Turkey was openly supporting the broader opposition, including some deeply unsavoury elements of it. One café in Antakya, a place by the river with huge open windows bringing in the fresh air, was constantly packed with rebel commanders who spoke candidly to journalists about their meetings with Turkish officials in Ankara. Meanwhile the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), the opposition’s government-in-exile, was operating from a five-star hotel in a chic-but-bleak district of highways and glass towers close to Atatürk airport. Funded by Qatar, the SNC had begun as a half-hearted stab at an inclusive political opposition and quickly became little more than the mouthpiece of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Every so often, the SNC would call a press conference to remind journalists that Syria’s revolution was a glorious and vigorous one fighting for democracy and the rights of all Syrians. But it grew further and further detached from the reality of what was happening inside the country until, one day in August 2013, it put out a press release about a battle I had just come back from covering. Menagh military air base was Assad’s last redoubt in the countryside north of Aleppo, and the FSA had kept it under siege for ten months, as the government soldiers inside held out through air resupplies. There seemed no way for the rebels to break the deadlock, until Jaish al-Muhajireen, a brigade of foreign extremists led by Chechen rebel veteran Omar al-Shishani, came in to finish the job.
I had ducked into an abandoned farmhouse just outside the perimeter of the airfield, where one of the lonely few FSA groups taking part in the final battle in August 2013 had based themselves. Even though they were on the same side as Jaish al-Muhajireen, they were overwhelmed, outgunned, and in every way outpowered by the hardliners. The fighters I interviewed were freaked out that I was there; had one of al-Shishani’s men stuck his head in, he would have been unimpressed to find a British female journalist. After an hour I made a swift and low-profile exit, and a few days later, as the final battle got underway one early morning, my fixer Mahmoud went back to the front line dressed in Afghan-style shalwar kameez. He managed to blend in for long enough to bring back footage confirming that this was a victory for the jihadists, not for the FSA. Nonetheless, back up in Istanbul the SNC lauded it as a dazzling victory for the mainstream rebels in the press release they sent out to all correspondents.
Nuance didn’t feature in the good-versus-evil fairy tale of Kobanî. The YPG won in the end, and forged a firm friendship with the US that grew into formal joint operations in Syria that still continue today. The West had already lost heart in the Syrian revolution, and while the rebels turned radical and became further ridden by the infighting that had plagued them from the start, the Kurds seemed the best hope of a unified ground ally against Isis.
Despite the YPG’s links to the PKK, Ankara had initially been willing to deal with the group. The stumbling block, according to Turkish foreign ministry officials working on the file, was the Kurds’ reluctance to break their mutually advantageous détente with Assad.
‘During the initial years of the Syrian civil war the AKP governments were in close contact and conducted negotiations with the Syrian Kurds and their leader, Salih Muslim,’ says Haluk Özdalga. ‘The main purpose was to convince them to join the opposition forces fighting to topple the Assad regime. Several times they flew Muslim back and forth to Turkey with government jets. However, the Syrian Kurds refused Ankara’s proposals. Had they accepted, we would have been seeing an AKP willingly cooperating with the Syrian Kurds.’
Western diplomats working on the Turkey and Syria file say that whatever tensions were already brewing between Washington and Ankara before Kobanî, it was the Pentagon’s ever-tightening relationship with the YPG after it that caused the greatest damage.
‘We kept telling [Erdoğan] that the support [to the YPG] was temporary, tactical and transactional,’ said one US diplomat working on the file. ‘The Turks were complaining loudly, especially after the PKK ceasefire broke down in the summer of 2015. We were making calming calls with the PYD [the YPG’s political wing]. They got it. But for Turkey this is existential.’
Erdoğan had also been bruised by another recent development on his doorstep; in Iraq, Kurdish fighters had taken over cities abandoned by the federal army in the summer of 2014 as Isis blitzkrieged across the country. The Kurds’ new acquisitions included Kirkuk, an ethnically divided town sat on top of one of the biggest oil fields in the world. Among Kirkuk’s minorities is a large population of ethnic Turkmen, who have strong ties to Ankara.
