After Assad, can the Kurds survive in Syria?

The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime has revealed a cruel reality – that the Syria marked on maps is a phantom, says Mark Almond

The US foreign policy establishment sees the return of Donald Trump to the White House as an imminent threat to the bipartisan consensus in foreign policy matters.

Joe Biden was understood to be the return to a “normal” foreign policy approach after the turbulence of Trump 1.0.

Biden has been staunchly critical of the Kremlin and four-square behind Israel. He has ramped up pressure on China and not relaxed it on North Korea.

Yet in one area – vital to the security, at least of those who live in it – the Biden administration has broken ranks with a US foreign policy tradition dating back to 1919. He now has less than six weeks left in the White House in which to abandon the Kurds.

Presidents of both US parties since the end of the First World War have uttered pieties about the Kurds’ rights to nationhood, or at least autonomy in the regions of Middle Eastern states where they live in large numbers – Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.

Like Jewish people before the establishment of Israel in 1948, Kurds are the classic “nation without a state”.

A little over a century ago – and excited by Woodrow Wilson’s call for self-determination in the wake of the collapse of great empires in 1918 – a delegation of Kurds from the defunct Ottoman empire bound a copy of the president’s Fourteen Points into their Quran and set off, full of hope, to the Paris Peace Conference. Cruel disappointment awaited them.

Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, admitted afterwards that he, his boss and the other allied leaders had no inkling of how many ethnic and religious “minorities” would emerge from the collapsed Ottoman, Habsburg and Romanov empires and demanded Wilson implement “self-determination” for them.

As is clear in today’s Syria, competing claims were lodged by Arabs (Sunni and Shia), Kurds, as well as Turkoman and Armenians (at least those who had survived 1915) to the same plots of land.

A worse problem for Washington, then as now, was that its allied great powers, with little concern for minority rights and none for self-determination, were determined to use territory inhabited by Kurds or other groups for their imperial and strategic purposes.

The British and French in 1919, and the Turks and Israelis today, have grand designs of their own which allocate at best an auxiliary role to the inhabitants of Syria. If ever Assad’s regime ruled a functioning state, however awful, its collapse has ushered in the cruel reality that the Syria marked on maps and seated at the UN is a phantom.

All eyes are on Damascus and the arrival of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) as the new rulers, and maybe born-again jihadis at that. But across Syria, other paramilitary groups have been establishing themselves as the local rulers or fighting rivals to try to achieve that.

Our focus on Syria’s nominal capital has distracted us from the emerging civil wars elsewhere in Syria and the geopolitical games played by the two big neighbours, Israel and Turkey.

Israel’s hamstringing of Assad’s ally, Hezbollah, in the weeks before the Syrian uprising, left Iran impotent to intervene. Now Israel has been destroying Assad’s military legacy.

The huge airstrikes have not only disarmed Syria as a state. They have left any militantly anti-Jewish groups without the mix of residual chemical weapons and ordinary munitions or rockets to attack Israel.

Israeli raids, however, have also destroyed the chance for groups like the Kurds to inherit Assad’s air defence or other weapons to protect themselves from their main enemy, Turkey, and its local Arab and Turkomen proxies in northeast Syria.

Israel has good relations with the Kurds running northern Iraq, partly because both fear neighbouring Iran – but it doesn’t trust Erdogan’s Turkey. Unlike Israel, Turkey has a huge Kurdish minority of its own, dwarfing the Kurdish-run regions in northern Iraq and Syria.

Viable self-government for Kurds there threatens the territorial integrity of Turkey. It does much the same for Iran and whoever rules in Baghdad or Damascus.

From presidents Truman and Eisenhower, through Nixon to the Bushes, Washington has hinted at support for Kurds’ rights… before pulling the plug on them.

In the Cold War, their leaders were tarred as communists – and “Apo” Ocalan of Turkey’s PKK and its Syrian offshoots certainly was – or later as a blockage to a regional carve-up, or even to “peace” itself.

The United States has been protecting the Kurds of north and eastern Syria since the grim battles against Isis culminated in 2017.

What the US Air Force and about 900 ground troops have been protecting the Kurds from is not Isis or even Assad’s forces. The Kurds needed American patronage to shield them from Washington’s Nato ally, Turkey.

Brutal fighting around Manbij near the Turkish border and in the southeast at Deir Ezzor on the Euphrates has seen the Kurdish so-called Syrian Democratic forces squeezed by Turkish proxies and the US military’s decision to let HTS take local oil and grain fields over from them.

It is still far from certain whether Washington will abandon the Kurds altogether. Maybe it will protect a rump region.

But courting the HTS that has in the past been hostile to the Kurds’ secular model – with its women’s rights, for instance – raises the spectre of Washington ditching them once more for Machiavellian geopolitical reasons.

Will someone lean over Joe Biden’s shoulder soon and say: “Mr President, you have reached the point in your presidency when you can betray the Kurds”? Or will Mr Biden break the mould and leave the White House with at least one promise partly fulfilled?

Or will it just be in Donald Trump’s in-tray?

Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford