SPIEGEL ONLINE
06/14/2017 05:42 PM
The offensive to take Raqqa back from Islamic State has begun. Kurdish fighters are leading the charge in the hopes of eliminating the Islamist scourge -- but they are also hoping to expand their power in northern Syria.
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June 14, 2017 05:42 PM Der Spiegel on line
The chirping of a few birds can
be heard, but they are instantly drowned out by the squawking of the radio.
"Clara to Guevara, come in please! Guevara! Here, Clara base. Please come
in!" If you keep listening, Rosa Luxemburg also reports -- as Clara Zetkin
continues waiting for Che Guevara.
It sounds as though the
revolutionary idols of a bygone era have arranged for a reunion in the ether --
in the middle of the steppes of northern Syria not even 10 kilometers from
Raqqa, which in January 2014 became the first large city conquered by Islamic
State (IS). It is also the only city the radical Islamist group still controls
-- in contrast to Mosul, Iraq, where IS is now
holed up in one last neighborhood of the city center.
It is the end of May and Kurdish
fighters are preparing for the assault on Raqqa. It still doesn't sound much
like war here, but jihadist radio traffic -- in which they used to regularly
announce their intention to slaughter all infidels -- has become more sporadic,
says a Kurdish radio operator. "They're too concerned about being
geo-located and by the airstrikes by the Americans," he says. He then
tries once more to reach Che Guevara. "We love revolutionaries," he
says before listing a number of them. He pauses and, without being asked, says:
"Stalin isn't among them!"
Men and women in camouflage walk
through the courtyard of the farmstead they have seized while pickups disguised
with mud take munitions and meals to the front lines and bring exhausted
fighters back to camp. Men and women sit smoking in the shade of the terrace,
most of them armed with Kalashnikovs.
Just a few days ago, they were still slowly approaching Raqqa, but on
Tuesday of last week, the long-planned, large-scale attack on the most
important Islamic State bastion in Syria began. Several units conquered areas
in the city's eastern outskirts last week, including most recently the
al-Mashlab district. It is a motley group that has assembled to drive out IS.
Officially, they all belong to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a military
alliance that was founded in October 2015 with the aim of bringing together
Arabs and Kurds.
In addition to SDF insignia,
though, one can also see the shoulder patches of other Kurdish militias and, on
occasion, the Syrian flag with three stars, the symbol of the Free Syrian Army
(FSA), some units of which joined the SDF. Around a tenth of the fighters are
Arabs, with the rest comprised of Syrian Kurds. Several of the officers and
specialists don't even understand Arabic and, aside from Kurdish, speak only
Turkish.
Omnipresent Öcalan
There is only one logo that is
missing completely: that of the tightly organized fighting force that looms
over everything here in northern Syria, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK.
Founded in 1978 as a Marxist-tinged separatist group in the Turkish city of
Diyarbakir, it has managed over the decades to create an effective power
apparatus that exerts it's influence far beyond Turkey's own borders.
All groups are under the control
of the same Kurdish leadership that has holed up in the expansive Qandil Mountains
since the 1990s, from where they provide military and, of particular
importance, ideological training to volunteers from Turkey, Iraq, Iran and
Syria. All of them revere PKK founder Abdullah "Apo" Öcalan, who has
been locked away on the Turkish prison island of Imrali since 1999 and whose
portrait is omnipresent.
DER SPIEGE
Recapturing Raqqa
Gigantic images of Öcalan hang
behind officers' desks at headquarters while many fighters wear tiny portraits
as an amulet around their necks. A silhouette of the PKK founder is stuck to
the windshield of the military pickup as we bounce along hardly recognizable
roads on the way to the front. "We have stay on track no matter
what," says our female driver. "There are mines."
IS lays them everywhere: in the
sand, hidden in artificial rocks, in wells, door thresholds, generators, toilet
doors and even corpses. Sometimes the detonations are triggered by almost
invisible filaments, others are set off by pressure or movement sensors. A mine
somewhere is almost sure to go off after every heavy shower. "It always
happens after rain when mud is splashed onto their sensors," the driver
says. "You can't make any false step!"
International Newsletter
For Kurds on the Syrian side of
the border, the brother of the imprisoned PKK leader founded a Kurdish party
and military arm in 2004, the People's Protection Units, or YPG. Since 2011,
the party and its militia have demonstrated significant flexibility as they
seek to negotiate the convoluted Syrian civil war. First, the YPG entered into
a tacit agreement with the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad
according to which the Kurdish force would refrain from participating in the
rebellion. In return, they were allowed to take control of all Kurdish regions
of Syria in 2012 without a fight. Then, when IS besieged the Kurdish enclave of
Kobani in 2014 -- only failing to conquer the city due to help from the U.S.
Air Force -- YPG became a perfect partner for U.S. President Barack Obama's
Syrian strategy. Obama wanted to fight IS, but not Assad, something that Syrian
rebels refused to agree to. YPG, though, proved a willing partner.
