Beyond the Pale: The Turkish and Iranian War in Kurdistan

Next year will mark the hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne, which sealed the splitting of the Kurdish people into different four parts. To this day, these borders remain a bloody fact in the heart of the Kurdish regions.

The border between Turkey and Syria has been marked by the third-longest wall in the world. It is a complex tinderbox of Turkish army posts and lucrative customs collection posts, while thousands of Kurdish border runners, people suffering economic hardship and with no other way to earn a living, have perished along the line separating Turkey and Iraq from Iran.

Turkish Attacks on AANES and Iraqi Kurdistan

As insurmountable as these boundary lines are for the Kurdish people, they are completely permeable for Turkey and Iran, especially when it comes to military operations.

The Turkish state has been bombarding Rojava extensively since the late hours of 19 November: from the region of Tel Rifaat, which is overflowing with internally displaced people and the place where the survivors of the 2018 Battle of Afrin reside, to Derik in the far west of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). Eleven civilians have already lost their lives, and thousands have been injured. Grain silos, hospitals, power stations, and a lot of other critical infrastructure is directly under fire.

It seems as if the mere existence of Kurdish people is considered a potential threat to the sovereignty of these countries.

Yet the boundless disproportion continues, as the Turkish Ministry of Defence has announced that these operations will for the first time no longer be limited to AANES, but shall now fall under Operation Pençe. These military campaigns, which are actually “theft operations” that have been running since 2019, have until now mainly been focused on the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), where they have been responsible for dozens of civilian deaths, the evacuations of villages, and the destruction of ecosystems in the border zone between Turkey and Iraq.

Unlike Operation Euphrates Shield (2017), Operation Olive Branch in Afrin (2018) and Operation Peace Spring (2019), these Turkish operations are equally directed at Devera Girê Spî (Tall Abyad) and Serê Kaniyê (Ras al-Ayn), that is, at west and east Kurdistan. Erdoğan has long spoken of a war against the “southern” border, a term traditionally used in Turkish nationalist discourse to refer to neighbouring Kurdish regions, and he has made it clear that “the war will only end when the southern border is secured.”

State Terror in Iranian East Kurdistan

The bellicose actions of Iran, which in recent days has massively escalated military campaigns against the Kurdish population, are just as horrific. Nationwide protests were called for from 16 to 17 November — in remembrance of the 2019 protests in the country, which was isolated from the outside world by internet shutdowns and in which at least 1,500 civilians were killed by the state.

The suppression of these protests hit Kurdish cities the hardest, with at least 30 civilians killed in the last week alone. People hoarded the dead bodies of their loved ones, as the Iranian regime doesn’t hesitate to steal them and bury them far from the family. The following day the people hoarding were themselves killed.

In Saqqez, Baneh, Bukan, Diwandareh, and Marivan, the Iranian military is attacking civilian areas with artillery fire and combat helicopters, while on 19 November a night of terror was reserved for the city of Mahabad. While Turkish F-16 fighter jets were taking off over Kobanî, the Iranian military viciously attacked Mahabad’s civilians, storming from door to door, carrying out summary executions of activists and bringing fear and terror to the entire city. Videos by terrified Kurds secretly trying to capture the excessive violence from their windows and courtyards are filled with the victims’ screams.

Iran also seems to know no bounds: in September and in November the Iranian air force used its Shahed drones and rocket systems against Kurdish party positions, not even hesitating to attack the party headquarters of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), located in the middle of the Kurdish city of Koye, Iraq, right next to schools and homes. In the September attacks, 13 people were killed and at least 50 injured. The youngest victim was a baby, whose mother was killed by a blast. It was born brain-dead, only to die shortly afterwards.

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq, the only formally recognized autonomous Kurdish region, is thus under fire on two fronts, from Turkey and from Iran. As so often, it is clear that no piece of even partial Kurdish autonomy is safe, so long as the entire Kurdish question has not been resolved.

German Foreign Policy Lacks Strategy

Meanwhile in the West, there is no discussion of resolving any questions, least of all the Kurdish one. On the contrary: on 21 November, German Federal Minister of the Interior and Community Nancy Faeser visited Ankara to discuss various issues with her Turkish counterpart Süleyman Soylu — but Turkish expansionism was assuredly not one of them.