The Iraqi-Kurdish president, Masoud Barzani, was one of Erdoğan’s strongest allies and closest personal friends in the region. Turkey had supported Barzani’s project for semi-autonomy for the Kurds in northern Iraq since its inception in 1991. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) shares a stretch of border with Turkey, and trade deals between the two have brought Turkish fashion brands into the malls of northern Iraq, and Kurdish oil to the port of Ceyhan, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, through a pipeline that opened in 2014. But when Barzani’s Kurdish army, known as the Peshmerga, seized Kirkuk in June 2014 and Barzani announced that he would hold an independence referendum, Erdoğan felt he had been stabbed in the back. Kirkuk’s Turkmen fervently opposed the Kurds’ grab for their city. Neither did Erdoğan much fancy the idea of a fully independent Kurdistan on his doorstep.
‘His best buddy in the world, the one place where he had real influence and a guy he was a brother to,’ says one diplomat. ‘I cannot tell you the impact that this had on Erdoğan. When I saw him in September 2015, he went through the motions when he talked about the US sending weapons to the YPG. But when he got to what Barzani did he was shaking with anger. It had been a very lucrative and beneficial project for both sides. The only thing that Barzani could have done to screw that thing up, was exactly what he did. Barzani insulted the Turks and also the Arabs by including Kirkuk and its oil fields in the new independent Kurdistan. Erdoğan felt betrayed, and started to think that even the most cuddly “pro-you” Kurds can go for independence and you have to be careful about them.’
Erdoğan’s descent
Internationally, Kobanî was the moment Turkey’s – and particularly Erdoğan’s – reputation began to nosedive. Meanwhile, it triggered a chain of domestic events that upended the delicately balanced peace process. First, in June 2015, a bomb exploded at a Kurdish rally in Diyarbakır. Second, there was a suicide bombing in Suruç, the Turkish town directly across the border from Kobanî, in the cultural centre where I had sat for so many hours during the battle, interviewing refugees and local Kurdish politicians. Thirty-two leftist activists who had travelled from Istanbul to take part in a reconstruction project in Kobanî were killed, and a horrific video capturing the moment the explosion ripped through them circulated on social media. I recognised the garden, the gate. After the blast they were blackened, smeared with blood and strewn with limbs. Two days later, two Turkish policemen were shot dead in their homes in the nearby city of şanlıurfa, in an attack that initially appeared to have been claimed by the PKK as ‘revenge’ for the Suruç bombing (the charges against the alleged perpetrators were quietly dismissed in court later, and no other suspects have yet been found). The 2013 peace process broke down, and almost immediately the war in south-eastern Turkey revved up again. One of the first victims was Tahir Elçi, the lawyer who had brought the Kaymaz cases against the Turkish government in 2005. Now serving as the head of Diyarbakır’s bar association, he was shot dead in broad daylight in the city in November 2015, as he gave a press statement appealing for calm.
‘If he was still alive, he would be so angry now,’ Elçi’s widow, Türkan, told me, less than two months after his death. Beautiful, dignified and still moved to tears when she spoke about him, she was horrified at the fresh violence now exploding in the city he loved. ‘He was working for peace. Now I see no one doing that impartially, as he did.’
The descent of Erdoğan’s image from peacemaker to warmonger happened so quickly that even he appeared shocked by it. Doubtless there
are many Kurds – particularly those in the diaspora who trumpet the PKK but do not have to live with its endless insurgency – who have always had it in for him. They would feel the same about any Turkish leader, although an Islamist makes for an exceptionally good pantomime villain. But there were two moments when Erdoğan accelerated his own downfall.
The Gezi Park protests, and Erdoğan’s rough handling of them, was the first, a mere two months after Öcalan announced the ceasefire at Newroz. Kurds played a major part in the Gezi demonstrations, even taking advantage of their newfound freedoms to wave banners bearing Öcalan’s image and the red star logo of the PKK in Istanbul’s Taksim Square – something that would have been unthinkable a few months before. The Gezi movement was a soup of unlikely alliances. Football hooligans stood with environmentalists, and staunch Kemalists stood with Kurds. It was the kind of broad consensus that Erdoğan himself had managed to craft in his early years. No wonder he got the jitters.
