Turkey has its own good reasons for not intervening in Kobane
Turkey, in essence, is being asked to risk its soldiers to save a “terrorist” organization that has been trying to dismember the Turkish state for decades. The government couldn’t sell this to the wider Turkish public even if it wanted to.
More to the point, it suits Turkey that IS and the YPG/PKK are slugging it out: not only are two of its primary enemies otherwise occupied, but they are weakening each other.
Kobane is not a strategic priority
If Kobane falls, it will be a blow to PKK prestige. The Turkish government is calculating that a PKK threat to end the peace process if Kobane falls is a bluff; the Kurds are too weak to fight both IS and Turkey at once.
Turks are not entirely unwilling to help. The country is hosting some 1.5 million refugees, including around 200,000 from the Kobane area. Given Australia’s reaction to asylum seekers, and the pitiful numbers taken in by Turkey’s NATO allies, it’s a bit rich to criticize Turkey as being unhelpful.
While the resistance in Kobane has been impressive and the political organization of Rojava is regionally unique in terms of its inclusiveness of women and minorities, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s declaration that Kobane is not of strategic importance is apt.
Hard up on the Turkish border, Kobane is otherwise surrounded by IS forces. As high-ranking members of Turkey’s ruling AK Party note, the vast majority of those left in the town are fighters and others who have chosen to remain.
On what conditions might Turkey intervene?
Turkey has not ruled out intervening, but it has a list of conditions.
Turkey demands a renewed focus on toppling the Assad regime, which entails renewed training of the seemingly mythical “moderates” of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Turkey points out that whatever happens in Kobane pales in comparison to the ongoing bloodshed in Syria. This three-and-a-half-year conflict has cost more than 200,000 lives.
Turkey also demands a buffer zone in Syrian territory to shield Turkey from IS retaliation should it intervene. The Turkish-Syrian border is some 900 kilometers long, porous and hard to defend. It is also unclear on what terms Turkey secured the release of consular staff held by IS after capturing the Iraqi city of Mosul in June.
It is true that Turkey has, until recently, done little to stop foreign fighters entering Syria to fight the Assad regime. Before the ascendancy of Islamist radicals, however, supporting anti-Assad rebels was the de facto policy of many regional states, the Obama administration and other western governments. It wasn’t until the Islamist monster created by the proverbial Dr. Frankensteins of the region escaped that this policy began to shift.
Finally, Turkey demands that the PYD renounce its territorial ambitions. Unsurprisingly, the PYD refuses to do this in light of its strong position in the two other self-declared autonomous regions of Rojava. The PYD has been accused of collaborating with the Assad regime — the Syrian army withdrew from Kurdish areas without a fight, yet officials were subsequently on hand to assist with Yazidis rescued from Sinjar — and Turkey has no intention of allowing another PKK haven to be set up along its borders.
Kurds are not a united force
The PKK already operates from the Qandil mountains in Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) territory in Iraq. There is, however, no love lost between the dominant party of the KRG — the Kurdish Democratic Party — and the PKK as they vie for leadership of the wider Kurdish national movement.
The KRG has even, in the past, allowed the Turkish army into the autonomous region to conduct operations against the PKK. While travelling in the mountains near Turkey I was surprised to drive past a Turkish army base on Iraqi soil, before being shown a valley desolated by Turkish bombs years earlier.
The KRG has also refused to recognize the autonomous cantons of Rojava. The KRG says a ditch it has dug along the KRG-Syria border is to keep IS out, but Syrian Kurds see it as a “betrayal” with the purpose of keeping them out. In short, the KRG is often seen as a Turkish lackey and Kurdish political unity is a myth.
This explains why Turkey agreed to help transfer Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga and FSA reinforcements in the defense of Kobane. Only 150 Peshmerga and fifty FSA fighters have been allowed to enter Kobane. Despite an ostensible unity agreement recently signed by the KRG and PYD, the latter sees a large, Turkish-assisted influx of these fighters as a means of weakening PYD, and by extension PKK, influence in Rojava. The PYD thus refused the much higher numbers originally touted.
Given all these factors, it’s unsurprising that Turkey refuses to intervene with boots of the ground. Other U.S.-aligned “coalition” members haven’t volunteered to do much more than engage in what often appears to be an elaborate and exceptionally expensive way to destroy empty buildings.
The PYD-YPG resistance is testimony to their courage, but the Western public’s fleeting emotional investment in Kobane isn’t going to flick a magic switch in the Turkish majority’s collective consciousness after decades of separatist conflict.
Tristan Dunning is Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics at The University of Queensland. This story is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution/No derivatives).
