The Turks have unleashed a religious war against the Kurds. Who is to blame?

The guns have fallen silent, but it is the calm before the storm. The ceasefire on the border of northern Syria is merely a pause before the next phase of “Operation Peace Spring”, the Turkish offensive against this Kurdish autonomous region. Already 200,000 civilians have fled and hundreds of thousands more are likely to follow.

 So far the assault has taken place on a narrow front. But it is not a question of “if”, but “when” the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan will order his forces to extend their attack along the entire 300-mile frontier. Their aim is to drive out the “terrorists” or “unbelievers”, as Turkish propaganda refers to the entire Kurdish population, and replace them with as many as possible of the 3 million Syrian refugees who have been living in Turkish Anatolia, in some cases for as long as eight years.

Operation Peace Spring, in other words, is not about peace, but ethnic cleansing. The Syrian Kurds are to be expelled from their land or, if they resist, simply killed. Turkey, itself the homeland of some 14 million Kurds, is deliberately and explicitly carrying out a war crime on a vast scale in plain sight. The fate of their Syrian cousins is intended as a brutal warning to the Turkish Kurds of what will befall them if they ever dare to challenge the authoritarian regime in Ankara.

That regime is increasingly open about its leader’s neo-Ottoman and Islamist ideology. President Erdogan’s use of mercenaries from Syria as shock troops in his assault on the Kurds recalls the janissaries of the Ottoman sultans. 

A standing army that served simultaneously as bodyguards in peace and elite units in war, the janissaries were originally recruited from captured or kidnapped Christian slaves, mainly from the Balkans, because it was impermissible under Sharia to enslave Muslims. Ultimately the janissaries became too powerful and in 1826, some 6,000 were slaughtered en masse and the corps was abolished. 

Rather than Christian slaves, Erdogan prefers to use Islamic mercenaries. Radicalised and brutalised by civil war, they are steeped in the blood of “infidels” in the killing fields of Syria. Their extremist version of Islam is almost indistinguishable from that of Islamic State, except that they are loyal to Erdogan, the successor of the Ottoman Caliphs, rather than the false Caliphate declared by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of IS.

These are the monsters that Erdogan has unleashed on the Kurds, whose tolerant and secular form of Islam they regard as heretical. Their fury at the fact that women enjoy equal rights in Kurdish society has caused them to target female politicians. One of the first victims in this war was Hevrin Khalef, leader of one of the main Kurdish parties, who was dragged from her car and shot by Erdogan’s janissaries.

 By spearheading his invasion of northern Syria with these fanatics, the Turkish President is reigniting a religious war. The Kurds, who lost thousands of their best fighters in the defeat of IS, are not only defending their homes but their way of life. Turkey, meanwhile, is gradually abandoning the secular legacy of Kemal Attatürk, and submitting to the Islamist imperialism of their autocratic President.

It is hard to believe that Donald Trump was entirely ignorant of the consequences that would flow from the fatal phone call to Erdogan, announcing that he was pulling out US forces and thereby removing the last obstacle to an the invasion. He apparently went “off script” and, unrestrained by advisers, gave the green light to his Turkish counterpart. The result has been catastrophic for American prestige, not only in the region, but among US allies everywhere. 

Trump’s clumsy attempt to retrieve the disaster by sending and then releasing a letter to Erdogan, warning the Turkish President “Don’t be a tough guy”, has only made matters worse. Erdogan is even more notoriously thin-skinned than Trump himself. While the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has persuaded the Turks to halt their offensive, nobody believes that the ceasefire will last. 

The only concession made by Trump to placate his diplomatic and military establishment is that the American troops are not “coming home”, but moving next door to Iraq. The Kurdish civilians are reported to be jeering their erstwhile allies as they leave. The United States will not soon be forgiven for its cynical betrayal. Which other Muslims will now take the risk of emulating the Kurdish model? What will happen if, after their former adherents are released, Islamic State rises from the grave? Over the coming year, Trump will face both impeachment proceedings and re-election. If IS resumes its terrorist campaign and the victims include Americans, the President will hardly be able to evade responsibility. The price of isolationism is impotence. Are Americans ready to pay that price, as Europeans already have?