A Road Unforeseen

by Meredith Tax

  Information about Turkey’s relationship with Daesh was also starting to trickle out. On September 17, an Alawite nurse who worked at a private hospital near the border wrote a letter to Parliament and the police saying she was sick and tired of having to care for wounded jihadis. “The ISIL commander named Muhammet Ali R. who was admitted to our hospital on Aug. 7 was treated at room number 323. Many of his bodyguards kept watch around the hospital. Many other ISIL commanders like him and soldiers have been treated at our hospital, and returned to war after the completion of their treatment. I don’t want to help these people. I want you to inspect these hospitals. And I am referring the owners of the hospital and its management to God.” It later came out that the person who had been placing Daesh fighters for care in Turkish hospitals was none other than Erdogan’s daughter Sumeyye.15

  After the battle of Sinjar, the Obama administration debated whether to give air support to the Syrian Kurds. As the attack on Kobane continued, pressure to do something mounted. What was holding the President back? He had already authorized airstrikes in Iraq and air drops of supplies in the Sinjar Mountains. “We’re not going to let them create some caliphate through Syria and Iraq,” he told Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times in August, but the US could not get more involved without “partners on the ground who are capable of filling the void.”16

  He meant partners who wouldn’t offend Turkey; even if the Kurds were the only ones willing to fight Daesh, they had to be kept at arm’s length. The Obama administration’s position made no sense to anybody who knew what was actually going on. David Romano, a Middle East specialist at the University of Missouri with a weekly column in Rudaw, an Iraqi Kurdish publication, wrote on July 26: “Let us look at the PYD’s [Democratic Union Party] concrete record of action since it took control of large parts of northern Syria and declared autonomy in the cantons of Kobane, Cizre and Afrin. They held municipal elections. They provided refuge to Arab, Turkmen, Christian, and other refugees from all over Syria. They incorporated not just Kurds, but also Arabs, Turkmen and Christians into the autonomous administrations of all three cantons. They protected all of them from both Daesh and the Assad regime. They empowered women, arming them, and placing females into leadership positions of every single municipality the PYD controls. They have committed no massacres, and they continue to insist that they want only good relations with Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds. They did all of this while being isolated, starved economically, and pressured militarily from all sides.”17

  Daesh attacks on Kobane kept getting worse. Kurds in Turkey and other parts of Rojava were desperate to join the fight, but the Erdogan government was determined to keep the border closed in both directions. Asya Tekin, a Turkish reporter for Jinha, the Kurdish women’s online news service, described the scene at the border, with thousands of refugees on the Syrian side trying to flee Kobane. “They were mostly women, children, elderly people. People were crossing with giant bags of stuff, with their cars and sheep. There was no water and food. The [Turkish] police opened fire with teargas. People on this side of the border know about teargas, but people from Rojava had never experienced it before and they thought it was a chemical weapon attack against them. That was what they were most familiar with, so they hid under blankets. A reporter . . . ran to help them and told them that they needed to run away from the teargas. A lot of women were screaming because they couldn’t find their children. There were hundreds of journalists there and they were also attacked. A lot of journalists stopped their journalism role, abandoned our jobs, because we needed to help the people urgently. That was the first day. After that there was an attack every day. Turkish police and soldiers were there in their thousands and launched attacks with teargas, batons, and with live ammunition. There were tanks, soldiers on foot, and bullets being fired.”18

  On October 2, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a small London nonprofit that was the most trusted group tracking the Syrian war and its victims, reported that Daesh had surrounded Kobane with thirty to fifty tanks, which were shelling the city, sections of which were going up in flames. Daesh and the YPG-YPJ were clashing only hundreds of meters away from Kobane to the east and southeast of the city, and two or three kilometers to the west. It was clear that Kobane was about to fall and that Daesh would massacre anyone still there. Three hundred thousand people had already fled; now the PYD moved the rest into makeshift refugee camps at the Turkish border, to clear Kobane for street fighting. On October 3, Daesh captured the eastern part of the city and raised the black flag on Mistenur Hill above the town.19

