometers from the Turkish-Syrian border.
Mardin, Tur Abdin – the calm before the storm in the Mesopotamian plain
Mardin and the region in which it is located, Tur Abdin, were once extremely cosmopolitan. The population included Armenian and Syriac Christians (Süryani, a population considered descendant of the ancient Assyrians), Jews, Sunni Hanafi and Sufi Muslims (Kurds, Arabs, Turks), Yazidis, Alevi, and many other ethno-religious identities. Many languages were spoken, including Armenian, Neo-Aramaic Süryanic and Hebrew, an Arabic dialect specific to the region, Kurdish Kurmanji and other Kurdish dialects, Turkish, etc. The Tur Abdin plateau has also been, for over 14 centuries, the historical home of the Syriac Christians, where their legendary monasteries, Mor Gabriel and Mor Hananyo (Deyrul Zafaran) can still be visited.
The massacres committed in the region in the last years of the Ottoman Empire led to the disappearance of the Armenian and Jewish populations, but there remained the majority Kurds, Arabs and Süryani Syriac who have been preserving the traditional cultural diversity alongside the Turks. I met many locals, of all generations, who were fluent in at least 3-4 local idioms, plus the official Turkish language. A girl working at the hotel where I was staying confessed to me in Turkish, with a pronounced Arabic accent, that she really liked idioms; she already knew six local dialects and was planning to learn more.
I also went to the village of Savur (Dereiçi / Kıllıt), where the PKK terrorist war against the Turkish state, which began in 1984 and intensified in the 1990s, drove away most of the population, especially Süryani Christians. Abandoned houses and the Mor Yuhanun Church are painful testimonies. A local named Sami opened for us the church he takes care of, even though there are no longer parishioners. He and his mother speak neo-Aramaic natively, but this language is on the verge of extinction because most of the other native speakers have fled the war, especially to Western Europe. The two use Turkish, Mardin Arabic and some words in the Kurdish dialect Kurmanji in order to be able to live together with the other inhabitants of the area.
But the atmosphere was peaceful and I had the same impression in Mardin. People usually converse in the languages and dialects mentioned earlier and are very kind to tourists, who are not very numerous due to the economic problems facing the whole country. The civil war in Syria and the disaster caused by the Islamic State just a few tens of kilometers to the south have left their mark, but the locals have been moving on with their lives. Politically, however, the Ankara regime dealt a severe blow to local democracy when it fired Mardin's elected mayor, the experienced Kurdish politician Akmet Türk, on charges of “supporting terrorist organizations”, for attending a YPG fighter's funeral.
Türk was acquitted in this case in February 2020 but was not allowed to return to the post of mayor, which remained in the hands of the governor (vali, prefect) of Mardin, appointed by President Erdoğan. It was a second such experience for Akmet Türk, whose first term as mayor, won in the 2014 local elections, was also interrupted following his arrest in November 2016 on “terrorism charges”. Although he was released in February 2017, just like in 2020, Türk was not reinstated as mayor, and his office remained under the control of the district governor, appointed by President Erdoğan.
Turkey’s policy towards the Kurds, dictated by the interests of the Erdoğan regime
While I was in Mardin, I had conversations with locals from all walks of life and from almost all ethnic communities. They do not avoid politically sensitive topics but ask for their names not to be published in media materials. This must be understood and respected. After the first general elections fo June 2015, when the current regime lost the Parliament majority, the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK was rekindled. Subsequent constitutional amendments and the transition, from January 2018, to presidential system of governing have brought the armed forces, the police and the judiciary under the direct control of the Presidential Chancellery.
Anything interpreted at those levels as an act of terrorism or supporting terrorism inevitably leads to imprisonment. We hear daily news of people arrested on charges of collaborating with the “terrorist organization”, including journalists and politicians, Kurds in particular. Even a traditional Kurdish dance, halay, was interpreted by a university in Izmir as a “provocative action”. This is because the dancing students were in fact protesting against the recent attack perpetrated by an ultra-nationalist group on other students who had danced halay at a university in Antalya.
It should be added that almost 50 Kurdish mayors in southeastern Anatolia have been suspended and, just like with Ahmet Türk, their duties have been taken over by interim administrators (kayyum) appointed by the all-powerful presidency in Ankara. Those mayors, elected by the local population in 2019, are either already imprisoned or under judicial investigation, along with dozens of other Kurdish politicians and journalists, all accused of collaborating, in various ways, with the “terrorist organization” or its affiliated organizations. The euphemism is necessary because the Ankara authorities generally refrain from naming the PKK, and they do not officially acknowledge in legal documents the existence of the Kurdish minority.