Tenacious Ignorance of Reality
Since then, the Kurds have joined
forces with both the U.S. and Russia. Among those forces assembled under the
SDF umbrella, they are the only American ally worth mentioning. They receive
air support, weapons and ammunition deliveries and battlefield assistance from
U.S. Special Forces, which have several bases in Kurdish-controlled areas. In tenacious ignorance of reality, U.S.
generals praise the Syrian YPG as their most reliable ally -- while in the same
breath pledging Turkey their support in the fight against the terrorists of the
Turkish PKK.
Turkey, meanwhile, has sidelined itself
since 2012 with its focus on fighting the Kurds. For years, Ankara allowed IS
supporters to cross the Turkish border to Syria unhindered because Islamic
State targeted the Kurds. But IS ultimately became the world's Enemy No. 1 and
the U.S. lost trust in its NATO ally.
Öcalan's pliable military,
meanwhile, soon had the strongest military in the world on its side -- a
ludicrous ascendency, and one which, if the party leadership has anything to
say about it, isn't over yet. The Raqqa offensive, though, is an advance into
foreign territory for the Kurds. That's why their use of revolutionary names
from the past to refer to battlefield positions also has a practical reason:
"We aren't familiar with the villages here at all," says the officer
next to the radio operator prior to the launch of the offensive. "Few of
us have ever been in this area."
The SDF front line to the west,
north and east of Raqqa stretches kilometer-for-kilometer through the gently
undulating steppe-land in an endless chain of modestly sized outposts. Hardly
any of them are larger than a dozen fighters, sometimes nestled in an apricot
orchard, other times on the roof of a farm building, protected by a sniper
surveying the surrounding area while lying on a foam mattress -- armed with a self-made,
1.5-meter-long weapon called a Zagros, which can fire large-caliber, 12.7 mm
ammunition at a distance of up to 2 kilometers.
Every outpost commander has a
tablet with a constantly updated map of skirmishes. Mines are cleared from
every new position. Reconnaissance teams or those who recently fled provide a
rough description of the situation at each site: How many IS troops are there
and where can they be found? Which paths are mined? Are there tunnels?
One Step in a Larger Conflict
U.S. Special Forces, which
operate just behind the front, occasionally fly camera drones to keep an eye on
the IS side of the front. Several units then advance in a pincer movement and,
once they have conquered an IS position, they set up camp, defuse mines and
blow up tunnel entrances. It has been the same procedure for almost an entire
year.
The conquest of Raqqa is just one
step in the larger conflict, says a commander who has named herself after Clara
Zetkin, the German women's rights activist and communist who died in Moscow in
1933. "We aren't just seeking to liberate the country, we also want to
change the mentality of the men here. We don't just want to be a Kurdish
women's organization, but a power for all women in the world! There have been
so many revolutions, but nothing has changed." The diminutive woman in her
late 30s speaks of the difficulties of growing up as a woman in an
arch-conservative society under Arab and Kurdish influence and says that she is
also fighting for their freedom.
The Kurdish project of expansion,
though, is not without its shortcomings. It does, in fact, aim to liberate
women from the brutal patriarchy of IS. But those
liberated go from an oppressive system to an air-tight and cleverly disguised
regime of party dominance. And the more powerful the Kurdish fighters become,
the more rigorously they pursue this goal. Even as Washington, in early May,
officially announced its intention to provide significant military support to
democratic forces in Syria, YPG secret service units stormed the last remaining
offices belonging to Kurdish opposition parties in Qamishli, the largest city
in northeastern Syria, and arrested 11 people.
Part 2: A Steadily Expanding PKK
June 14, 2017 05:42 PM
Even before that, opposition
activists in their own ranks were arrested, beaten and deported to Iraq. Their
offices were closed or burned down. Demonstrators who protested the arrests
were shot. Freedom, it seems, ends where the party's absolute hold on power is
questioned.
The same is true when it comes to
the liberation of Raqqa: Only those who display obedience are allowed to take
part. The result is that one rebel group -- which has fought against IS longer
than any other, doesn't belong to the Islamist camp and took part in extended
negotiations for American support -- is being kept away from the fighting by
force of arms.
"Things actually began quite
cooperatively," says Abu Isa, a leader of Raqqa Revolutionaries' Brigade
who is basically under village arrest in the Kurdish region of Syria. He can
receive visitors, but he isn't allowed to leave. "We set up a joint
operations headquarters together with the Kurds, just as we had done with the
Free Syrian Army. But following the victory in Kobani, everything changed. The
YPG officer with whom we had negotiated our cooperation was transferred and his
successor said he knew nothing about it and was just following Öcalan's orders.
The Americans wanted to support us, but they then changed their minds. Sorry, they
told us, but our only allies now are the Kurds."
The final break came when Abu Isa
and others demanded that Raqqa be liberated by rebels from the city and that
residents be allowed to choose their own city council. "That's why we took
to the streets in 2011, for freedom and rights," Abu Isa says. Everybody
in Raqqa knows, he adds, that the Arabic-Kurdish military alliance, the SDF, is
just a guise for the PKK-allied Syrian Kurdish party and its militia, the YPG.
"How do the Kurds hope to control Raqqa? It's an Arab city. It won't go
well."