  That same day, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu promised that Turkey would do whatever was necessary to prevent the fall of Kobane but refused to make any definite commitment. The next day, Erdogan held a press conference. He said, “For us, the PKK is the same as ISIL. It is wrong to consider them as different from each other.” He refused to send any help, saying Turkey was helping enough already by taking in refugees and was not going to bow to people “involved in PKK terrorism.”20

  The Turkish Army massed tanks at the border, but their only purpose seemed to be to prevent Kurds who wanted to get to Kobane from crossing. In protest, the HDP and the Kurdish youth group YDG-H organized massive demonstrations all over Turkey. As protestors crowded the streets, they were attacked by fascists and the police; there were fifty-five deaths between October 7 and October 10.21

  The siege of Kobane convinced most Kurds that the Turkish government was secretly supporting Daesh. Abu Khaled, the nomme de guerre of an ex-jihadi interviewed by journalist Michael Weiss, told him, “During the Kobani war, shipments of weapons arrived to ISIS from Turkey. Until now, the gravely wounded go to Turkey, shave their beards, cut their hair, and go to the hospital. Somebody showed me pictures in Kobani. You see ISIS guys eating McDonald’s french fries and hamburgers. Where did they get it? In Turkey.”

  He also told Weiss that Daesh openly proselytized in Turkey. The border town of Kilis, he said, had two important mosques. “This one [is] for the Islamic State. You go there, everybody says, ‘You want to go to Syria?’ They arrange your travel back and forth. And the other mosque is for Jabhat al-Nusra.”22

  Knowing that an air war alone could not defeat Daesh, the Pentagon had been searching in vain for Syrian Arab “partners on the ground” who would be willing to fight the jihadis without insisting on fighting Assad as well. There weren’t any. Still the State Department resisted the idea of an alliance with PKK-connected groups and did not confront Turkey strongly on the ways it was enabling Daesh. On October 9, Secretary of State John Kerry told the press that preventing the fall of Kobane was not a US strategic objective.23

  This was two days after Erdogan had once more predicted the end of resistance in Kobane, pooh-poohing the idea that US airstrikes could help. He said only a ground campaign could do the job, implying that the Turkish army was the one force capable of such a campaign. “Months have passed but no results have been achieved. Kobane is about to fall,” he said, in a televised speech at, of all places, a Turkish camp for Syrian refugees.24

  Against all odds, the Rojava Kurds continued to resist. They absolutely refused to admit defeat. And as the days passed, the Pentagon began to push the administration, convinced that the YPG-YPJ forces were the “partner on the ground” needed to defeat Daesh. On October 11 and 12, the State Department met secretly with representatives of the PYD in Paris. Shortly thereafter Vice President Joe Biden, never known for his diplomatic tongue, mentioned that Turkey was letting an awful lot of foreign fighters pass through its territory to join Daesh. Erdogan had a fit and insisted that Biden apologize, which he did, but the wind was changing.25

  On October 19, the press again asked Erdogan if he would agree to the US arming the PYD militias in Syria. “The PYD is for us, equal to the PKK. It is a terror organisation,” he answered. “It would be wrong for the United States with whom we are friends and allies in NATO to talk openly and to expect us to say ‘yes’ to such a support
to a terrorist organisation.”26

  But finally, on October 21, the Obama administration took a clear position. A State Department spokesperson announced that, as far as the US was concerned, the PYD was a different organization from the PKK; the PYD was not on the terrorist list and the US was not barred by law from giving it aid.27

  In fact, the US had already begun air strikes though these were not very effective until the Air Force developed a system of coordinating with Kurdish fighters on the ground. And, though YPG-YPJ commanders were happy about the air support, they still needed better weapons. They told The Guardian, “Air strikes alone are really not enough to defeat Isis in Kobani. . . . They are besieging the city on three sides, and fighter jets simply cannot hit each and every Isis fighter on the ground.”28