The main issue here, especially from the perspective of the states where justice and independence are non-negotiable, is that Turkey has always used vague definitions of terrorism. This strategy, although condemned by the European Union, the Council of Europe and other organizations and states, has allowed the Ankara regimes, whatever they may have been, to extend indefinitely the effects of anti-terrorism legislation and policies. They have been applied to any act or organization perceived as hostile by those regimes.
In the case of the current regime, the policy towards the Kurds was initially an unprecedented friendly one, translating in the peace process of 2009-2015 and certain rights won by the minority. However, the positive evolution proved to be radically reversible. In March 2015, when the leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP party, Selahattin Demirtaș, bluntly stated that he and his party did not support Erdoğan's plans for a presidential system, which would be implemented three years later, it was actually the beginning of the regime's hostility towards the Kurds. The peace process was interrupted, the reforms virtually canceled, and the conflict with the PKK resumed. Just a year later, in 2016, the first Turkish military operation against Kurdish militias in northern Syria, the YPG, treated as a Syrian branch of the PKK, took place.
The regime's ferocity has now exceeded the regional boundaries of this confrontation, extending towards NATO, where Ankara's opposition to Finland’s and Sweden's accession to the organization is officially motivated by what the Turkish regime perceives as support given by these countries to the YPG militias. Basically, Ankara wants the two Scandinavian states to abandon their democratic principles, with a long tradition, and to adopt the evasive Turkish interpretations and approaches to terrorism.
The pro-government press in Ankara, which dominates the national media landscape, insists on the intense activities of the YPG militias, which, for example, operate a broad network of tunnels around Tell Rifaat. However, the same media omit to say that those tunnels serve in the confrontations with the rebel jihadist militias in the area, more or less coordinated by Ankara against the Kurds and the Damascus regime. All this while in Mardin and the Tur Abdin region, on the Turkish-Syrian border, there’s been no record of and I have not witnessed any terrorist attacks on or towards the sovereign territory of Turkey.
Will the Turks attack and why should we care?
If it happens, a fourth Turkish attack in northern Syria will be perceived as serving the interests of the Ankara regime, which, unable to resolve its serious socio-economic issues, is turning to nationalist militarism in order to secure for itself a chance in the local, parliamentary and presidential elections due in June 2023. The current polls do not support such optimism but the stakes are high. In 2023, the centenary of the Republic will also be celebrated and the current regime has only two alternatives: to celebrate the centenary in power or, if it loses all three elections, to account for what the opposition considers to be serious violations of national laws and interests in the last two decades.
A new attack would thus represent another episode in the Ankara regime's fight with the Kurds who supported the peace process with the Turkish state but have opposed authoritarianism in recent years. However, the attack should be facilitated by Moscow and Washington, which control the airspace in the region. The Russians and Americans can tolerate limited action on Ankara’s part, as they need its support against the background of the war in Ukraine. And the establishment of Turkish control in Tell Rifaat and Manbij would not affect the area of Russian interest in northwestern Syria or the American one in the northeast. But the expansion of Turkish territorial control visibly disturbs Iran, which is becoming increasingly and openly irritated, especially as localities with a predominantly Shiite population in the vicinity of Tell Rifaat would become extremely vulnerable. In addition, the long-term territorial sovereignty of Damascus is at stake.
But the main victim of a fourth Turkish attack would be stability in the region, an issue that official statements from Washington, Moscow, Damascus or Tehran also draw attention to. From what I’ve seen there, it is a relatively poor but peaceful corner of the world. The people of Mardin and the region on the Turkish-Syrian border are not talking about attacks from Syria, but about how they are affected by Ankara's policies that have led to an unprecedented economic crisis and the failure of the Turkish-Kurdish peace process.
The same policies, especially hostile to the Kurds, extended after 2016 to the Syrian territories controlled by Ankara. Turkey is likely to apply the same strategy in the area targeted by the fourth attack as in other parts it already controls in northern Syria: entrusting local security to Sunni militias and building facilities to accommodate refugees, especially Sunni Arabs, although the Kurds are dominant in the region. This will fuel the local conflicts and the pressure from the government in Damascus, eager to regain its sovereign rights throughout Syria, will increase. This will most likely lead to tensions between Turkey, Syria and the main supporters of the Assad regime, namely Russia and Iran. It remains to be seen how much the United States will choose to get involved.
Overall, this scenario can only lead to another forging of identities in the area and an extension of the conflict. That is, maintaining the threat of new waves of refugees who, as always, will choose to leave the Islamic “paradise” in the hope of a normal life in Europe or America. If a fourth Turkish attack is averted, people will continue to live a precarious life in Mardin, Tur Abdin, Tell Rifaat, Manbij and other parts of northern Syria where the Kurds remain predominant. But at least they can hope for peace.