As far as Faeser is concerned, the pressing issue is stemming the flow of refugees, which is hardly surprising as the issue of migration has been dealt with via EU-financed Turkish border guards, marines, and deportation centres at least since the 2016 EU–Turkey deal. For Soylu, meanwhile, “fighting terrorism” is the key issue.

In the aftermath of the suspicious bombing in Istanbul, about which we currently have more questions than answers in terms of who is responsible, anti-Kurdish election propaganda was brought to a fever pitch. The military operation in Rojava is being sold by Turkey as a response to the bombing, which the PKK and the YPG are being held directly responsible for despite both groups explicitly denying involvement.

Clarifying what actually happened and who is actually responsible is of secondary importance and not one of Faeser’s specific demands. Instead, the meeting is to be about working together in the fight against terrorism, which in the German–Turkish view of reality simply stands for working together in the fight against Kurdish people.

There is just as little strategy regarding Iran, or East Kurdistan in particular. Isolated sanctions packages appear on the German foreign policy agenda, and the development of political responses is outsourced to the UN Human Rights Council, but no one wants to get to the root of the matter. Iranian regime politicians continue to travel the world without issues, and the country’s national economy continues to be well-represented in Germany. For example at the recent 2022 MEDICA Trade Fair, Iran even had its own section, proudly marked by the flag of the Islamic republic, and the German Chambers of Commerce Abroad are courting Iran’s cooperation.

Securing safe escape routes is not even discussed — German representatives in Iran are currently placing extreme limits on the issuing of visas, and in Germany things don’t look good for refugees with Iranian backgrounds. Shoan Vaisi, municipal councillor in Essen for Die Linke, recently shared a letter from someone with an Iranian background, who as part of the process of applying for German citizenship was required to have a valid Iranian passport, which necessitates a dangerous visit to the Iranian embassy, that is, entry into Iranian territory.

100 years after arbitrary borders were drawn up by the Treaty of Lausanne, the only thing that is boundless for Kurdish people is the unbridled violence of the occupying states.

Neither basic political mechanisms that would limit the financial flows of the regimes in Ankara and Teheran, which are both plunging into financial crisis, nor political pressure, nor safe escape routes for people threatened by terror and persecution are forthcoming from the German side.

Even dealing with the real danger of a resurgence of the Islamic State is not a foreign policy priority for this government. This real terrorism, which Ankara doesn’t seem to focus on at all, does actually exist in north-eastern Syria. Tens of thousands of IS family members and extremely radicalized students are sitting in dilapidated prisons alongside thousands of IS fighters. Were Turkey to attack and cause a destabilisation of the local security architecture, they may attempt to flee — as already happened in January of this year.

Beyond the scope of action in foreign policy, for Faeser there is theoretically much that needs to be fundamentally changed on the domestic front — not in Ankara, but in Berlin. Transnational repression by Iran and Turkey knows no end in Germany. Threats against public dissidents by right-wing Turkish people pile up on social networks, particularly against those with Kurdish backgrounds. Iranian henchmen unabashedly attack protesters and opposition figures in Germany, as happened recently in Berlin.

There is barely any reaction to the fact that Iran and Turkey are continuing their drone warfare in Iraq without any concern for the losses caused. It seems as if the mere existence of Kurdish people is considered a potential threat to the sovereignty of these countries.

This is significant, as it is precisely an Social Democratic Party (SPD)-led government that has nothing to say about these grave security developments, the same SPD that claimed that its “No” to participation in the Iraq War was a “No” to “war adventures” in Iraq. The more the SPD prides itself on that “No”, the more incomprehensible is its complete lack of words and action in face of the simultaneous undermining of Iraqi national sovereignty through both Turkish and Iranian hegemony.

Whether it be Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey or the German diaspora: 100 years after arbitrary borders were drawn up by the Treaty of Lausanne, the only thing that is boundless for Kurdish people is the unbridled violence of the occupying states. A German politics that fails to clearly call this by its name, cannot claim to take issues of democratization and peace in Turkey and Iran seriously, as recent events have made clear: the Kurdish question is fundamental to any such progress being made in both countries.