This article has been written and produced by Adam Abdullatif for Alaquarium.media. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect any opinions or views held by Alaquarium.media or its contributors
On the 12th of October 2019, Hevrin Khalaf, a Kurdish-Syrian politician, was torn out of a civilian car in Northern Syria and brutally executed. Her body, mutilated at the hands of Turkish backed militias. Making international headlines, the incident was captured on video, filmed by her murderers who can be seen taunting her dead body. The death of Khalaf was tragic. In the grand scheme of the modern tragedy that is the wider Syrian conflict, however, the circumstances of Khalaf’s death are unfortunately not uncommon. Eight years of war in Syria have manifested many tragic tales; thousands of Hevrin Khalafs.
Much alike the conflicting circumstances that have led to the brutality of the wider Syrian conflict, many elements led to the gruesome death of Khalaf. Firstly, the militia directly responsible for her murder: Members of SNA (Syrian National Army [Not to be confused with the Syrian Arab Army, forces of the Syrian government]). The SNA is culmination of 28 Syrian rebel militias, all fighting on behalf of the Turkish government, and all adhering to the same extremist Wahabi ideology. Then there are the Turkish forces themselves, who've bombarded towns across Syria’s north with relentless airstrikes as part of what the Turkish government declared, “Operation: Peace Spring”; an offensive seeking to consolidate land in Syria’s north and crush the perceived threat of militarised Kurdish forces bordering Turkey.
The reckless Turkish offensive, using rebel militias as boots on the ground, is responsible for the death of Khalaf. The recent Turkish invasion was enabled by the sudden withdrawal of American troops, having previously been a buffer, allied with both the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces [Kurdish forces, formerly the YPG]) in the region, and the Turkish government. Many in the media have made the assertion that US president Donald Trump himself, in making the decision to withdraw American troops from “key positions” in Syria, is responsible for the bloodshed witnessed in Syria's north.
However, the blood Hevrin Khalaf, and all casualties lost as a result of the conflict, is not on the hands of Donald Trump alone. In reality, responsibility regarding the brutality of the Turkish offensive goes far beyond Trump’s recent decision to withdraw US soldiers from illegally occupied positions within Syria. In fact, when it comes to the situation in Syria’s north, policy makers and lobbyists from both the Trump and the Obama administration have Syrian blood on their hands. Not just that of the Kurds, but also of the Assyrians, the Yazidis, the Armenians and every ethnic / religious minority population that has suffered amidst eight years of war in Syria.
Turkey is a member of NATO and a key American ally. The two nations boast a strong relationship, with a small amount of cold-war era US nuclear weapons still remaining stockpiled, ready for use, in Turkey.
Kurdish militias formed in northern Syria amidst the chaos of Syria’s destructive civil war. In 2015, at the conflicts worst, Kurdish fighters armed themselves in order to defend their communities from ISIS, who had then occupied the northern region of Raqqa, calling it the “capital city” of their brutal caliphate. In 2017, Kurdish forces, dubbed the SDF, began to receive direct and open funding, arms, training and air support from the United States, supporting their fight against ISIS in the city of Raqqa and its surroundings in Syria's north.
From the early stages of Syria's conflict, in 2011, the Turkish government had enabled the crossing of foreign Al Qaeda affiliated rebel fighters into Syria by adopting a policy of “tolerating” unofficial border crossings between the countries, ultimately bolstering the presence extremist militias in Northern Syria. Inevitably, the streams of foreign fighters entering Syria through turkey only further eased the process of ISIS's official infiltration into the region in 2015.
ISIS’s rapid spread from a fractured Iraq to an unstable Syria in 2014 was enabled, in part, by the power vacuum created after the illegal, United States led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. ISIS’s rise in Syria was also indirectly funded and armed by the United States, through backing received from key western and NATO allies including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and even Turkey, who all directly supported the terrorist militia with funds, arms, trade and / or training at some point during Syria’s brutal war.
Also fighting alongside Turkish forces in northern Syria, are the 28 rebel militias that the SNA comprises. 21 of which, have at some point throughout the conflict, received direct funds, arms, and training from the United States in their NATO backed effort to oust the Syrian government from power. The other seven groups may not have been directly backed by the United States in Syria, but they’re still receiving indirect support through their alliance with the American backed Turkish government.
The fundamentally flawed, inhumane, foreign policy of the United States, going beyond that of Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops, is responsible, and needs to be held accountable, for all blood spilled in Syria’s north. Had the United States not sought to exploit Syrian tensions in 2011, arming a multitude of militias in order to incite regime change within the country for their own geopolitical gain, Kurdish communities would not have had to militarise in order to combat western perpetuated Islamic extremism to begin with.
And as media outlets claim that the United States betrayed the Kurds, realise that at no point during this conflict did anyone in the White House seem to genuinely have the plight of the minority Syrian Kurds at their heart. The United States didn’t betray the Kurds, because they never truly supported them, they exploited them; as they did with every other American backed militia in the region. The United States is responsible for the death of Hevrin Khalaf, and of thousands of men and women just like Hevrin Khalaf, who have been killed in war-torn Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and beyond; innocent lives taken in violence bestowed upon them in the interest of policy makers and lobbyists they’d never met.