A female Kurdish fighter looks on at the funeral of female politician Hevrin Khalaf, one day after Khalaf was brutally raped and murdered in Northeast Syria by Turkish-aligned militiamen. October 13, 2019 (Delil Souleiman, AFP)
The head of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced that his leadership reached an agreement with the Syrian regime in Damascus late Sunday to cooperate in a counteroffensive against invading Turkish forces. The announcement was published only hours after US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper confirmed that all US forces will be withdrawn from Northeast Syria (Rojava) as soon as possible, and after almost 800 family members of ISIS fighters broke out of a detention camp near the Turkish border the same day. The SDF deal with the Syrian Arab Army includes SAA deployment along the entire span of the Kurdish-controlled Turkish-Syrian border, as well as the reoccupation of large urban centers throughout Rojava by regime forces.
In a Foreign Policy article published online yesterday, commanding General Mazloum Abdi reminded his readers that the SDF lost over 11,000 men and women in the hard-fought, five-year war against the Islamic State, after which his forces maintained peace and protected democratic transition in the eastern third of Syria, while also guarding over 12,000 ISIS prisoners. Now, in the face of an overwhelming Turkish military operation to clear Northeastern Syria of Kurds and resettle Arab refugees in their place, General Abdi explained his decision to reach out to Russia and the brutal Assad regime for help, stating, “We know that we would have to make painful compromises with Moscow and Bashar al-Assad if we go down the road of working with them. But if we have to choose between compromises and the genocide of our people, we will surely choose life for our people.”
The beginning stages of that painful compromise became readily apparent today as Syrian army units began crossing the Euphrates by the hundreds, lowering the yellow SDF flag in cities such as Kobane and Raqqa, and raising the flag of the Syrian Arab republic for the first time in seven years. The cost of Syrian regime cooperation will likely by the end of Kurdish political autonomy in the east, the dismantling of the tolerant and pluralistic Democratic Federation of North and Eastern Syria, and the eventual dissolution of the SDF itself. The pill is as bitter to swallow for Syrian Kurds as it is necessary, considering that they had no citizenship in the Syrian state for a half-century between 1962-2012, they could not legally speak their own language in public, and they lost hundreds of square-kilometers of fertile farmland in the 1970’s when it was seized by the father of Bashar al-Assad and resettled by Arab farmers. But faced with an advancing Turkish army, the documented brutality of their Islamist proxies, a resurgent ISIS, and the lack of US military support, the specter of yet another Kurdish genocide made compromise with Assad the lesser of two evils. To date, almost 250 Syrian civilians have died and 130,000 have been displaced by “Operation Fountain of Peace,” as Turkish forces continue to advance far beyond the limits of their declared “safe zone.”
Only time will tell how consequential this campaign will be for the Kurds, the nation of Syria, and the entire region. We would encourage all of our global partners to join us in daily prayer for the safety and well-being of the Kurdish people throughout the Middle East, for the international community to place immense political and economic pressure on the regime of Turkish President Erdogan, for the Turkish operation to end quickly inside Syria with minimal casualties, and for the divine restraint of other bad actors in the region who would seek to capitalize on on the US withdrawal.
We covet your prayers, first and foremost. If you are also led to donate to the work that FAI is doing among our Kurdish friends and neighbors, you can do so here:
https://www.faimission.org/donate
You are also cordially invited to our upcoming Night of “Prayer for the Kurds” in the Presidential Ballroom of the Trump Hotel in Washington, DC on Sunday, October 27th, 2019. Registration is free, and you can find more details here.
https://www.prayforthekurds.org/
Sources:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/13/politics/us-troops-syria-turkey/index.html
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/13/kurds-assad-syria-russia-putin-turkey-genocide/
https://twitter.com/RojavaNetwork/status/1183722370802032640
https://twitter.com/RojavaNetwork/status/1183717451437092866
https://twitter.com/watanisy/status/1183713518094340099
https://twitter.com/RojavaNetwork/status/1183699054422888448
https://twitter.com/RojavaNetwork/status/1183699054422888448
https://twitter.com/HalaJaber/status/1183839352423698435