In light of Turkey’s renewed threats to invade Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), the present is an apt time to reevaluate the dire consequences that such an action would have for northeast Syria and the wider region.
Turkey is presently warning the United States that it will take military action against Rojava if Washington does not establish a buffer zone free of Kurdish forces all along Rojava’s lengthy border with Turkey.
In recent weeks Ankara has deployed more troops, tanks and artillery to its border to reinforce this threat. While major military action is unlikely to commence in the coming weeks any major ground operation by Turkey will likely destroy Rojava’s relative stability, spark a widespread war along the lengthy 600-kilometre border between the two adversaries and possibly enable the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist organization to make a major resurgence in Syria.
Turkey’s primary adversary in Syria, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), consists of at least 30,000 fighters to as many as 60,000. Those fighters would be fighting the Turkish military in defence of their heartland so are not likely surrender willingly. Consequently, if Turkey seeks to destroy the YPG it would need to invade the one-third of Syria the group controls and fight it in urban areas.
The Turkish state previously fought the YPG in Rojava’s isolated northwestern enclave Afrin when, without provocation from the Syrian Kurds, Turkey invaded the stable region in early 2018 and has since subjected it to a brutal occupation with numerous human rights abuses against the local population. The YPG had managed to hold off Turkey and its Syrian militia proxies, which greatly outnumbered and outgunned them, for 2 months and opted not to fight in the city of Afrin to spare it from destruction. Turkey’s proxies then moved in and brazenly looted it in broad daylight.
If Turkey invades Rojava’s heartland, which spans the two-thirds of Syria’s border with Turkey between Iraq up to the east bank of the Euphrates River, it’s unclear whether or not the YPG would even make tactical withdrawals from the border areas since most of Rojava’s Kurdish majority cities sit directly on that border. Furthermore, the YPG might calculate that if it withdraws as it did in Afrin the civilians in those cities would face abuse and torture at the hands of Turkey’s proxies.
These border cities include Rojava’s capital Qamishli and the city of Kobane, the latter famed for withstanding and eventually breaking a brutal and unrelenting ISIS siege in late 2014. The breaking of the siege of Kobane constituted ISIS’s first major strategic setback since it declared its caliphate and was even likened to a Stalingrad-like defeat for the jihadists.
An urban conflict would undoubtedly result in large numbers of civilian casualties. Turkey has previously destroyed several major Kurdish towns and cities in 2015-16 after its conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) flared up again with a vengeance following the breakdown of a two-and-a-half-year ceasefire between the two adversaries. The widespread scale of the destruction made these urban areas indistinguishable from Syrian cities such as Aleppo, where whole neighbours were reduced to heaps of rubble. Ankara would likely use similar scorched earth tactics if it tries to remove the YPG from Rojava’s major cities, which would kill countless numbers of civilians and displace tens-of-thousands more.
In the meantime, this could well enable ISIS remnants to regroup and reorganize. When YPG fighters left their front-line positions against ISIS to combat the Turkish invasion of Afrin ISIS was given a 2-month window to regroup and even recruit new members. A Turkish invasion of Rojava’s heartland would similarly enable the group’s sleeper cells to reorganize and wage more terrorist attacks.
In displaced person camps in Rojava, there are presently thousands of captured ISIS fighters. There are also thousands of ISIS wives who, far from showing any contrition for the group’s crimes against humanity, are actively radicalizing their children. Consequently, ISIS could become a major factor in northeastern and eastern Syria thanks to any Turkish war of aggression against the YPG.
The Syrian regime has not reconquered the entirety of the country from the ragtag opposition groups it has been fighting since 2011. It still launches intermittent Russian-backed bombardments and offensives targeting both civilians and the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, the latest incarnation of the Al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra, in the northwestern province of Idlib – the only major part of the country still held by its opponents. To this day, Turkey continues to arm and train anti-regime forces in Idlib, who have recently fought alongside HTS, to prevent the regime from reconquering the area. This state-of-affairs is likely to drag on for some time to come. One Rojava leader even predicted that the conflict in Syria could drag on until 2025!
While it’s unclear how the Idlib impasse will ultimately be resolved or not anytime soon it is clear that any major Turkish attack on Rojava will certainly prolong the Syrian conflict, needlessly cause more death and destruction as well as sow the seeds for even more conflicts and crises that would continually plague the region for many more years to come.