Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  I first encountered the YPG in November 2013, eight months after Turkey’s Newroz ceasefire, when I travelled to the Kurdish-populated north-eastern region of Syria. At that time the Kurds were battling against Isis but mostly against the mainstream Syrian rebels, and their leaders ardently denied their back-room deal with Assad even though it was clear to see. In Qamishli, Syria’s main Kurdish town, regime soldiers manned checkpoints at the central roundabout and the nearby closed border crossing with Turkey, happily coexisting with the YPG troops manning checkpoints half a mile down the road. While the YPG’s political wing controlled the state institutions in Kurdish areas, all the salaries of the workers were still paid by the Syrian government.

  The YPG quickly built an image as the protector of Kurds amid Syria’s Darwinian anarchy – much as the PKK had done for thirty years in Turkey. In many respects it was true. But, like the PKK, the YPG could be ruthless with rivals. One Syrian Kurdish doctor who had fled to Istanbul told me in intricate detail about the day in 2012 when YPG fighters dumped the corpses of a father and son who had opposed them outside the entrance to her hospital.

  The YPG fighters I met on the front line near the town of Ras al-Ain, close to the Turkish border, were almost all veterans of the war in the mountains of Turkey. They spoke a brand of leftist Kurdish that even my translator, a native of Qamishli, had trouble deciphering. Sometimes they spoke Turkish among themselves and one, having spent time in Europe, was also fluent in French. All were well practised in reciting the ideas of Öcalan.

  ‘There is no difference between our fight before and our fight now in terms of ideology,’ said Berwalat, a 29-year-old with sun-leathered skin and a strip of white lace woven through her long, plaited hair. It was her only nod to femininity; otherwise, she was dressed in an outfit that could as easily have been worn by a man. The rollneck of her red jumper sat up high against her chin, and her black leather jacket and khaki trousers were loose and shapeless. She told me she had joined the PKK when she was just twelve years old, and had dedicated her whole life to the cause. She recommended that women join the militia young, as she had, because it was better for them to carry a gun than to live as a slave in domesticity. She had not seen her own mother since 2005, she said. When I asked her if she would ever marry and have children, she creased double with laughter: the PKK bans sexual relations between its members. Men and women are not even allowed to give gifts to each other, lest it spark romantic feelings.

  Now, in this new war and new phase in the PKK’s history, Berwalat had a new enemy – the Syrian rebels, whom she referred to in blanket terms as Al-Qaeda. But neither had her old enemy gone away. ‘The ideology of Al-Qaeda is stronger, and Turkey has the better technology,’ she said in her soft, almost melodic voice, at odds with the battered old Kalashnikov laid out on the rug in front of her. ‘But ultimately we can defeat them both.’

  That still sounded ridiculous by the time Kobanî erupted less than a year later. The YPG’s ranks were filled with hardened guerrillas, but they had no heavy weaponry. I found it difficult to take them seriously; they parroted the kind of leftist political theories that had gone out of fashion decades before most of them were born, and many had joined up when they were still children with malleable minds. But this bunch of slightly outlandish idealists was about to score a huge PR success, which would bring them US military backing and position them, for a time, as the war’s biggest winners.

  I was in Silopi, the last town in Turkey before the Iraqi border, as the battle for Kobanî geared up. It is a Wild West frontier of Kurdish smuggling and PKK fanaticism, each feeding off the other; a remote, deadbeat place, deep in territory that has long been neglected by the Turkish state. Silopi’s potholed main street is lined with kebab houses and cheap motels catering to truckers on their way to the Habur border crossing, six miles down the road. The local men who hang out in the tea houses look as though they have little else to do.

  I had witnessed the PKK’s publicity machine in action here before; when Isis attacked the Yazidis in Iraq in August 2014, some of the first to flee managed to make their way over the border into Turkey and to a tiny hamlet next to Silopi called Nerwon. I scrambled down from Istanbul to cover the story and reached the camp as the first refugees were flooding in. The camp, on a sun-beaten patch of land and framed by a sweeping vista of the mountains over in northern Iraq, was disorganised and under-equipped – a huddle of half-finished dwellings and agricultural outhouses where the new arrivals squatted without water or electricity. It was August, and in the 45-degree heat even sitting in the shade was unbearable.

  Everyone in Silopi knew where the Yazidis were staying, and they rallied to help their Kurdish brothers, bringing piles of blankets and huge vats of food in the backs of pick-up trucks, along with crates of bottled water taken straight from the deep freezer. Within a day, a bright banner hung at Nerwon’s entrance: the flag of the PKK, emblazoned with the face of Abdullah Öcalan.

