by Meredith Tax
This rule by terror was the model of an ideal society being held out to Sunni Muslims all over the world. The weak states of Iraq and Syria were unable to defeat it. Only when Daesh got to Kobane did it encounter a society with a political vision as strong as its own, based on diametrically opposed ideas.
The seeming invincibility of Daesh went into decline after the battle of Kobane. According to the military intelligence research group IHS Conflict Monitor, it lost 14 percent of its territory in 2015, including the vital border crossing of Tal Abyad, Tikrit, the Bajji oil refinery in Iraq, and a stretch of road connecting Raqqa and Mosul.46 Due to these losses and the falling price of oil, Daesh apparently failed to meet its $2 billion 2015 budget.47
These losses were a blow to morale and prestige, and in the fall of 2015 Daesh moved swiftly to balance them by attacking civilians in countries including Bangladesh, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen. It downed a Russian plane in the Sinai on October 21, killing all 224 on board; staged a triple suicide bomb attack on a Shia neighborhood in Beirut on November 12, leaving forty-three dead and between two hundred and two hundred forty wounded; killed twenty-six with a road bomb and suicide attack in a Shia neighborhood of Baghdad on November 13; and, also on November 13, organized a coordinated attack by at least six jihadis in Paris at multiple sites, including a soccer stadium, a cafe, a public square, and a theatre. The death toll the next day was 129, with 352 wounded.48 Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram, which pledged allegiance to Daesh in June 2015, was also responsible for attacks in November of that year, when female suicide bombers, one only eleven years old, blew up a mobile phone market in Kano, Nigeria, killing fifty or sixty people, just hours after another bomb killed thirty-four and wounded eighty at a marketplace in Yola.49 The carnage continued in 2016 with suicide bombers targeting civilians in Istanbul, Jakarta, and Homs; an attack on a Shia mosque in Syria; a second bombing in Istanbul; attacks on the Brussels airport and metro; and a suicide bombing during an Iraqi soccer game.
These widespread attacks indicated that Daesh’s earlier concentration on capturing and holding territory might be changing. Confronted with so many powerful enemies, its would-be state in Iraq and Syria seemed less viable. It is worth noting that, despite Obama’s stated intention to “degrade and ultimately destroy” Daesh militarily, his actual strategy has been one of containment—rather than bombing Daesh into smithereens along with all the civilians under its control or putting in those constantly referenced “boots on the ground,” he has preferred to send in some advisors to train local forces and wait until Daesh fell apart of its own accord because it couldn’t handle fighting such a big war and running a quasi-state at the same time.50
But defeating Daesh militarily is not the same as defeating its ideas, which continue to find other hosts. It is an amoeba-like organization, sending out arms to various places and taking in affiliates wherever it can. By late 2015, it had established a base at Sirte, Colonel Gaddafi’s old hometown in Libya, where it had three thousand fighters. Some observers thought its leadership might settle there if Daesh were chased out of Raqqa.51
As Daesh territory has begun to shrink, that of Rojava has grown. According to the military strategists of the IHS Conflict Monitor, “Territory under their control expanded by 186 percent to 15,800 km in 2015. They have established control over nearly all of Syria’s traditionally Kurdish areas, and are the largest component of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which are being nurtured to form a key part of the US ground campaign against the Islamic State in 2016.”52
Polat Can, a founding member of the YPG who was head of the Kobane media center during the siege, expressed hope for the region for the first time in many years: “The whole region is on the verge of a deep and radical change. The region will not return to what it was before 2011, that era is gone forever—a new world and new system is forming and nothing will remain the same. . . . I am optimistic that the Kurdish people will defeat ISIS and terrorism and the Kurds will obtain their rights and no one will be able to keep the Kurdish people from determining their own future.”53
PKK guerrillas pose at Makhmour trench, Iraq.
