Russia plays Kurdish card as US, Turkey watch
MURAT YETKIN
Moscow hosted a Kurdish conference on Feb. 15 that drew Kurdish political figures from four neighboring Kurdish-populated countries: Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Kurdish media outlets called it a Kurdish National Conference, though Russian officials refrained from labeling it.
The conference came to the agenda after a meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and representatives of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) on Syria on Jan. 27 in Moscow. That meeting was followed by Turkeys blocking of the PYDs participation in a conference on a cease-fire on Syria in Astana on Jan. 23-24. The PYD and its militia, the Peoples Protection Units (YPG), is collaborating with the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) as their ground units against the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), or DEASH.
Turkey did not want the PYD to take part in cease-fire talks, despite being a fighting party, because the PYD is the sister organization of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been fighting against Turkey for more than three decades in a war in which more than 40,000 people have been killed. The PKK is also designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S.. Actually, the collaboration with the PYD is a major source of the rift between the two NATO allies and pushed Turkey to cooperate with its NATO rival Russia in Syria.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan is waiting for a clear signal from U.S. President Donald Trump about his Syria strategy to revise his own, especially after the belated telephone conversation of Feb. 8. But the Trump administration is deep in controversy over Russian involvement in the U.S. election that has resulted in National Security Adviser Michael Flynn having to resign. As Trump waits for a new Pentagon plan for Syria and ISIL and Erdoğan waits for Trump to respond to his questions about Syria and the PYD, Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to be playing the Kurdish card to consolidate the Russian position in the Middle East.
Even the date of the Moscow meeting is enough to play with the nerves of both Ankara and Washington.
Feb. 15 is the 18th anniversary of the capture of Abdullah calan, the founding leader of the PKK, in 1999 through a joint operation by U.S. and Turkish intelligence services in Kenya, after he had spent months on the run from Syria, where he used to be based, to Greece, Russia, Italy and once again Greece before the final destination of Nairobi. It is an irony that one of the biggest Kurdish groups, the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iraq, (KDP) whose leader, Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Masoud Barzani, rejected the invitation in Moscow. It is another irony that the KDP was founded in 1946 in the Moscow-backed Mahabad Republic of Kurdistan (with its base in Iran), which survived only for two years before his father, Mustafa Barzani, had to seek refuge in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, before migrating back to Iraq. Barzani does not want to risk his relations with any of Turkey, Iran or especially the U.S. now. Plus, the KDP has its own rivalry with the PKK and its affiliates in Syria and Iran.
Another irony is that PYD leader Salih Muslim, who openly recognizes calan as his guide, used to have red-carpet treatment in Ankara during the dialogue between the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Parti) government and the PKK through calan in prison and the head of Turkeys National Intelligence Organization (MİT), Hakan Fidan, between 2012 and 2015 during a halt in Turkeys bloodshed. The dialogue period ended when the PKK restarted its acts of terror in Turkey in July 2015 (coincidentally, ISIL started to hit Turkish people in Turkey at almost the same time), and the PYD was denounced as a terrorist, like the PKK, by the government.
Hurriyet Daily News
