Kurds- People With No homes and No land

Kurds – People with no homes and no land

Thirty-Five million Kurds in middle-east are waiting for the world to see them and acknowledge their existence. Hoping that the promises of getting a homeland will be fulfilled one day. Many of us know Kurds for having beautiful faces and strong women fighters who have many western followers. But a lot we chose to “not know” and a lot we chose to ignore.

Kurds and Their History After World War 1

         Speaking of all, the Kurds are the largest stateless ethnic group in the middle east. They are a minority in Turkey and also in the Northern part of Syria. The chaos which is happening right now in Syria and turkey regarding has a long history. 

         This goes back to the time when the ottoman empire was removed during world war 1. After world war 1, different agreements and treaties took place between Turkey and the colonizers and these treaties did include the possibility of the Kurds people having their own state. But with Mustafa Kamal taking over Turkey and making his government, the possibility for Kurds to have a separate land dissolved. And then another treaty, Treaty of Lussane, divided the region. The boundaries were drawn like that they will divide the regions based on religion and ethnicities but they were done in a way to serve the colonial Powers’ interest too. No wonder the region has never been completely stable.         

         After the world war and the division, the Arabs started to emerge and their moment started but the Kurds were not Arabs. They had their own culture and traditions. They were ancient people and they were not ready to merge into another culture. What the colonizer did was that they made another nation called Iraq that never existed before in the world. They used the Kurds who were living in the northern part of Iraq (directly attached to the Turkey border) as a buffer against turkey because Turkey newly emerged at that time and the colonizers saw them as a threat. Well, the colonizers used Kurds. President Winston Churchill of America at that time promised the Kurds their homeland. Then European treaties promised them a homeland. But they still do not have their homeland. They were used by Europe to protect against Turkey. 

           After world war 1 and all the division, there were Turkish Kurds and there were also those Kurds who remained inhabitants in the Northern part of Syria.

HISTORY OF TURKISH KURDS

          Kurds have been fighting for their freedom since the very beginning. After World War 1, the ethnic nationals were seen as a threat and they were considered dangerous. There was an erasure of Turkish ethnic identity. The Kurds were killed, they were displaced and they were moved across the country, the names of their towns were changed. Massacres occurred against Turkish Kurds. Massacres like the Dersim Rebellion and Zilan massacre (1930) killed thousands of Turkish Kurds. The use of Kurdish language, dress and names were banned and the Kurdish inhabitant area was under Martial Law until 1946. In an attempt to deny Kurds' existence, turkey referred to them as “Mountain Turks”. The use of the Kurdish language remained illegal. What happened as a result in 1978 was a push back from the Kurds when they adapted communism and they made a party Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). And in 1984, they initiated a war against the government in Turkey. An open war started between PKK and Turkey resulted in thousands of more deaths of Kurdish people.

SYRIAN KURDS

          Right after World war 1, the Kurds in Syria were seen as the strategic assets by the French mandate. French mandate lasted until 1943 and the French troops left Syria completely in 1946. But in the 1960s Kurds were stripped off their basic human rights. They were forced to migrate from their towns. A lot happened in the 1980s. Saddam Hussain was in government. He committed horrible atrocities to the Syrian Kurds. And in 1988, he decided to drop chemical weapons (Mustard gas, tabun gas, sarin gas) on them in Halabja. Halabja is a city in the Kurdistan region in Syria. These were the weapons that made people separate their joints, liquefy their organs and crush their own skulls. Innocent people died and they died horribly. 5000 people died just in 2 hours on 16 March 1988. 10,000 people were damaged going to be dead in the following weeks. Later, Kurds were taken by Saddam Hussain’s troops and they were put in mass graves.

          Not only Turkish Kurds were being brutally killed in Turkey but the Syrian Kurds were being attacked horribly. 