  By this time thousands of Syrian Kurds from Cizire and Afrin had gathered on the Turkish border, trying to get into Kobane from the one side that wasn’t controlled by Daesh. But Turkey still would not let them in. On October 28, Meysa Abdo, a woman commander in Kobane, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times: “We will never give up. But we need more than merely rifles and grenades to carry out our own responsibilities and aid the coalition in its war against the jihadist forces. . . . Last week, following domestic and international criticism, Turkish leaders at last said they would open a corridor for a small group of Iraqi peshmerga fighters, and some Free Syrian Army brigades, to cross into Kobani. But they still will not allow other Syrian Kurds to cross Turkish territory to reach us. This has been decided without consulting us. As a result, the Islamic State can bring in endless amounts of new supplies and ammunition, but we are still effectively blockaded on all sides—on three by the Islamic State’s forces, and on the fourth by Turkish tanks.”29

  At the beginning of November, Turkey finally allowed 150 peshmerga from Iraq into Kobane. A new Arab brigade, the Euphrates Volcano, also formed, made up of volunteers who had previously fled Raqqa. On November 8, the YPG-YPJ announced that they and the Euphrates Volcano had killed three thousand Daesh fighters since September 15.30

  US forces were now collaborating more closely with the YPG-YPJ forces, who would call in coordinates to the bombers, and the airstrikes were beginning to hurt Daesh. On November 11, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said they had heard from reliable sources that “a very important military leader in IS said that IS militants [had been] shocked by the fierce resistance of the YPG fighters” after Daesh had detonated more than 20 booby-trapped vehicles. “He also said that the battle of Kobani has drained hundreds of IS fighters.”31

  On November 29, Daesh sent four cars of suicide bombers into Kobane from the Turkish side of the border, where they had been using government-owned grain silos as their base. Turkey assisted them with an unannounced power cut that plunged the border area into darkness so the attack took the Kobane forces by surprise. Clashes went on through the night, and many were killed on both sides.

  At a protest rally, Selahattin Demirtas of the HDP said the government could no longer deny supporting Daesh: “ISIS terrorists opened fire on Kobanê from wheat silos belonging to the (Turkish) Agricultural Products Department all day.” He said that it was obvious that some officials at the border were collaborating with Daesh: How else could vehicles packed with bombs have gotten through the Turkish border to carry out suicide attacks at an official crossing?32

  By this time, the battle of Kobane had lasted seventy-seven days. Between IEDs (improvised explosive devices), suicide bombers, and US aerial bombardment, the city had been reduced to rubble. Now fighting began to take place street to street as the Kurds tried to clear out areas occupied by the jihadis. A YPG fighter interviewed on the online networking service Reddit described the day-to-day battle.

  “Look, the Daesh don’t really give up (especially en masse). So you have to clear the place house by house, street by street. Clearing an area (I think Americans call this “mopping up”) is a lot harder than it sounds. It leads to a lot of loss of life on our side. As the city fell into ruins, Daesh’s tanks and heavy weapons ceased to be so advantageous. Because so much of the city was ruined we had plenty of cover. They couldn’t use the tanks in the blocked streets. They also were incapable of defending specific buildings from our assaults. . . . which were launched at night and when they couldn’t take advantage of their heavy-weapons at once (they couldn’t see what they were shooting at).”

  The battles were very intense, he said; at least seven hundred fighters died during this period. “There was dozens of Alamos in that city no one will read about. . . . hundreds of small little battles in small ugly broken houses no one will ever care about. It was like Stalingrad. At night, it was haunting to see how much of it looked like the moon.”33

  By December 1, the Kurds had retaken three-fourths of the city. On January 27, 2015, the YPG-YPJ captured Mistenur Hill, where Daesh had planted its black flag in October, and replaced it with the Kurdish flag. As the PYD announced victory, celebrations broke out everywhere Kurds lived.

  Daesh was badly hurt by the battle of Kobane. As Michael Weiss wrote, it no longer had “its aura of invincibility.” When he interviewed Abu Khaled, the former jihadi told him that Daesh had lost five to six thousand fighters in Kobane, most of them foreigners who had been sent “to their slaughter, without any tactical, much less strategic, forethought.” Twice that many had been wounded and could no longer fight. The defeat had been devastating for recruitment, he said. Before Kobane, “We had like 3,000 foreign fighters who arrived every day to join ISIS. I mean, every day. And now we don’t have even like 50 or 60.”34

