No friends but the mountains — a look back at the Kurds of Kobane’s heroic stand against ISIS

The Kurdish town of Kobane (Kobani) on the Syrian-Turkish border was officially part of the Aleppo governate of northern Syria, though at the beginning of 2014 its location brought it under the administration of the de facto autonomous Kurdish canton of Rojava.

A small border town with a population of 40–50,000, in September of that year Daesh launched an attempt to take the town during which it became a byword for courage and defiance in the face of barbarism and butchery. The town’s inhabitants and defenders, in the shape of hundreds of fighters belonging to the Kurdish resistance movement, the YPG (The People’s Protection Units), found themselves under a sustained assault during a determined military offensive involving captured Iraqi tanks and heavy artillery. Within a few days Daesh’s offensive succeeded in penetrating the outskirts of the town, defended by men and women with only small and medium weapons. The situation was so grave that YPG spokesman, Redur Xelil, issued a plea for international assistance.

“The international community has to take action,” he announced. “If not, there will be a new genocide, but this time in Kobane.”

The “new genocide” mentioned by Xelil was a reminder of the fate to befall the Yazidi minority community at the hands of Daesh a few months previously, when the Salafi-jihadi group invaded Sinjar region in northern Iraq, close to the border with Syria. The Yazidis are of Kurdish ethnicity and followers of a distinct and ancient pre-Islamic religion. For adherents of Salafism they were apostates and polytheists, a crime punishable by death.

When Daesh overran Sinjar it forced thousands of Yazidis to feel to nearby Mount Sinjar, precipitating a humanitarian crisis which briefly dominated global news bulletins and front pages. Yazidi men unlucky enough to fall into the hands of the terror group were summarily slaughtered, along with old women and others deemed surplus to requirements. Yazidi women were abducted and sold as sex slaves in Raqqa, the de facto capital of the so-called Islamic State in Syria at the time.

With this in mind, the struggle waged by the Kurds of the YPG against Daesh in defence of Kobane came under the category of do or die. The YPG were linked to the Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which itself was an affiliate of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) in Turkey. In 2014 the PKK was listed as a terrorist organisation both by the Turkish government and its NATO allies.

The relationship between Syria’s Kurds and the Assad government see-sawed throughout the conflict, initially antagonistic before evolving into a de facto alliance against Daesh when the group erupted across northern Syria in 2013/14. Along with the Kurds of Turkey and Iraq, Syria’s Kurds have long sought political autonomy. In fact the Kurds of Syria, inhabiting the north and northeast of the country, considered themselves part of a greater Kurdish state that included Iraqi Kurdistan and parts of southeastern Turkey. The tension between the Kurds in each of those states and said states’ respective governments had been ever-present as a consequence.

The plight of the Kurds as the world’s largest single stateless ethnic group — numbering somewhere between 30–40 million — began with the Sykes Picot carve up and redrawing of the region after the First World War by Britain and France. The establishment of new states across the Ottoman Empire’s former Arab possessions left the Kurds dispersed among four states — Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. They had never stopped struggling and fighting for the self determination denied them by the imperialist and colonial powers since, suffering the consequences in the shape of brutal suppression in each of the four countries around which they were dispersed. However despite this shared history of struggle and oppression, in the second decade of the 21st century the Kurds were not a united people.

Moreover, though injustice was a word the Kurds understood well, it had been responsible for them lending support to any government or state which might be in a position to further their objective of forging an independent state. The consequences of doing so littered their history, most grievously with their decision to respond to a call from the Bush Sr administration in 1991 to rise up against Saddam during Operation Desert Storm. In a speech to his supporters in the midst of the military operation to force Saddam’s armed forces out of Kuwait, Bush Sr said, “There’s another way for the bloodshed to stop, and this is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”

Responding to the president’s words, the Kurds rose up, expecting the Americans to provide them with military support. However this support never materialised, leaving them at the mercy of Saddam’s vengeance, which he unleashed in time honoured fashion after the US-led coalition achieved its military objectives, which did not include regime change in Baghdad.