CHAPTER 10
War and Peace in Turkey
RECIP TAYYIP ERDOGAN came to power in Turkey as an Islamist allied with the powerful Gulen movement (also called the Hizmet movement, and described as perhaps “the world’s biggest Muslim network”),1 and an opponent of the Kemalist elite’s narrow and restrictive form of secularism. For many years before his election, the military had ruled with an iron hand, exercising strict censorship, preventing any cultural expressions other than their own, staging coups whenever they got nervous, and focusing on what they saw as the two enemies of the Turkish nation: Islamists, who wanted to replace secular nationalism with Sunni nationalism, and Kurds, who refused to assimilate to the dominant culture. Even after the changeover to civilian rule, repression continued. In 2012 and 2013 Turkey won the distinction of having more journalists in prison than any other country; only in 2014 was it surpassed in this regard by China, which has a much larger population.2
Before becoming prime minister, Erdogan had been Mayor of Istanbul, representing the Islamist Welfare Party, a party with anti-Western politics and connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. He was a capable mayor who did a lot to curb pollution and improve the city’s water supply, though residents were unhappy when he banned drinking in cafes. But his open Islamism made the military nervous and they looked for an excuse to go after him. They got one in 1997, when he recited the following lines from a poem at a rally in Sirt: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.” He was sentenced to ten months in jail for “inciting religious hatred,” of which he served four, and the Welfare Party was banned in 1998.3 But in 2001, he switched allegiances, founding the Justice and Development Party, the AKP, which he framed as a Muslim version of Europe’s Christian Democratic parties, combining religiosity with friendliness to capital and the West.4 It was a foregone conclusion that the AKP would win the votes of religious Muslims but, since many urban secularists were more worried about the military than Islamism, the AKP got their votes, too. The party even got the votes of lots of Kurds, some because they were religious, some because they thought a man who had been in prison might be sympathetic to their cause.
The AKP won 363 seats out of 550 in in the 2002 parliamentary elections, becoming the first party in fifteen years able to govern without a coalition. Though Erdogan’s jail sentence had made him ineligible for public office, Parliament amended the constitution and he became Prime Minister in 2003.5
At that point he seemed to want to be a peacemaker. One was certainly needed. When the PKK split in 2004, a group called the Freedom Falcons (TAK) suddenly emerged, and established themselves as more violent than the PKK and much more willing to bomb civilian targets, especially tourists. Soon attacks took place at a train station, a resort town, a supermarket, a bus station. While the Turkish media called TAK a PKK front, the PKK denied any connection with these attacks. Some believe TAK is contolled by the Turkish deep state, the secret intelligence program set up by the CIA during the Cold War.6
In August 2005, Erdogan made a dramatic peacemaking gesture by traveling to Diyarbakir, where he gave a speech saying that a great nation like Turkey needed to accept the fact that it had made mistakes. He said the Kurds needed more democracy, not more repression, and that the Kurdish problem could not be solved through purely military means. He was immediately denounced by politicians to his Right, including some people in his own party.7
The Kurds waited for a year to see what the follow up would be. There was none. Even so, in August 2006, the PKK announced yet another unilateral ceasefire. TAK responded with a wave of bomb attacks on tourist buses and resorts that killed three people and injured many more. When the PKK condemned these attacks, TAK warned tourists to stay out of Turkey and issued a statement saying, “From now on, every attack against our
people will be met immediately by even more violent acts. We will start to harm not just property, but lives too. With our actions, we will turn Turkey into hell.”8
Although the PKK continued to disavow any connection to TAK, the Turkish government used the attacks as an excuse to attack the PKK camps in Iraq once again. It declared martial law in the southeast for three months, and embarked on another war with the PKK that lasted until 2008.9 Erdogan’s resumption of the war led to his party’s loss of the southeast to the Kurdish Democratic Society Party in the election of March 2009. A wave of arrests of Kurdish politicians followed. Seizing the initiative, the PKK announced another ceasefire. This time Erdogan seemed to get the message and made an impassioned plea for peace negotiations, issuing a call for a “Democratic Initiative” to reform the constitution and address Kurdish demands. Meanwhile, in secret discussions, the PKK and the government had decided on a piece of political theatre to illustrate the PKK’s desire to put down their arms and the government’s willingness to let the guerrillas come home. They planned a dramatic “peace caravan” of eight guerrillas and their families who would cross into Turkey from Iraq in October 2009 and be granted immunity from prosecution.10
Unfortunately, the two sides did not have the same image of what the peace caravan would look like. Erdogan, who saw himself as the father of his people, may have imagined a handful of prodigal sons slinking over the border to ask his forgiveness. In reality, as soon as the guerrillas crossed into Turkey, they were met by a rapturous Democratic Society Party rally of thousands of Kurds, all waving PKK flags and pictures of Ocalan and shouting “Long live the PKK!”
