Are the Kurds Giving Up Their Independence Movement?

This week, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, a longtime thorn in Turkey's side, announced it would disband. Earlier this year, the Syrian Democratic Forces also announced it would gradually integrate with the other Syrian rebel forces that took down the Assad regime last December. This makes me wonder: are the Kurdish people giving up their cause for independence, and what does this mean for the region?

The Kurds are an ethnic group related to Persians and many other groups found in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. They have long been a nation without a state, and for centuries most of them have been under Turkish rule, starting with the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s. When the Ottoman Empire was defeated at the end of World War I, Kurds hoped they might gain independence. There was a plan for an independent Kurdistan in the Treaty of Sevres, but that idea was tossed aside by the new Republic of Turkey. The new Turkish government has persecuted Kurds just as heavily as the Ottomans, and that persecution, coupled with the hope of national independence movements during and after World War I, has brought about decades of various conflicts. For about a century, "Kurdistan" has been split between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

Kurds have generally stayed Muslim, but some independence movements have taken a socialist or communist stance. The armed groups founded by Kurds include the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Turkey), the Syrian Democratic Forces (Syria), and Peshmerga (Iraq). The Kurdistan Workers' Party has been the most troublesome for Turkey and other NATO countries, aligning itself with communist ideology until the '90s and using terror tactics that make it get labelled as a terrorist group by Turkey and many other countries. (On the other hand, maybe they wouldn't be fighting Turkey at all if Turkey would just give Kurds the independence they desire.)

The Syrian Democratic Forces deserves attention by itself. When the Syrian civil war began, the SDF soon decided to join the rebellion against Assad, seeking to set up a democratic, autonomous region for the Kurds and others. Soon, their attention turned to ISIS, whose wicked presence was not only swallowing up land in Syria but threatened Kurdish lands as well. The SDF and other armies started focusing on getting rid of ISIS on the map, and the SDF started to get attention from American government officials and the media. SDF fighters are often women, which is unusual for an army (and a Muslim one at that), and the SDF was taking more land from ISIS than most other armies. As a result, the SDF had almost all the land east of the Euphrates, and it was the SDF that delivered the final blow to ISIS (territorially) on March 23, 2019, a day I remember well. 

Turkey, on the other hand, has decided on a few separate occasions to invade Syrian territory. The first time was justified in that ISIS was right on the border, and so Turkey took over some ISIS territory in Syria. In the same offensive, however, the Turks invaded SDF territory, and Turkey has launched three more offensives against SDF territory since then. Turkey sees the SDF and the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) as one and the same. I can't believe how stupid that is. The SDF has not invaded Turkey, neither does it commit terrorist attacks, and has often been a force of good against ISIS especially. The political ideologies of the SDF and PKK are very different as well. The US has often cooperated with SDF forces, and the SDF has proven to be a reliable ally. Turkish offensives against the SDF have not only made Turkey look bad (and neo-Ottoman) but it also gives ISIS a chance to resurge. The Turkish offensives also make a mockery of the hope for peace in Syria with such names as "Olive Branch", "Peace Spring", and "Dawn of Freedom", despite being new escalations of the Syrian civil war, which now appears to be a proxy war between Israel and Turkey.

Anyway, since the fall of the Assad regime, the SDF has recognized the need for Syria to unite and rebuild. They announced back in March that they would gradually fold into the new Syrian Armed Forces. Last week, the PKK laid down their arms and disbanded. I never heard the reason why, but maybe they took note of what the Syrian Kurds were doing. I haven't heard about what Peshmerga, the Iraqi Kurdish army, has done, but maybe they will decide to quietly disband next. Whatever the case, I hope that the countries in which the Kurds live, especially Turkey, will stop persecuting the Kurdish population so that peace in the northern Levant might actually become a reality.