Uprising Of Syrian Kurds and SDF

          After facing horrible atrocities and cruelties, things began to change for Syrian Kurds in the 2000s. Then in 2011, Syria descended into an armed conflict. After the violent crackdown, a power vacuum or void was left in the North. It marked the beginning of the Jihadist militant group ISIS. They came in 2013. Many significant portions in North were homes to Kurdish people. They were eventually conquered by the ISIS. But Kurdish militias successfully fought back. At this point, the united states backed the Kurds with air support and on the ground training against the ISIS. In 2015, Syrian democratic forces or SDF was formed by the alliance between Kurdish and non-Kurdish people in the North of Syria primarily to push ISIS back. An autonomous Kurdish territory established in the North of Syria. By 2019, the SDF effectively broke the ISIS stronghold in the north. The ISIS fighters were kept in prisons. There were around 11000 captives. US military bases were already in Syria and their troops began patrolling the Turkish Syrian border. 

Why Turkey attacked Syrian Kurds?

            But after all of this, Why Turkey attacked Syrian Kurds? Erdogan, who was the president of Turkey, saw the rise of the Kurds in Syria as a threat for a very long time. He thought they were somehow linked to PKK in Turkey which has fought the Turkish government for decades. PKK has been fighting for the autonomy of Kurds in turkey. Turkish government always rejected their right to form an autonomous state.

           Erdogan claims that PKK has links with the Kurdish forces in Syria. Syrian Kurds developed a Kurdish Governed territory in Syria and Turkish Kurds wanted the same for years. A territory of Kurds in Syria could inspire the same in Turkey and that was why Erdogan saw it all as a threat. He launched attacks on Syria multiple times because of this same reason. An attack was made in 2016. Another one to destroy SDF was made in 2018.

           By the time, because of the trade war between Turkey and America and due to other reasons, turkey’s economy crashed and many people blamed Syrian refugees. The Syrian war forced 3.6 million refugees into Turkey. People of Turkey turned against Erdogan because of the influx of refugees. In the elections of 2019, he lost 11 seats in local elections compared to the seats he won in previous elections. It happened in March 2019. To make it even worse for Erdogan, a pro-Kurdish party won 8 mayoral seats and helped the opposition candidates to win across the country. The Kurds of Turkey became the key in the result of elections of 2019.

           Because of this and the political pressure, he doubled down on an idea of a Safe zone between Turkey and Syria. A safe zone that was on the border of Turkey and Syria. He claimed that the purpose of the safe zone is to put back the Syrian refugees into that safe zone. Because of the same political pressure after the US and Russia refused to help, Erdogan and his government threatened to move into Syria on their own. There was just one obstacle and that was the US as the US was a military supporter of the Kurds. US troops were still in Northern Syria. 

           In August 2019, Turkey made some progress with the US. The two (Turkey and USA) agreed to a safe zone on the border that they would both patrol together. The zone was about 5 km into Northern Syria. SDF (The Kurds) cooperated by withdrawing some of their forces from the zone. But well the agreement was not enough for Erdogan. Only a month later, he proposed a much larger zone in the UN. The zone was of 30 km and length of 480 km into Northern Syria to enable 2 million refugees. Erdogan approached Donald Trump and after that president of the United States ordered the withdrawal of US troops from Syria leaving the SDF in Syria on their own to face the barbarity of Turkish forces in the coming months. Trump broke the US alliance with Kurds forces and left the zone abandoning Syrian Kurds to genocide.

          

            In October 2019, Erdogan sent their troops into Northern Syria. This invasion was brutal and barbaric. Hospitals were filled with Kurdish people. Families and unarmed people tried to move out of the land. Because of this chaotic situation in northern Syria, the prisons who had ISIS captives couldn’t be any longer guarded. Hundreds of ISIS captives escaped. 

           To put it in more obvious words, when the US needed help to push back ISIS in Syria, they used Kurds. With the help of the USA, SDF was created in Syria. The alliance between Kurds in Syria and the USA was never accepted by Turkey. Turkey was happy about the removal of this alliance. Again, Kurds were left homeless. 

           The war or fight isn’t between the common people. Not between the Kurds or the Turkish because there were times when Kurds were together with Turkish people. Even in the war on independence, they fought together. The exploitation and manipulation by the powerful remain the central problem.

           If thirty-five million people want a separate homeland then they have every right to do so. What they want is a homeland. What they want is to have a life of freedom. A life that is free of discrimination and manipulation. What they want is to be born in a peaceful environment. To live in freed homes. To have a normal life where they are allowed to speak their own language, to name their children according to their culture, to dress according to their traditions and live according to their own rules. And what did they do to not deserve that?

 What did the Kurds do to not deserve a home?