Fight against ISIL is helping with a different battle

With all eyes trained on the battle against ISIL, the Kurds are advancing in their quest for independence, writes Jesse Rosenfeld

Fight against ISIL is helping the Kurds win their battle for independence. Photo: AP

The international community has, on occasion, been shocked by atrocities committed against the Kurds, but it has generally treated them as localised acts of oppression against a minority community in Iraq, Syria, Turkey or Iran. For years, the world turned a blind eye to Kurdish aspirations for self-determination.

However, their centrality in the battle against ISIL and the unity forged by the Kurds as they fight a common enemy is forcing the world to see Kurdish demands for political and cultural rights in a new light.

“The Kurdish people have been fighting for their existence for 40 years,” Ayse Efendi, recently told me in Suruc, the Turkish border town next to Kobani. “But since the war [with ISIL] the world is starting to understand what we are fighting for.” As a leader of the Kurdish Syrian refugee community, Ms Efendi, 55, plays a central role in organising the return of refugees to fight on the Syrian front. She is also the wife of Salih Muslim, leader of the political wing of the Syrian Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG). With one son killed in the Syrian civil war and another fighting as a guerrilla in the armed wing of Turkey’s banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Ms Efendi’s life exemplifies the tightening cross-border ties between Kurds.

Labelled a terrorist organisation across most of the West for its 29-year-old armed uprising against Nato member, Turkey, the PKK has become an essential fighting force against ISIL in northern Iraq. The PKK bolstered the US-backed Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces and trained Yazidi volunteer units on Mount Sinjar. And heavy artillery brought by the peshmerga to bolster the YPG, a PKK sister organisation, was essential to Kobani’s liberation.

The Kurds are now in a very different political situation from the 1990s. At the time, the international community turned a blind eye to Turkey’s brutal repression of them and to the Kurdish civil war in Iraq.

Now, the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq is a major oil supplier to Turkey and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government is the first to begin peace talks with the PKK. Iraqi Kurdistan’s economy is doing well and political autonomy has strengthened in the past few years. Meanwhile, there’s been some easing of restrictions on the Kurdish language in Turkey.

Even so, any attempt to mobilise Kurdish nationalists in Turkey’s south-east is often firmly repressed by state security forces and PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan remains in a Turkish prison. And Turkey actively blocked attempts by Turkish Kurds to bolster their Syrian compatriots who were fighting ISIL around Kobani.

As a result, the cross-border response to ISIL is both a fight for survival against a new and bloody threat and a means to overcome long-standing injustices.

Suruc, a town of Turkish Kurds, is an example of the changes under way in Kurdish society. In September, the town became flanked by refugee camps that housed many of the 200,000 people who fled Kobani and the surrounding areas and came across the border into Turkey. This has drawn Kurds from around Turkey and as far away as Iran to volunteer in Suruc’s poorly equipped camps. Meanwhile, hospitals run by the Kurdish municipality covertly treat YPG fighters who would be arrested if they went to Turkish government hospitals. The refugee camps and Suruc town are united in a general sense of political admiration for Mr Ocalan and his left wing, secular, nationalist movement.

Mr Ocalan has shaped the Kurdish struggle for decades, from the founding of the PKK- inspired Kurdish Iranian guerrilla group, PJAK, to the creation of autonomous Kurdish cantons in Syria in 2014.

Last year, when he declared from his prison cell that the Kurdish struggle should be directed at creating a federation of locally driven democratic and autonomous communities, it was a shift away from the aspirations to statehood. But this seems to have been about realist concerns – how best to tell the West and Turkey that a resolution with Ankara was possible without creating a separate state? It also addressed a key problem for the Kurds – how to assert sovereignty across so many borders.

Even so, in Suruc, Mr Ocalan is seen as a symbol of sacrifice and commitment to the cause of the Kurdish peoples.

Inside the thin plastic refugee tents, he is revered for leading a struggle to put Kurds on the map or at least to get them to the point where they can live freely and speak their own language.

The advance of ISIL and the Kurdish resistance campaign to the extremist group is redrawing the borders of Syria and Iraq. While ISIL has accelerated the sectarian splintering in both countries, the Kurds have more territory in their control than at any time in recent history.

The political shift away from statehood has made the Kurds’ goals of greater autonomy and self-determination in Kurdish areas more possible. Amid the carnage, Kurdish national aspirations are strengthening.

Jesse Rosenfeld is a Canadian journalist based in Turkey. He has lived in the Middle East since 2007

On Twitter: @jrosyfield