Collegial Cooperation in Conflict : Syria

"February 19 was the one of the worst days that we’ve ever had in the history of this crisis."
"I opened his mouth [one-year-old baby with blue skin and faint pulse] to put in a breathing tube and I found it packed with dirt."
"This is just one story from among hundreds of wounded."
Abu al-Yasa, doctor, Eastern Ghouta

"Since this morning the bombing has not stopped."
"I was in the street and twenty rockets hit houses around me. The people are living as if they are dead."
Abu Jihad Darawi, Ghouta resident

A Syrian civil defense member carries an injured child rescued from between the rubble of buildings after a government bombing in the rebel-held town of Hammuriyeh, in the besieged Eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus, on February 19, 2018. (AFP Photo/Abdulmonan Eassa)

"We no longer have the words to describe children’s suffering and our outrage."
"Do those inflicting the suffering still have words to justify their barbaric acts?"
UNICEF statement

Over 400,000 people live in Eastern Ghouta. An enclave of Damascus, in the hands of the Sunni Syrian rebels whom Syrian President Bashar al-Assad contemptuously calls "terrorists", for spurning his Shiite-centric regime. The enclave has been surrounded by government troops since 2013, in a siege tactic meant to starve out the residents, forcing them to live with inhumane privation. Food, medicine, the very basic necessities of life have been denied the population.

In the hands of a variant array of rebels, some of them jihadists, zones of control have been claimed in Eastern Ghouta. There is also a Kurdish minority living there, but all have been denied humanitarian aid, punishment for having among them the presence of rebel militias, defiant of the rule of the Alawite regime whose assaults upon the civilian populations of Sunni Syrians have proven to be equally atrocious to the humanity-debased attacks of Islamic State whose dread slaughters have garnered it global disgust.

The latest attacks on Eastern Ghouta for three days straight have intensified the civilian death toll; "spinning out of control" is how the United Nations described the situation in the rebel area. Rocket and artillery fire, air strikes and an absolute dedication to cleansing the area of its fighters has battered the enclave in an apparent softening up of the area preparatory to a large ground onslaught planned for the besieged and suffering region.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, about 200 civilians have died, a quarter of them children.

The bodies of civilians who were killed in Syrian army bombardment on the town of Hamouria in the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta are seen lying on the ground at a make-shift morgue the morning after the attacks on February 20, 2018. (AFP PHOTO / ABDULMONAM EASSA)

Syrian state media claims that pro-regime forces were making preparations to move onward toward the Kurdish pocket of Afrin in northern Syria where Turkish forces were ordered by their president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to cleans the area of Kurdish YPG fighters whom he claims are aligned with the Kurdish PKK resistance fighters in Turkey. State media in Syria describe regime fighters prepared to fight alongside Kurdish troops from the People's Protection Units to "join the resistance against the Turkish aggression".

Free Syrian Army fighters head towards Afrin as part of the Turkish operation [AP]

"If the regime is entering Afrin to oust the YPG, there is no problem. But if they are entering to protect the YPG, then no one can stop us", warned, Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey's foreign minister. Turkey's air and ground offensive against Afrin controlled by the Kurdish YPG has encountered a level of resistance from Afrin's Kurdish defenders far surpassing Turkey's expectations. However, Erdogan defended the slow progress of the operation, claiming to be cognizant of the need to avoid placing the lives of Turkish troops and Kurdish civilians at needless risk.

In the meanwhile, informing parliament in Ankara that Turkish troops alongside their Syrian rebel allies are preparing to lay siege to Afrin "in the coming days". According to Erdogan, the Kurdish People's Protection Units which control Afrin are a "terrorist" offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party and he detests them all, and can think of no more appropriate punishment for them that they be routed by his troops, relinquishing the territory he aims to use as a protective ring along the border between Syria and Turkey.

Turkey has given warning it plans to open fire on regime forces should they fight alongside the Kurds, risking the prospect of a direct confrontation between Turkish and Syrian troops, with Russia apparently on the sidelines preparing to leap into action to put a stop to the situation if it appears to burgeon out of control. Moscow seems more than comfortable with Russian troops attacking Eastern Ghouta alongside the regime's forces, but draws the line at its two ostensible allies coming to blows between them.

Many of the dead were children as the regime stepped up its attack on the Damascus suburb Credit: Khaled Akasha/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

The rows of small bodies of Syrian children bombed to death in the last several days, wrapped in their burial shrouds, does not appear to unduly faze Moscow or give it second pause, while the prospect of Turkey and Syria ferociously engaging on the battlefield targeting one another rather upsets Russian plans for everyone to get along together.