A storm of criticism erupted on the Right, blaming Erdogan for allowing what they called a PKK victory demonstration. Erdogan couldn’t stand the pressure. He abandoned all talk of peace in order to hold on to the support of the military. Despite Turkey’s promise that they would have immunity, the peace caravan guerrillas were all arrested and tried as terrorists. In December 2009, the Democratic Society Party was banned and its officials were arrested. That was the end of the “Kurdish opening.” It was also the end of any attempt by the AKP to lead Turkey in a more democratic direction.
The death of the “Kurdish opening” in 2009 led to another round of what author Paul White called the “deadly pattern” in which “wholesale bloodletting is followed by fruitless attempts at peacemaking—which are followed by even worse bloodletting.”11
The pattern will sound all too familiar to anyone who has followed the other Oslo “peace process” between Israelis and Palestinians, in which negotiations that began in 1993 led to one betrayal and disappointment after another. But, unlike the Palestinian movement, members of the Kurdish movement in Turkey and Syria had a unified vision of what they were fighting for. They also had taken concrete steps to build an institutional base for what they wanted. Whatever one may feel about the Ocalan cult of personality, there can be no question that his ideological leadership enabled this transition.
The AKP and “Moderate Islamism”
Turkey had been a NATO member since the organization’s beginning and had been a candidate for membership in the European Union for many years. For these reasons, the US and the EU failed to take Erdogan’s Islamism seriously. In fact, members of the US State Department used Erdogan as the poster boy for what they termed “moderate Islamism,” meaning a kind of fundamentalism that was not only friendly to development, but allegedly moderate in its views.12
By 2013, Erdogan’s moderation was not much in evidence, but his friendliness to development remained and was the source of many of the accusations of corruption against him and his associates. The planned destruction of Gezi Park in 2013 was a landmark in the convergence between “moderate Islamism” and real estate development: He would rebuild the center city for the rich and tourists, exile the poor to the outskirts, and console them with religion. This agenda also entailed cutting back public spending in favor of “faith-based” charity.13
In a scathing essay written six months after the Gezi protests, Nazan Ustundag called out Erdogan’s manipulation of Turkish popular opinion, writing that “the AKP’s rhetorical skill has been in its ability to rewrite the history of Turkey’s multiple oppressions by putting itself at the center and by narrating the suffering of the prime minister and his friends as the suffering of the whole nation. In such an equation, defending public space, secular education, or a guaranteed job—that is, objecting in any way to the AKP’s policies—is seen as an act of coup d’état against the nation’s will.”14
The AKP’s Islamism was not just a foible. Like the Islamism of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, it was inseparable from authoritarianism, repression, censorship, and a willingness to impose its own beliefs by force. The AKP was certainly not “moderate” when it came to women. Erdogan tried to outlaw abortion and the morning-after pill. He decreed that every Turkish woman should have three children. His Forestry Minister told women who were looking for jobs, “Isn’t your housework enough?” And in the 2015 election, Prime Minister Davutoglu actually promised to find mates for people who voted for the AKP: “You have a job, a salary and a home. Now it’s time for a spouse. We want people of this land to be bountiful. We want you to procreate. First, seek the help of your parents to find a spouse. God willing, this will work out. If it does not, apply to us. We will find you a blessed spouse.”15
With this approach, it was no wonder that the AKP presided over a decline in the economic position of women relative to other countries. In November 2015, the World Economic Forum announced that “Turkey has moved down five places, ranking 130th among 145 countries in the “Global Gender Gap Index,” placing Turkey among the three lowest performing countries in the Europe and Central Asia region alongside Malta (104) and Armenia (105). It did particularly poorly in areas of economic and political equality.16 Women suffered in other ways after the AKP took office. Between 2002 and 2009, the murder rate for women increased by an astonishing 1400 percent. In 2002, sixty-two women were murdered; in the first seven months of 2009, 953 were.17
