system for the capital. It turned out not to exist and the money allocated to it had all been stolen.
At the end of the day, an Isis blitzkrieg and a dysfunctional Iraqi military were not enough to give Isis victory. Its use of mass terror, publicised by the internet, as a strategic weapon was successful in intimidating many people, but it made even more of them determined to fight to the death. For a fleeting moment after the fall of Mosul, Isis might have generated enough panic to break into Baghdad, but the opportunity was soon gone and would never return.
2016: Three States on the Edge of Disaster
19 February 2016
The war in Syria and Iraq has produced two new de facto states in the last five years and enabled a third quasi-state greatly to expand its territory and power. The two new states, though unrecognised internationally, are stronger militarily and politically than most members of the UN. One is Isis, which established its caliphate in eastern Syria and western Iraq in the summer of 2014 after capturing Mosul and defeating the Iraqi army. The second is Rojava, as the Syrian Kurds call the area they gained control of when the Syrian army largely withdrew in 2012, and which now, thanks to a series of victories over Isis, stretches across northern Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates. In Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), already highly autonomous, took advantage of Isis’s destruction of Baghdad’s authority in northern Iraq to expand its territory by 40 percent, taking over areas long disputed between itself and Baghdad, including the Kirkuk oil fields and some mixed Kurdish-Arab districts.
The question is whether these radical changes in the political geography of the Middle East will persist—or to what extent they will persist—when the present conflict is over. Isis is likely to be destroyed eventually, such is the pressure from its disunited but numerous enemies, though its adherents will remain a force in Iraq, Syria, and the rest of the Islamic world. The Kurds are in a stronger position, benefiting as they do from US support, but that support exists only because they provide some 120,000 ground troops [35,000 each for two Peshmerga groups belonging to the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in northern Iraq and 50,000 Kurdish led the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) forces in north-east Syria] which, in co-operation with the US-led coalition air forces, have proved an effective and politically acceptable counter to Isis. The Kurds fear that this support will evaporate if and when Isis is defeated and they will be left to the mercy of resurgent central governments in Iraq and Syria as well as Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
“We don’t want to be used as cannon fodder to take Raqqa,” a Syrian Kurdish leader in Rojava told me last year. I heard the same thing this month 500 miles to the east, in KRG territory near Halabja on the Iranian border, from Muhammad Haji Mahmud, a veteran Peshmerga commander and general secretary of the Socialist Party, who led 1,000 fighters to defend Kirkuk from Isis in 2014. His son Atta was killed in the battle. He said he worried that “once Mosul is liberated and Isis defeated, the Kurds won’t have the same value internationally.” Without this support, the KRG would be unable to hold onto its disputed territories.
The rise of the Kurdish states isn’t welcomed by any country in the region, though some—including the governments in Baghdad and Damascus—have found the development to be temporarily in their interest and are in any case too weak to resist it. But Turkey has been appalled to find that the Syrian uprising of 2011, which it hoped would usher in an era of Turkish influence spreading across the Middle East, has instead produced a Kurdish state that controls half of the Syrian side of Turkey’s 550-mile southern border. Worse, the ruling party in Rojava is the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which in all but name is the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), against which Ankara has been fighting a guerrilla war since 1984. The PYD denies the link, but in every PYD office, there is a picture on the wall of the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who has been in a Turkish prison since 1999.
In the year since Isis was finally defeated in the siege of the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani, Rojava has expanded territorially in every direction as its leaders repeatedly ignore Turkish threats of military action against them. Last June, the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) captured Tal Abyad, an important crossing point on the Turkish border north of Raqqa, allowing the PYD to link up two of its three main enclaves, around the cities of Kobani and Qamishli; it is now trying to reach the third enclave, further west, at Afrin. These swift advances are possible only because the Kurdish forces are operating under a US-led air umbrella that vastly multiplies their firepower. I was just east of Tal Abyad shortly before the final YPG attack and coalition aircraft roared continuously overhead. In both Syria and Iraq, the Kurds identify targets, call in air strikes, and then act as a mopping-up force. Where Isis stands and fights, it suffers heavy casualties. In the siege of Kobani, which lasted for four and a half months, 2,200 Isis fighters were killed, most of them by US air strikes.
Ankara has warned several times that if the Kurds move west towards Afrin, the Turkish army will intervene. In particular, it stipulated that the YPG must not cross the Euphrates: this was a “red line” for Turkey. But when in December the YPG sent its Arab proxy militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, across the Euphrates at the Tishrin Dam, the Turks did nothing—partly because the advance was supported at different points by both American and Russian air strikes on Isis targets. Turkish objections have become increasingly frantic since the start of the year because the YPG and the Syrian army, though their active collaboration is unproven, have launched what amounts to a pincer movement on the most important supply lines of Isis and non-Isis opposition, which run down a narrow corridor between the Turkish border and Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city.
On 2 February, the Syrian army, backed by Russian air strikes, cut the main road link towards Aleppo, and a week later, the SDF captured Menagh airbase from the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front, which Turkey has been accused of covertly supporting in the past. On 14 February, Turkish artillery started firing shells at the forces that had captured the base and demanded that they evacuate it. The complex combination of militias, armies, and ethnic groups struggling to control this small but vital area north of Aleppo makes the fighting there confusing even by Syrian standards. But if the opposition is cut off from Turkey for long, it will be seriously and perhaps fatally weakened. The Sunni states—notably Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar—will have failed in their long campaign to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Turkey will be faced with the prospect of a hostile PKK-run statelet along its southern flank, making it much harder for it to quell the low-level but long-running PKK-led insurgency among its own seventeen million Kurdish minority.
Erdogan is said to have wanted Turkey to intervene militarily in Syria since May of last year, but until now, he has been restrained by his army commanders. They argued that Turkey would be entering a highly complicated war in which it would be opposed by the US, Russia, Iran, the Syrian army, the PYD, and Isis while its only allies would be Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf monarchies. Entry into the Syrian war would certainly be a tremendous risk for Turkey, which, despite all its thunderous denunciations of the PYD and YPG as “terrorists,” has largely confined itself to small acts of sometimes vindictive retaliation. Ersin Umut Güler, a Turkish Kurd actor and director in Istanbul, was refused permission to bring home for burial the body of his brother Aziz, who had been killed fighting Isis in Syria. Before he stepped on a landmine, Aziz had been with the YPG, but he was a Turkish citizen and belonged to a radical socialist Turkish party—not the PKK. “It’s like something out of Antigone,” Ersin said. His father had travelled to Syria and was refusing to return without the body, but the authorities weren’t relenting.
The Turkish response to the rise of Rojava is belligerent in tone but ambivalent in practice. On one day, a minister threatens a full-scale ground invasion and on the next another official rules it out or makes it conditional on US participation,