The Iraqi Kurds also supported Bush and Blair’s 2003 war on Iraq, which though resulting in the devastation of the Sunni and Shia areas of the country to the south, allowed them to assert political autonomy in the north, which was untouched by the war, during which they established a provincial capital in Erbil, fifty miles miles east of Mosul.

As for Kobane, in late 2014 its strategic importance to Daesh was self-evident. Having the town under their control would give them access to a wide swathe of territory on Turkey’s border, making it easier for them to move men and materiel between both countries as they sought to consolidate their presence and extend their writ. At the beginning of October, Daesh raised its black flag within the eastern permimeter of the town, suggesting that its fall was imminent. Up to this point the Salafi-jihadi group had only been able to raise its flag on a hill overlooking the town. The civilian population fled, streaming across the Turkish border.

Even now the courage and heroism of Kobane’s Kurdish defenders was of the uncommon sort. That these young men and women, some barely out of their teens, were holding the line with predominately light weapons against a group whose savagery was unbounded, and which meant to slaughter them in the most horrific ways imaginable, conjured parallels with Barcelona, the Warsaw Ghetto — perhaps even Stalingrad in microcosm.

In contrast to their courage, the cynicism of the US and its allies was mesmerising in its mendacity, prepared as they were to abandon Kobane and its Kurdish defenders to their fate. During a press conference in Cairo in mid October 2014, when asked about the conflict that was raging on the outskirts of the town, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that saving it “was not part of the strategy.” Kerry’s UK counterpart, Phillip Hammond, offered an equally grim assessment. “We can’t save Kobane from falling to Islamic State,” he told journalists outside the House of Commons.

Pondering those words, the craven abandonment of a people fighting for their lives was breathtaking in its cynicism, with Washington and London guilty of a naked and shameful embrace of opportunism and realpolitik that was completely at odds with the kind of courage and heroism neither could ever fully grasp.

But for all that, if political opportunism was an Olympic sport the gold medal in 2014 would undoubtedly have belonged to President Recep Yayipp Erdogan of Turkey, whose contempt for the Kurds of Kobane was only matched by his government’s role in facilitating an insurgency that had wrought so much death and destruction in Syria overall. Yet despite mounting international pressure, Erdogan refused to budge from his position of inaction. Instead he demanded the imposition of a no-fly zone over northern Syria and the toppling of Assad to be made a priority before he would intervene. His disdain for the defenders of Kobane was made explicit when he announced to a group of journalists, “The PYD (Kurdish Democratic Union Party) is for us [Turkey] equal to the PKK. It is a terror organisation. It would be wrong for the United States with whom we are friends and allies in NATO to talk openly and to expect us to say ‘yes’ to such a support to a terrorist organisation.”

Adding to the woes of the people caught up in the whirlwind of violence engulfing Syria and Iraq in latter half of 2014 was a US president, in Barack Obama, whose vacillation and lack of a coherent policy towards the region was unconscionable, illustrated by his announcement that he was still formulating a strategy to deal with Daesh, weeks after its eruption across Iraq. Here, Obama was a prisoner of his desperation to draw down the number of US troops in the region after the enormous economic and political cost of the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

No matter, in January 2015, after a long and brutal struggle, the Kurds of Kobane declared victory against a Daesh offensive which at one point had come close to taking the town. Even though US airstrikes, undertaken in the face of enormous international pressure and despite Erdogan’s opposition, played a definitive role in turning the tide, the courage and determination of the Kurdish defenders of the town shattered the myth of Daesh’s invincibility.

Thus it was a seminal moment, which could not have failed to lift the spirits of all who were pitted in conflict against the organisation in the rest of Syria and in Iraq. More significantly, it was a victory that laid the ground for future US military and logistical support of the YPG, support which culminated in them going on the offensive against Daesh at the beginning of 2016.

End.

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