ISLAMIC STATE

It was Respect MP, George Galloway, who said that the west must ‘strengthen the Kurdish fighters, who are doing a good job of fighting IS’. Mr Galloway gave that view during a House of Commons debate on Iraq last month.

It isn’t a contradiction to be anti-war and left-wing at the same time as being pro-Kurd and in favour of supporting and arming the Kurds. Many people have been long-standing opponents of western-led military interventions in the Muslim-majority world. All campaigns from Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003 to Libya in 2011, have resulted in civilian bloodshed and terrorist blowback. Many are not pacifist, either. To somehow hide and pretend that the response to those who carry out beheadings of the self-styled Islamic State need not involve an element of brute military force is either ludicrously naïve or disgracefully disingenuous.

And so too is the lazy obsession with airstrikes. General David Richards, the former chief of the defence staff, has repeatedly called for ‘boots on the ground’ and says that: ‘Wars, historically, have never been won by air power alone.’

Another foreign military occupation of Iraq – or, for that matter Syria – would be wholly disastrous. Further bloodshed would ensue, with yet more blowback. There are, however, secular and Sunni boots on the ground that the west should be backing against the jihadists of IS. There are Kurdish fighters not just in northern Iraq, where the peshmerga have fended off IS attempts to bring Erbil and Kirkuk under its terror-inspired caliphate, but also in northern Syria, where the People’s Protection Units (YPG) of the Kurds’ Democratic Union Party (PYD) have been heroically holding off IS in the importantly strategic town of Kobani for more than a month now.

These Kurdish units, which include all-women militias, have to all intents and purposes become the last line of defence against the genocidal fanatics of IS. But, while, in Mr Galloway’s words, they are doing a ‘good job’, they can’t do it alone. IS are equipped with US-made tanks seized in Iraq following the desertion of whole units of the Iraqi army in the face of IS threats. Progressives in the west, which should also include those of the anti-war variety, need to get behind the Kurds. A loud public voice needs to be heard. We should do so because we owe them. Kurds constitute the biggest stateless minority in the world, with a population of some 30 million, divided mainly between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. They have been bombed in Turkey, executed in Iran, gassed in Iraq and besieged in Syria. Not to mention how they have been repeatedly betrayed by the west.

The Kurds are worth fighting for. Take northern Syria. Here the three autonomous and Kurdish-majority provinces of Rojava have avoided the worst excesses of the civil war. They have engaged in what can only be described as a remarkable democratic experiment, ceding power to popular assemblies and also to women’s and youth councils. Why would any progressive want to stand and watch the revolutionary Kurds of Kobani to fall to the murderous thugs of IS?

Another reason, too, is because of Turkey’s reluctance to do anything. The ghastly crisis unfolding in Islamic State could have been an opportunity for Turkey, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to build a new long-term alliance with his country’s embittered Kurdish minority against the brutal and barbarous extremism of IS. The PYD in Syria, however, is an offshoot of Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been locked in a violent conflict with Ankara over Kurdish autonomy since 1984. Mr Erdogan took the decision to seal Turkey’s border with Syria, but this gave the green light to IS militants to seize Kobani and massacre its PKK-affiliated populace. It then bombed PKK positions in southern Turkey for the first time since the group agreed to participate in a peace process in March 2013.

At a briefing on 4 October, Mr Erdogan said that for Turkey the PKK was the equivalent of IS. Other than shamelessly echoing the mantra of Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, that ‘Hamas is Isis, Isis is Hamas’, a clear irony emerges because if the PKK had been deemed the same as IS Turkey would have done a lot more to help. The Turkish-Syrian border hasn’t been closed to IS fighters, only to PKK fighters. On 20 October, Turkey finally agreed to allow Kurdish fighters to cross the border into Syria, but only Kurds from Iraq and not from Turkey – and not with heavy weaponry either, which has been the main request of the YBG fighters in Kobani.

It would seem that Turkey doesn’t care whether Kobani falls to the jihadists. The Turkish government insists it won’t be bullied by anyone and rejects world opinion as to how it should be acting to help. But to balance the argument it’s fair to say that western governments have never lifted a finger either to help Turkey’s Kurds – or, by extension, Syria’s. As is gaining evermore traction, these are the wrong sort of Kurds – the victims of a NATO ally, rather than a horde of jihadists. Look no further than the interpretation of the language: Kurds in Turkey are deemed ‘terrorists’, but Kurds in Iraq are associated as being ‘freedom fighters’. No one is quite yet sure about the present status of the Iranian Kurds.

Progressives, then, need to get behind the Kurds, especially those Kurds in Kobani. There is a danger, of course, that their struggle will be co-opted by western governments, particularly by those governments which often shape outcomes in the Middle East to suit their own interests. Progressives do not have an alternative stance to pursue given how squeezed the Kurds are between Bashar al-Assad, Erdogan and IS.

In the words of an old Kurdish proverb: ‘Freedom is never given but taken.’