East, Europe, and the United States, my recurrent theme was: “Unlike the aftermath of the World War I, when the map of the Middle East was drawn following the demise of the Ottoman Empire that had ruled the region for 400 years, the Kurds have stepped into history. They are on the stage of history now and it is impossible to roll it back.”
It was not only the developments in Iraq where Kurds gained a high profile and acquired almost independent state status that inspired such an argument. In Turkey, where half of the entire Kurdish national community reside, with a decades-old insurgency and violent manifestation of the issue, hopes for a peaceful resolution had emerged thanks to peace initiatives that had been launched. Although intermittent, those processes unleashed new dynamics that broke many taboos in the cultural and societal realm that were believed to be untouchable and eternal. In Syria, a proxy war of global and regional powers and an ugly civil war that devastated and fragmented the country nevertheless brought to the fore the country’s Kurds, who until 2014 were the most forgotten and ostensibly the most insignificant segment of the entire Kurdish people. Syrian Kurds were able to establish control of more than a third of Syria, encompassing all the oil-producing regions. More importantly, they proved to be the most reliable and efficient partners of American-led international coalition on the battlefield in the fight against the Islamic State (Daesh), to the dismay of Turkey. There were adequate reasons and indicators to rewrite the history of the post-Cold War period, with Kurds occupying a central place and promising fortunes on the stage of the Middle East.
However, in 2015 and especially after 2016 and 2017, more prudence and sobriety were required in analyzing and forecasting the prospects for the Kurds. The slippery ground on which the history of the Middle East operates has countless times illustrated that tables can rapidly be turned against the Kurds. The end in July 2015 of Turkey’s peace process, which had generated earnest hopes for a political settlement, postponed the chances for resolution of the Kurdish conflict indefinitely, and perhaps forever. The aspirations for a political settlement were replaced by a zero-sum game that became the modus operandi of the Turkish regime, which drifted from an imperfect democracy into a full-fledged autocracy under the most powerful leader Turkey has had in almost a century. Turkey moved into the Syrian quagmire in 2016, not in cooperation with its NATO ally the United States, but as a partner of Russia, a rival of the US, and in conjunction with a trilateral partnership that included Iran, to confront the Kurds of Syria, at the cost of reversing the gains the Kurds had made since 2012. In 2017, the independence bid of the president of the KRG, Masoud Barzani, drew the ire of Turkey with which it had developed an extremely cordial relationship since 2009, and also of Iran. The latter coordinated with and supported the Shiite-dominated Baghdad government to overrun Kirkuk, the disputed city in Iraq over which the Kurds claim ownership and which they need to form the basis of their ultimate independent state to cede from Iraq. Not only Kirkuk but all the territorial gains of the KRG on the “Disputed Territories” were lost overnight. The divisions among the Iraqi Kurds helped the armies and paramilitary forces of Baghdad, supported by Iran, who easily defeated the Kurdish peshmerga. Turkey established a military presence inside the Iraqi Kurdistan as well, and the Turkish air force undertook a permanent action against the bases and redoubts of the Kurdish insurgents of Turkey in that region.
In January 2018, Turkish armed forces entered the northwestern Syrian Kurdish region and dismantled the Kurdish rule that had been in force for more than five years. A year later, Turkey declared its resolution to terminate the Kurdish rule, stretching along the frontier with Turkey, in northeastern Syria east of the Euphrates. On October 9, 2019, the fateful war of Turkey against the Syrian Kurds was launched. Turkish Army with its Syrian proxies comprising mostly Salafi thugs attacked the predominantly Kurdish Autonomous Administration in northeastern Syria. American military personnel abandoned the region abiding by the decision of President Donald Trump. The developments reverberated across the world as the Kurdish question acquired a global dimension. Russia replaced the United States, and emerged as the new kingmaker in Syria. Thus, the intertwined nature of Turkish and Syrian Kurdish issues had drawn Turkey into the Syrian quagmire with the potential to seal its destiny during the unprecedented historical period of transition of the Middle East in the post-Cold War international and regional order.
Following the developments across the region, I began to be overcautious in prognosticating the prospects for the Kurds. I told my Kurdish friends, some of whom are well-known names in international society, that although facile comparisons are too risky to be accurate, the analogy of the developments of the last years of the Ottoman Empire during World War I might provide an unpleasant but a useful compass to navigate the present and in the future.
The developments following the collapse of the peace process in the summer of 2015 also spelled an incontrovertible departure of Turkey from its fledgling democracy to a nationalist authoritarianism, reminiscent of the final decade of the defunct Ottoman Empire.
The prospect of eternal peace and stability in the Middle East and in Turkey looked increasingly evasive. Fears of new bloodshed, deportation, displacement of populations, and aggravated human agony and misery were rekindled. At this crossroads of history, I was interested in writing a book about why Turkey’s Kurdish peace processes failed, what went wrong, and what can be done to avoid the mistakes of the past and make the peace initiatives of the future more successful. My research thus initially focused on the failures of the Kurdish peace process.
V
The richest experience concerning the Kurdish issue, and one that must occupy a very distinct place in the historical record, took place in the following years, from 2011 to 2015 and from 2015 to 2018. The year 2011 witnessed the violent collapse of the most significant enterprise for the peaceful resolution of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. That phase was marked by secret talks that took place mostly in Oslo, Norway. Any research on these talks leads to the information that they were held between the intelligence officials of Turkey and the PKK delegation, half of whom had come all the way from the organization’s redoubt in Mt. Qandil on the inaccessible frontier zone between Iraq and Iran, therefore suggesting a third-party and international involvement. The PKK’s uncontested leader Abdullah Öcalan, who is serving life imprisonment on a prison-island in the Marmara Sea near İstanbul, indirectly participated in the endeavor. The talks in Oslo continued from 2008 to 2011 following a preparatory phase that goes back to 2006.
This most crucial period pertinent to reconciliation between Turkey and the Kurds has not sufficiently been scrutinized and therefore has not taken its deserved place in the annals of history. This is why it was a personal obligation for me to address the issue comprehensively in Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds.
In the aftermath of July 2011, an interlude marked by the eruption of violence between Turkish and Kurdish belligerents, the peace process was established once again in the last days of the year 2012. Unlike the Oslo talks or perhaps more accurately the previous process that extended from 2006 to 2011, this process was homegrown and coincided with momentous developments in the Syrian conflict that saw effective establishment of control by the PKK’s Syrian Kurdish affiliates on the other side of Turkey’s longest frontier. The second peace process, as it should be correctly termed, as well as being homegrown, was unprecedented, being centered on negotiations with the PKK’s leader Abdullah Öcalan on his prison-island. The quadripartite effort involved Öcalan; the PKK’s political-military leadership in their Mt. Qandil redoubt in Iraqi territory; members of parliament from the pro-Kurdish party BDP (Peace and Democracy Party, banned by verdict of the Constitutional Court in 2012) and then from the HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi–Peoples’ Democratic Party which succeeded the banned BDP); and the Turkish government. In contrast with the previous process that was secretly run, this one was relatively transparent. It continued under the careful public eye, and was observed and reported extensively by the then relatively free Turkish media. More importantly, it aroused hopes for the ultimate resolution of the Kurdish question, “the mother of all the questions” of the Republic of Turkey, which was founded in the 1920s over the debris of the Ottoman Empire. The two dominant leaders, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s prime minister who later became the first president, elected by