"Ghouta is of major symbolic importance to the regime because it is so close to Damascus and it matters for economic and security reasons,."
"If the regime takes it, they can tell their supporters that the war is almost over and the opposition only controls some pockets in the north, east and south but not in what the regime calls ‘useful Syria’ in the west."
"Everyone is interested in reaching a deal: the regime, the Kurds, the Turks, the Russians. I think the question now is what that deal will look like but I don’t think the parties are interested in fighting each other."
Ibrahim al-Assil, fellow, Middle East Institute

Turkish-backed Syrian rebel fighters fire from the town of Salwah, less than 10 kilometres from the Syria-Turkey border, towards Kurdish forces from the People's Protection Units (YPG) in the Afrin region. AFP/Getty

Calling Erdogan's Bluff in Afrin

"As observers of Erdogan’s war on the Kurds know, the current attack on Afrin is to be put into the context of Turkey’s longstanding racist hostility towards any prospect of Kurdish self-determination, including democratic rights within existing states. By labelling any attempt at self-determination as ‘separatism’ and ‘terrorism’, Turkey tries to legitimize its war crimes in the eyes of the international community."
"Ever since the peace process between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) ceased in the summer of 2015, and especially after an attempted coup attempt in July 2016, several massacres on Kurdish civilians have been committed by the state, while tens of thousands of people were arrested, and even more assaulted, sacked, injured or displaced."
New Internationalist In Afrin, northern Syria, Kurds protest Turkey's invasion as YPG (People's Protection Unit) members look on, 24 January 2018. Source: Kurdish Struggle, CC

Robert Fisk of The Independent, Great Britain, writes disparagingly of Afrin's untouched status; that despite the news coming out of the region of Turkey's assault on the YPG and stated determination to wrest Afrin from Kurdish hands, he could see first-hand no indication of any conflict other than in surrounding towns, that all seems normal and calm, commercial establishments open for business and no perturbations to be seen anywhere. There is a discreet presence of Russian soldiers which tends to give the impression of a loose solidarity with the Kurds.

Fisk, an opinionated and fussily critical journalist at the best of times, seems to take a sneering position at anything that belies his impressions. As a nit-picker, he had to point out in his latest entry in his rag that he had to repeatedly correct Kurdish pronunciation of Erdogan's name, impressing on them that the 'r' is pronounced as 'w', as though that salient fact would be of any great moment to a people fearing the loss of their established autonomy in a geographic area in which they can measure Kurdish heritage by millennia.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan feels entitled to invade areas on the border with Syria, considering them to be Turkish in character and historical precedence and thus on the wrong side of the border. Aside from which he has an overweening sense of paranoia at the presence and autonomous territorial control of the YPG whose connection with the Turkish PKK he points out is injurious to Turkey given the Kurdish aspiration of achieving sovereign status on their own historical geography, absorbed by Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Erdogan's fascist hatred for the Kurdish propensity to claim what is historically and morally theirs, restively agitating for the world to finally recognize the injustice done the Kurds when the dominating custodians of the region, colonialist Britain and France were casually marking up borders for posterity, ignoring natural ethnic, tribal and religious minority groups and forcing uneasy pluralism on a population that historically saw no need to acknowledge the other, each living in their geographies, has been brought to a head.

Under Kurdish control, minorities generally were able to live in peace, unlike the kind of persistent persecution suffered by Christians, Yazidis, Kurds, Jews and Druze among others living under Muslim majority domination. During the invasion and caliphate establishment of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, minorities fled for protection from the invaded areas to find haven within wider, autonomously-regulated Kurdish areas.

Kurdish YPG fighter. Source: Kurdish Struggle, CC

Erdogan's purpose in the Afrin area and beyond is to establish a greater presence of Turkmens and Sunni Syrians on the border area between Turkey and Syria to counteract the link between the YPG and the PKK, sundering their alliance and giving 'protection' to Turkey, and just incidentally in the process enabling Turkey to target the fighting Kurds and demoralize their citizenry with the prospect of an invading Turkey. Because Turkey is a member of NATO, Erdogan has become almost exempt from scrutiny in his ambition.

That Turkey remains a member of NATO is one of those realpolitik mysteries. Ankara's realliance with Moscow has shifted his membership even further outside the Western alliance, yet it remains impervious to hard scrutiny. Lip service is paid by Europe and the United States to the plight of the Kurds under Turkish attack. Discreet messages, mild in language beseech Erdogan to refrain from full-out attack. In fact, Fisk did get one thing right; Turkey with its massive military could, if Erdogan willed it so, make quick work of Afrin if it dispatched sufficient numbers and weaponry to confront the YPG with.

Turkey's arrogance in warning the U.S. that it expects the White House to withdraw from ongoing training of the Kurds, to stop arming them and to recall all the weapons it has thus far supplied the YPG with, along with Turkey's intention to extend its invasion to areas like Manbij where American troops are established, calls for a more vigorous response from the Trump administration than merely responding that it has taken note of Turkish demands.

Kurdish YPG fighter, 19 January 2018. Source: Kurdish Struggle, CC