‘Gezi was important in showing clearly how such spontaneous demonstrations, even though [they were] held within the democratic and legal frame, completely misfit into Erdoğan’s agenda. Therefore, he reacted tough,’ says Haluk Özdalga. ‘One could discern he had a sense of urgency as he occasionally spoke about having to hurry up, that he didn’t have much time. That a leader feels like that after having been in power for a decade may look puzzling, but for him the time to enact his true agenda had actually only just begun after waiting for so many years.’
Other senior AKP figures openly opposed the harsh crackdown on Gezi, among them Abdullah Gül, then president, who counselled a softer approach, and Kadir Topbaş, the mayor of Istanbul. Erdoğan ignored them all. Some have attributed that change in his once-open mentality to his physical health problems – Erdoğan discreetly endured treatment for early stage colon cancer at around the same time.
Ertuğrul Günay, culture minister at the time of the protests and an opponent of the redevelopment plans that sparked the unrest, put it more bluntly. ‘Erdoğan saw the Gezi protests as the rehearsal of a possible insurgency against him,’ he says.
The June 2015 parliamentary elections, in which the AKP lost its majority for the first time, was the second key moment. The success of the Kurdish-rooted Halkların Demokratik Partisi, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which was partly down to the support that it leached from the AKP, clearly infuriated Erdoğan. There was no outright winner, and between June and the rerun of the elections in November that year the peace process broke down. Erdoğan began building an alliance with the hard-right (and staunchly anti-peace process) Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) – and the seeds of mistrust between him and the Kurds grew into unnavigable forests of hatred. Erdoğan, who had once spoken of peace in Diyarbakır, began adopting a stridently nationalist tone in his rhetoric about the PKK in order to keep his MHP allies onside.
‘We want to speak again about peace but how can we continue? The government says it is fighting terrorism and has explained the new rules,’ Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtaş told me in the south-eastern city of Mardin in February 2016, as the fighting raged in Cizre ninety miles down the road. It was the day that the military curfew was meant to expire, but the violence continued in the town. Demirtaş spoke of the people trapped in the basements, claiming that the ambulances were attacked by the security forces every time they tried to reach them.
Nine months later, Demirtaş was arrested on charges of promoting the PKK. The first leader of a major party to openly oppose Erdoğan’s plans to switch from a parliamentary to an executive presidential system, he believed that that was a major reason why he and his party, the HDP, were targeted. He remains in prison to this day.
‘We were still hopeful for Turkish democracy, and because of this the AKP attacks us,’ he had told me in Mardin. ‘They are scared.’
The dead
It is September 2016, a year since the war re-erupted. I count the graves in the Diyarbakır cemetery.
A whole section is decked out in red, yellow and green trinkets, the flowers fresh and the soil on top of the plots newly turned. There are thirty, forty, fifty … I stop as a group of gypsy girls approaches me. The oldest is sixteen, maximum. Her two little sisters are a lot younger, all of them dressed in age-flattening outfits of long, flowing skirts and loose headscarves. They sell water to mourners and keep the graves here tended for pennies.
‘I want to be a guerrilla when I’m older!’ says the smallest.
Her big sister rounds on her.
‘Shut up!’ she snaps. ‘All these people died for nothing. It’s stupid.’
I weave in and out among the grey marble, noting down the dates on the graves and the details that adorn them. Some are wrapped in the scarves their occupants died in. One has no headstone or marker, just a few wilting flowers on top. One of the dead was named Latife, like Atatürk’s wife. Few were born before the turn of the millennium and most were fifteen and sixteen years old when they died.
‘It started filling up after Kobanî,’ says Farkin Amed, who has come to visit his son’s grave. He tells me that, just a month ago, his younger son also ‘left for the mountains’ – the bucolic euphemism the Kurds use for joining the PKK, even though their wars are now mostly fought in the grimy squalor of the poorest city districts. His daughter has tried to go, too, but the PKK sent her back; she is only fourteen. He seems unbothered by the thought that she will likely try again and succeed within a year.