  As soon as the town of Kobane was declared safe—though many surrounding villages had yet to be cleared of Daesh—the international press corps, which had been camping on a hill in Suruc just across the border, watching the bombs but unable to enter the city, poured into Rojava. An English freelancer, Yvo Fitzherbert, reported that “more than 80 percent of the city has been destroyed entirely, reduced to little but a heap of rubble. . . . Unexploded bombs are scattered everywhere, often going unnoticed. Some are buried into the road, while others lie unobtrusively beneath the rubble. Children play alongside these bombs, not giving them a moment’s thought. Every now and then, a loud explosion pierces through the city, and civilians exchange fearful looks, hoping that nobody was harmed. Half a dozen people have died as a result of such accidents in the last week alone.”35

  The area was still far from peaceful. When Canadian photographer Joey Lawrence went to Rojava in March 2015, the YPG-YPJ took him to battles in progress, including one unanticipated suicide attack. The fighters he was with immediately grabbed their Kalashnikovs and headed for the front lines to support the fighters and drive wounded back to the base. He kept wondering why they didn’t wear some of the helmets and bulletproof vests they had captured, but they didn’t want to. “Their tactics rely on speed and stealth, and remaining fluid on a constantly changing battlefield. It’s these same guerrilla tactics that led to major successes against their adversaries. Sure ISIS has tanks, heat seeking missiles, and night vision technology, but even with these technological advantages, the jihadist group can still struggle against a force like YPG/J.”36

  Daesh attacked again on June 26, 2015, when dozens of jihadis dressed in Free Syrian Army uniforms snuck into town in the middle of the night and went on a rampage, setting off car bombs, shooting whomever they saw in the street, and raiding houses. They slaughtered over 150 people before they were killed. A YPG spokesman told Reuters, “The Daesh attack was a suicide mission. . . . Its aim wasn’t to take the city but to create terror.”37

  Still, in the year following the liberation of Kobane, despite very difficult living conditions, losing a flood of refugees who hoped for a better life in Europe, and having to guard against attacks at any time, the Rojava Kurds went from strength to strength. In June, they captured Tal Abyad, a key border town that was essential to the Daesh supply route from Turkey to its capital at Raqqa. The liberation of Tal Abyad freed t
he area between the Kobane and Cizire cantons and gave the Syrian Kurds control of a much larger contiguous space. These successes brought new recruits. In August 2015, a Reuters analysis put YPG-YPJ numbers at forty thousand fighters, and said they controlled twice the amount of territory they had the year before.38

  In 2016, Kobane remained a wreck, still full of Daesh bombs and mines that needed to be cleared by experts. An international campaign to rebuild it had begun, but the effort needed more support than it was getting, particularly from international agencies. Kobane was now home to two hundred thousand refugees whom the Kurdish community was supporting without much help from anyone. There were not enough standing buildings to house the refugees and none could be built without materials, construction equipment, and financial aid. And Turkey continued to refuse to open the border, so the few supplies that were available could not get through.39

  The border between Syria and Iraq was also closed most of the time. Not only did Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party have a long and contentious rivalry with the PKK and, by extension, the Syrian PYD, but its commercial interests tied it to Turkey, as Heval Dostar, the head of the Kobane Reconstruction Board, told reporters from the English left-wing journal Red Pepper in January 2016. “For two months now there has been an absolute embargo and for one month there has even been no cement allowed through. This is a big problem as winter is coming. We urgently need a humanitarian corridor opened. . . . Sometimes they allow things to come through but it requires a lot of politics on our side. They will not allow building materials to pass. They allow basic things after a lot of political pressure from us, but nothing that will make a positive long-term impact to our reconstruction work.

  Ther journalists saw no sign of international foreign aid anywhere. Dostar explained, “On 1 July 2015, there was a large conference in Brussels about the reconstruction of Kobanê. A lot of NGOs and parliamentarians attended and their reaction was supportive and positive in providing aid to us. But this has not been so in practice. Many NGOs have been here and have made many promises to remove mines and work on water and sewage, for example, but not much has been delivered. Also, when major NGOs try to bring over medicines and equipment, it’s often not allowed to come through. An individual with a small package can come through, but this has a very small impact. It’s the same on both borders.” After the November 2015 election, Turkey prevented any international NGO from entering Kobane; they even turned away Doctors Without Borders.40