  In the immediate absence of Turkish officials and international aid organisations in this far-flung corner of the country, the Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi (Peace and Democracy Party, or BDP – then the PKK’s political wing and the local ruling party in Silopi) took charge. Officials picked the Yazidis up from Habur and brought them to the camp, arranged for the sick to be taken to doctors and roused the local people to donate carloads of food and clothing.

  A BDP volunteer met me at the gate on the second day I went to the camp. ‘Please write the truth about what is happening here,’ he said before letting me in to speak to the Yazidis. ‘Write that it is us, not the Turkish government, who is helping these people.’

  Inside I met Dawd and Sivan, Yazidi friends in their early twenties who had graduated from Mosul University. One thing separated them: Dawd had a passport and had crossed into Turkey legally. Sivan didn’t. He and his family had paid a human trafficker thousands of dollars to guide them over the heavily landmined illegal crossing route.

  ‘We cannot stay in Iraq any more,’ explained Sivan as we walked to the building where his family was staying. ‘We can’t live amongst Muslims after this.’

  His aunt, Fatima, was a warm and kind-eyed woman who could not stop thinking about her pet birds. She had left them behind in her village as it was overrun by Isis fighters. ‘I dreamt about them last night,’ she said, smiling broadly. ‘I could hear the noises they made.’ Then she started sobbing, and one of Sivan’s brothers fumbled to find her a tissue.

  Over the following days Nerwon swelled. As more fleeing Yazidis crossed the border, rumours started circulating around the camp. ‘We’ve heard the Turkish government are going to move us,’ Dawd said one morning. ‘They’re going to take us to one of their official camps, and we don’t want to go.’

  The new camp being prepared by the Turkish government was in Midyat, a Christian town several hours’ drive north-west of Silopi. Dawd had heard they would have to stay there twenty-four hours a day, and that their mobile phones – their only link with their friends and relatives still stuck inside Iraq – would be taken from them. These rumours blossomed every time the Turkish government opened camps for Kurdish refugees – and always they were unfounded.

  Dawd and Sivan started planning, considering what their options could be. ‘Maybe we should leave and go to Ankara,’ Dawd said. ‘We speak English, we’re educated, we can find a job.’ The initial appeal of their plan wore off when they remembered the reality of their situation: they had no work permits, no official leave to remain in Turkey and, in Sivan’s case, no passport.

  It wasn’t hard to see why the Yazidis didn’t want to leave Nerwon: the camp had quickly become a community. For over a week they had slept alongside each other, and eaten, cried and laughed together. The children had forged new friendships. In a tent that had been turned into a play area, I watched volunteers lead them in traditional Kurdish folk songs, praying for rain on the parched land. At the end of playtime the children ran to the doorway to find their shoes. As they did, they
broke into a chant: ‘Apo! Apo! Apo!’

  Sivan smiled and shook his head. ‘Yazidis had nothing to do with the PKK before this,’ he said. ‘Now so many of us love them.’

  Now the streets of Silopi were alight: Kurds were again under attack in Kobanî, and this time they believed that Erdoğan was to blame. The riots were spectacular; it seemed as if the whole town, including women and small children, were coming out each night to build and burn barricades and lob Molotov cocktails at the cops. This was the night I realised why all the armoured police cars in the south-east are pitted with scars: it is where rocks and flaming bottles have bounced off them.

  That kind of violence is exciting to cover, until it isn’t. Invariably, it reaches a tipping point at which the rioters become completely invested in causing as much destruction as possible and the police get sick of people throwing burning stuff at them and decide to finish it by any means, as quickly as possible. Then, it becomes a zero-sum game in which you do not want to get trapped if you’re not armed with something, because sure as hell the people who are armed will be aiming something at you. Each night, I tried to sense when we might be approaching the tipping point, and retreated back to my hotel.

  Unfortunately, although the ambitiously named Grand was at the other end of town, Silopi was so small that the tear gas floated down to it eventually and seeped into my room. I had been waiting to cross the border into Iraq to follow a story there. But, as it became clear that Kobanî was going to become a huge news event, my editor dispatched me to go and cover it instead.

  The next morning I hopped on one of the old intercity buses that criss-cross the length and breadth of Turkey, rickety carriages reeking of sweat, the drivers’ stale cigarette smoke and the cheap sachet coffee the tea boy serves up every couple of hours. I have taken these buses so many times in Turkey’s borderlands, starting when I first came as a hard-pressed freelancer with little money, and continuing even when my finances revived because I’d developed a grudging kind of affection for them. They are uncomfortable and the attendants have a bad habit of moving you from seat to seat like a tiddlywink at every stop when you’re a lone female traveller, because it is unthinkable to have you sitting next to a man. Also, they can be held up for half an hour or more at police roadblocks, as all the passengers’ documents and bags are checked. But I had never felt unsafe on the border buses until this trip. Now, with Kobanî exploding, something felt different as I travelled across south-eastern Turkey; there was itchy static in the air.