‘At least my son died in honour, not in shame!’ he says.
Farkin is forty-six but looks older – a malignant mix of sun, stress and sorrow has beaten the youth out of his face. His son, Mehmet, died in June 2012, one of six young Kurds who set themselves alight in the western city of Bursa to protest at the lack of progress towards a peace deal. Farkin clings to the belief that it was their self-immolation that finally pushed the parties to a ceasefire nine months later, in March 2013. But now it is September 2016, the peace process has been dead for a year, and his son’s sacrifice has been in vain.
‘I come three times a week,’ says Farkin. ‘First I water the graves of the new martyrs, then I come to my son. In some months recently there have been only three or four days with no funerals, especially during the curfew in Cizre.’
Two low-flying Turkish fighter jets scream over us. A police car prowls around the perimeter road. A burial is taking place on the other side of the cemetery, where the people who have died natural deaths are laid to rest. Two young men sit silently at a nearby grave draped in the flag of the BDP, the political party that had rallied for the Yazidis in Silopi two years earlier.
‘I didn’t put it there,’ says Murat, the brother of the dead boy, eighteen-year-old Süleyman Güzel, who was killed in clashes in Diyarbakır earlier this year. Not even his family had known he was going out every night to build burning barricades with a scarf wrapped round his face and a gun in his back pocket.
‘I don’t know, he was a boy who never shared anything. He was like a closed box,’ says Murat.
Süleyman had been a normal high school student until Kobanî, his brother says. Some of his friends went to fight in the town, and those who didn’t joined the protests in Diyarbakır. The violence simmered down but their anger did not. After the PKK called off the ceasefire, they started blocking off their neighbourhoods and clashing nightly with the cops. Even when the tanks rolled in and the Kurdish youth fired back with rockets and assault rifles, Murat was reluctant to call it a civil war. The real fighters had gone to Kobanî, he said. The ones who died in Diyarbakır were just kids.
But a policeman I had met in the city while the fighting was at its heaviest told a different story. Diyarbakır in the worst days of its war, over the winter of 2015–16, looked like it had been hit by the apocalypse. The centre, the old neighbourhood of Sur, was under complete military curfew and a heavy snow had dumped on the city. Around the battle zone a network of metal police barricades weaved in and around the old city walls. There were sandbagged sn
iper positions and tent structures with chimneys for wood-burning stoves where the police drank tea and smoked. Baroque plumes of cigarette and wood smoke twirled together as they rose into the frigid night air.
The hotel where I always stay in Diyarbakır was now on the front line – to get to it I had to pass through the police checkpoints with a paper the receptionist had written out and rubber-stamped for me. Each night, as dusk fell, the soundtrack started, the staccato rhythm of each Diyarbakır night for the last eighty days banged out by the crackle of gunfire and the thump of explosions. I spent New Year’s Eve in the city that year, locked into the hotel together with a few other journalists by the fighting and the heavy snowfall. We were the only guests, and we got blasted drunk and made a game out of deciphering the gunfire from the celebratory fireworks. As we stood swaying in the doorway and smoking cigarettes at three in the morning, a line of Turkish tanks filed past us down the silent street.
The PKK’s youth militants had been pushed back to a small circle in the centre of Sur, but left webs of mines and improvised bombs behind. Ambulances screamed in and out of the curfew zone. Enes, the policeman, was tall, bearded and imposing, with a scar running through his left eyebrow. Most of his face was hidden by his balaclava, but as we started chatting he took it off to show a mop of boyish hair.
Enes was manning the last checkpoint before death alley – and he was bored. The special forces cops, with their camouflage uniforms and German-made weapons, were fighting the battle inside Sur. He, though, was a normal policeman with the misfortune to have been posted to Diyarbakır as the peace process broke down. He was a sitting target for the young PKK radicals who saw any cops as fair game. All he could think of was what he would do in five months’ time, when he was due to be posted back to western Turkey.
Erdogan Rising Page 21