If AKP rule was problematic for Turkish women, it was a disaster for the Kurds, who, let us not forget, made up 20 percent of the Turkish population. Their increasingly united stand in favor of democratic autonomy was a threat to any hegemonic Turkish party committed to centralization. Erdogan tried to disrupt this unity with token concessions—a Kurdish language TV station run by the government, a university elective in the Kurdish language. But, as Aliza Marcus said, “They see what Ankara gives them: schools where students cannot speak or learn Kurdish; security forces who harass the local population. And they know what they do not have: democratic freedoms.”18
They did not have democratic freedoms because whenever they started a new political party, it was banned, and whenever they elected local leaders, those leaders were likely to end up in jail. The Turkish constitution, written after the military coup of 1980, severely restricted freedom of speech and assembly, and minority rights, and entrenched the power of the military. Not just the Kurds but the entire country suffered under this dispensation.
Multiple promises to reform the constitution were never carried out, and after Erdogan reached his term limit as prime minister and had to accept the ceremonial office of president, rather than move the country towards greater democracy, he began to push for a revised constitution that would give the president almost unlimited power.19 He was clearly willing to sacrifice Turkey’s image in the world to maintain the old unitary state—only his version substituted Sunni identity politics for Ataturk’s secularism, and his Islamism brought him closer to Daesh and other jihadi groups than the US was willing to admit. The battle of Kobane brought that lesson home.
In the fall of 2014, when Daesh mounted its assault, Kobane was surrounded on three sides, its fourth side being the Turkish border. Instead of trying to help, or at least letting supplies and volunteers through, Turkey closed the border, massed tanks, and refused to let anyone pass, while Erdogan confident
ly predicted that Kobane would fall any minute. But Kobane did not fall. Instead, the remarkable battle of the Syrian Kurds eventually brought long overdue US air support, a turning point for the Kurds and the cause of considerable diplomatic stress between Turkey and the US.
In December 2014, Erdogan further scandalized Turkey’s Western allies by arresting twenty-four journalists, media workers, and police officers as part of his feud with the media empire of his onetime friend, Fethullah Gulen, the founder of the conservative Hizmet movement, whose newspapers had accused the Erdogan family of corruption. The New York Times published an editorial in response, headed “Turkey’s Descent Into Paranoia.” The editorial said that “Mr. Erdogan’s efforts to stifle criticism and dissent show an authoritarian leader living in a parallel universe, one where being a democracy, a NATO ally and a candidate for membership in the European Union are somehow compatible with upending the rule of law and stifling freedom of expression.”20
The political climate grew tense as the May 2015 election approached. Erdogan was banking on getting a large enough majority to protect his party and family members from being prosecuted for under-the-table deals. Although the Turkish presidency was supposed to be an office above politics, he campaigned ferociously for the AKP to win a majority large enough to permit them to change the constitution and make him an imperial president.21
Under the 1980 constitution, a party needed 10 percent of the national vote to become a recognized parliamentary entity. Previous Kurdish parties had been unable to reach that percentage because their base was limited to the southeast. But the game changed with the 2014 merger of the Kurdish BDP and the progressive Left and feminist HDP. Despite AKP attacks on their offices and arrests of party activists, in the June election, the merged HDP won 13.1 percent of the vote and eighty-one seats in Parliament. Even conservative and religious Kurds who had previously voted for Erdogan’s AKP switched their votes because of his refusal to allow aid into Kobane.22