But one of the rebels' weaknesses
is now becoming a significant problem. Like Abu Isa, they also took to the
streets in 2011, but they had no plan. They were unified by the idea that Assad
had to go, but even today, they still don't have a well-practiced apparatus, an
administrative team or resources to replace the state whose dictator they wish
to topple. The PKK, on the other hand, has all that in the form of decades of
experience as a united, disciplined group that can both conquer and administer.
And they have a strategy -- for Raqqa as well. And there are several reasons to
believe it might work.
'We Began Hating Islam'
One of those is the fact that the
war has displaced fully 100,000 people in Raqqa and its immediate surroundings.
There are refugees everywhere and often there isn't enough room for them in the
camps, leaving them to sleep in the steppe with their overloaded pickups and
tractors. Tired and afraid, many of them are from Raqqa, while others have been
on the run for years -- having fled from Assad's bombs in 2012, been overrun by
Islamic State, been taken into custody or been used as human shields. "Our
children have had to drink cow urine. We don't have anything left," says
one father.
"We are from Salamiyah in
western Syria," says another, "and have been on the run for four
years, from place to place. When we wanted to flee from Raqqa, IS shot out our
front tires. We bought a new tire with the last of our money. Now we are here
and the Kurds have been friendly to us." A third man says that it's only
here that he started praying again. IS "pushed us so far that we began
hating Islam, hating prayer. Anything, anything at all, is better than
Daesh," he says, using the local acronym for Islamic State.
Most only managed to escape just
a few days ago, with the men often still working on helping each other shave
off the scraggly beards that IS forced them to grow. Until recently, the only
women they saw were completely veiled in black, from head to toe. Now, they are
suddenly encountering female Kurdish fighters in fitted uniforms, Kalashnikovs
slung around their shoulders and cigarettes dangling out of the corner of their
mouths. It is surprising, they say, "but totally okay, really completely
okay."
·
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 24/2017
(June 10, 2017) of DER SPIEGEL.
No matter what comes after IS, it
can only be better. The inordinate violence meted out by the jihadists makes
the Kurdish party look almost saintly by comparison. As such, the sense of
relief people now feel at being liberated from Islamic State is currently
smoothing the Kurds' path to power.
Manbij, which in summer 2016
became the first large Arab city to be taken by the Syrian Democratic Forces,
is governed by a military council installed by the Kurds. When asked who used
to administer the city, council co-chairwoman Zainab Qantar answers, "Daesh,
of course!" And before that? "Oh, there was a revolutionary council
of some sort. But they are all dead, or have disappeared."
Filling a Political Vacuum
She doesn't mention that Manbij
had a democratically elected city council as early as 2012, made up of lawyers,
business leaders and teachers, all of whom fled the advancing Islamic State in
2014. Now, they are being prevented from returning and their homes have been
seized.
The economy in Manbij is
flourishing. You can find grain, potatoes, fruit and olives along with consumer
goods from regime-controlled areas in Syria and from Iraq. Goods are even
smuggled in from Turkey. There is bread and electricity and people are even
allowed to smoke again. In the self-proclaimed IS "caliphate," smoking
was punished either with lashes or with the breaking of fingers.
Öcalan's party, with its numerous
acronyms, has effectively filled a political vacuum: After over six years of
war, perpetual bombing and over three years of IS dictatorship, many people are
simply exhausted and prepared to accept any political power as long as it
leaves them alone.
The battle for Raqqa has almost
nothing to do with the beginning of the conflict, which saw Assad's troops up
against the Syrian rebels. Today, the fragmented groups that grew out of that
original conflict are fighting against each other. Islamic State had hoped that
it could, with a disciplined and brutal
intelligence service and military apparatus, defeat the rest of the
world. That plan is failing right now.
The Kurdish party is similarly
obsessed with control, but it has taken the opposite approach: It is seeking
out cooperation with the West and has exhibited as little brutality as
possible. That strategy could result in the control of large swaths of
northeastern Syria. "Manbij is our model for Raqqa," Commander Clara
and other officials say openly. Some are even willing to go further:
"First Raqqa and then Deir al-Zor," says one official while attending
the funeral of eight fallen fighters.
The town, further to the south,
isn't home to any Kurds at all anymore. But as PKK, with new groups and new
acronyms, has established itself in the background as the central power of the
Kurdish ethnicity, it has also lost its Kurdish core. The goal is no longer
merely the long-propagated establishment of Rojava, a Kurdish state covering
western Kurdistan and carved out of what's left of Syria. Now, the new name for
the Kurds' growing sphere of influence is the Democratic Federation of Northern
Syria. And a city council is already standing by for Raqqa to take over the
administration of the city once it is conquered.
As the party has become more
successful, its ultimate goal has become less clear. And perhaps, given the
uncertainties of the entire region, it is smarter to avoid having an overly
predetermined plan. Or, at least, to avoid communicating that plan.
Still, one young fighter voiced
his own enthusiastic version of the future prior to the storming of Raqqa.
"We will liberate everyone, first from Daesh and the former Nusra Front,
from the FSA and the from the regime, from Hezbollah, from the Iranians.
Everybody, out!"
·
Part 2: A Steadily
Expanding PKK
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