THE FREE PRESS Will America Abandon the Kurds—Again? Masked women on horseback carry the Kurdish flag during a celebration in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdish region, on December 17, 2024. (Safin Hamid via Getty Images) The Kurds expect an invasion by Turkish proxies any day now. Isn’t there anyone who will try to stop them? By Eli Lake 12.18.24

 THE FREE PRESS 

Will America Abandon the Kurds—Again?

Masked women on horseback carry the Kurdish flag during a celebration in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdish region, on December 17, 2024. (Safin Hamid via Getty Images)

The Kurds expect an invasion by Turkish proxies any day now. Isn’t there anyone who will try to stop them?

By Eli Lake

12.18.24 — International and Middle East

Call it the dark side of liberation. America’s most loyal allies in Syria, the Kurds, are now facing the wrath of Turkish proxies that helped topple Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny earlier this month. As of now neither President Joe Biden nor president-elect Donald Trump have offered any guarantees for the survival of the 200,000 Kurds who are now at risk of being cleansed from the northeastern city of Kobani and surrounding areas.

“We feel betrayed,” Ilham Ahmed, a Kurd who serves as the de facto foreign minister for the North and East Syrian administration, told The Free Press in an interview arranged through The Center for Peace Communications on Monday. “We feel defeated and betrayed, in our hearts.”

Ahmed expects an invasion of Kobani any day now by the Syrian National Army, a collection of Islamist militias armed, paid for, and sponsored by Turkey’s powerful intelligence service. When I caught up with her, she had just concluded a round of negotiations with Turkish officials to forestall this invasion—and she was despondent. ​​“All diplomatic talks with Turkey have failed. They have no conditions, they just want to invade,” she said.

A letter sent to Trump—and obtained by The Free Press—on behalf of the Kurds in the North and East Syrian province, pleaded with the president-elect: “From across the border, we can already see Turkish forces amassing, and our civilians live under the constant fear of imminent death and destruction.” It went on to say, “Your decisive leadership can stop this invasion and preserve the dignity and safety of those who have stood as steadfast allies.”

One reason Ahmed is appealing to Trump is because Biden’s efforts to pressure Turkey have been ineffective. “They are giving us verbal assurances,” she said. “They are saying they are pressuring Turkey, but they are not giving us any guarantees.”

Syrian Kurdish militias, known as the People’s Protection Units or YPG, were vital to the U.S. campaign that ended the ISIS caliphate between 2016 and 2019. With help from U.S. special operations forces and American airpower, the YPG was able to take and hold territory controlled by the terrorists. Today, they guard several hundred ISIS prisoners inside prisons they control in their territory. In the last week, though, these forces have been diverted to fight the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA).

The Kurdish people have had a fraught relationship with America through the years. In the early 1970s, the CIA helped to organize a Kurdish insurgency in Iraq against the dictator, Saddam Hussein, during a precursor to the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. When the two countries settled their border dispute in 1975, the U.S. ended its support for the Kurds, leaving them to be massacred. Initially, after the first Gulf War in 1990, the U.S. allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in place after driving his army out of Kuwait. The next year, he turned that machine on his Shi’ites in the south and Kurds in the north. This time, though, the U.S. would not allow the dictator to complete his gruesome task and established a no-fly zone and a regional government that stands to this day.

Will America Abandon the Kurds—Again?

A giant Kurdish flag is unfurled during a celebration of Kurdish Flag Day in Erbil on December 17, 2024. (Safin Hamid via Getty Images)

In Syria, the story is darker. In 2019 when Trump redeployed U.S. special operation forces from North and East Syria to other positions inside the country, the SNA pounced and began a brutal campaign against Kurdish civilians in Afrin and the Ras al-Ayn regions.

On December 10, General Michael Kurilla, the chief of U.S. Central Command, visited U.S. forces in Syria as well as Kurdish commanders in hopes of reaching a ceasefire with the Turkish-backed rebels in the nearby area of Manbij. A temporary ceasefire was reached, according to a tweet from the Kurdish military commander, Mazloum Abdi, shortly after Kurilla left.

But the ceasefire has not held. “Look at the Manbij, the moderate Sunnis working with us were targeted in a brutal way,” Ahmed said. “They killed people in their houses and kidnapped women. They have looted private property. In Kobani, we are expecting something even worse.”

The pending disaster poses an enormous test for both the Islamist rebels who now control Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime as well as the incoming Trump administration. The main faction that now presides over Damascus, known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, has promised to respect Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities, a pledge that has not been respected by the Turkish proxies threatening Kobani.

If Trump were to get involved—even with just a strongly worded tweet—it could very likely prevent an ethnic cleansing in Kobani. But thus far, he has signaled just the opposite: that Syria is not America’s problem. On December 7, as rebel forces were marching into Damascus, Trump posted on X in all caps: “THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”

For now Ahmed is hoping Trump will reconsider in light of his personal relationship with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “Trump has a personal relationship with Erdoğan, we are appealing to him to speak to Erdoğan,” she said.

An old Kurdish proverb says these people have no friends but the mountains. There are moments in U.S. history when America has proven this wisdom wrong, but for the most part America has been a fair-weather ally. Trump has an opportunity to save lives and restore American honor. All he has to do is persuade Turkey’s strongman to hold off his jihadists.

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Eli Lake

Eli Lake is a longtime journalist covering foreign affairs and national security. He formerly covered these topics for Bloomberg, The Daily Beast, and Newsweek. Lake has reported on these topics from India, China, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Israel.