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Despite the PYD’s denials, and probably their best intentions, the conflict in north-east Syria has many aspects of an ethnic war: the Kurds are driving out Sunni Arabs, whom they accuse of being Islamic State supporters. Those Arabs who flee are seen as demonstrably in league with the enemy: those who stay are suspected of belonging to ‘sleeper cells’, waiting their moment to strike. The Kurds say that they and their ancestors have lived in the area around Tal Abyad for twenty thousand years; the Arabs, they maintain, are recently arrived settlers, beneficiaries of a Baath Party campaign in the 1970s to establish a nine-mile-wide Arab Belt along the border. Arabs who are now being evicted from their homes say the Kurds are telling them to ‘go back to the desert’.
For the 2.2 million Syrian Kurds, a tenth of the Syrian population, the capture of Tal Abyad has enabled them to connect two of their three enclaves, which they call Rojava, or West Kurdistan. The largest enclave, or canton as the Kurds call it, is known as Jazira or ‘the Island’, because of its position between the Tigris and the Euphrates; it is an isolated statelet flanked by Iraq to the east and Turkey to the north. Its main city is Qamishli, which feels a long way from the war. This is a fertile and largely self-sufficient region of wheat fields and oil wells, though few are still operating. Further west is the canton that surrounds the devastated town of Kobani, which Islamic State failed to capture despite a four-and-a-half-month siege that ended in January when its forces finally withdrew after losing an estimated one thousand fighters thanks to some seven hundred US airstrikes and fierce resistance by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). With Tal Abyad in their hands, the Kurds now control a 250-mile-long swathe of territory along Turkey’s southern frontier, an achievement that is likely to cause dismay in Ankara.
full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n13/patrick-cockburn/why-join-islamic-state _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