  Diyarbakır, where I stopped for the night to meet up with a translator before travelling on to Kobanî, was no longer the friendly, laid-back place where I had sat for long dinners with friends and listened to Öcalan’s words about peace. Nightly funerals were being held for locals who had skipped across the border into Kobanî to join the YPG in the fight against Isis. Each day, bigger crowds were coming onto the streets to protest against what was happening to their Syrian Kurdish brethren, to be met with the inevitable water cannon and tear gas from the Turkish police.

  ‘It was the way Isis cuts off heads; when he saw this he felt he had to go and help the YPG,’ said Mehmet Çelik of his son, Sertip, who was being lowered into the ground of Diyarbakır cemetery swaddled in white sheets. Mehmet’s sorrow at his son’s untimely death, at the age of just twenty-seven, was drowned out by his indignation over the injustice of it all. ‘In Sertip’s last phone call he said he was in the centre of Kobanî and that all the villages around the town had been taken by Isis. The biggest gun they had was a Dushka [a vehicle-mounted machine gun], and they were being attacked with tanks.’

  Kobanî, eighty miles south of Diyarbakır, was brimming with stark desperation. The world’s press had gathered on the Turkish side of the frontier to await the town’s inevitable fall to Isis. Even then, it felt uncomfortable to pay so much attention to one battle when Syria had been soaking in blood for three years. Some Syrians believe Kobanî got so much coverage because it is a Kurdish town, and that Kurds make more sympathetic victims than Arabs for Western audiences. That was certainly part of it but, above that, Kobanî was a battle made for television. From our viewpoint safe in Turkey the town was laid out like a diorama, spread over a hillside on the other side of the border fence. We could see where each mortar round hit. We could see Isis’s positions outside the town, too, and watch their steady progress to the outer suburbs. We saw with our eyes as they raised their black flag over the hospital on the eastern edge of Kobanî. Later, as the Americans sent F-16s to strike the Isis positions and turn the battle’s fortunes towards the Kurds, the huge thump of their bombs rolled right through the ground we were sitting on, sending the birds scattering from the trees.

  It was hard not to join in with the local Kurds’ cheers. Thousands had gathered with us, some watching with tears rolling down their faces and others determined to join in. Kobanî had been cleaved from Suruç, its Siamese twin town on the Turkish side of the border, by the European mapmakers who partitioned the Middle East after the First World War. The frontier between Turkey and Syria follows the old railway line between Baghdad and Berlin, slicing east–west through the heart of Kurdish lands with little heed for human history. The border means little to the families and communities who straddle it, and most think nothing of crossing back and forth on the illegal smuggling routes through the flat fields. Now, with Kobanî in flames, the Kurds living on the Turkish side were determined to cross over to help their kin. Young men and boys, some so childlike they could be mistaken for girls, made dashes for the border in full sight of the Turkish army and riot police, who had lined up to stop them crossing. Every few minutes there was a surge, with up to a hundred pulsing forward at once. Most didn’t make it and were pushed back by the police, but each time a few more managed to cross, to the cheers and applause of those left behind. It was a strange thing to watch young men sprinting towards almost certain death.

  ‘They are so brave,’ said Aymann, my friend from Aleppo. He had come with me to the border because he knew how it felt to be besieged, and wanted to show his solidarity.

  Persistent rumours held that Erdoğan was arming Isis in a bid to wipe out the Kurds in Syria. As the violent protests spread across Turkey, they took on an even fiercer anti-Erdoğan tone. Every Kurd I spoke to would eventually come onto the subject of how the Turkish president was puppet-master of their tragedy.

  ‘This is a project of Turkey’s!’ said Mehmet Çelik in Diyarbakır, of the battle that had taken his son. It didn’t matter to him that the Turkish authorities had brought his son’s body back across the border and handed it to him to bury, nor that they were sending ambulances into Kobanî to bring out wounded YPG fighters and treat them in Turkish hospitals. The fact that Ankara was providing for the 200,000 Kobanî refugees who had flooded suddenly across its frontier with a brand new, high-quality refugee camp did not even register.

  ‘For thirty years there has been this war between Turkey and the Kurds,’ Mehmet continued. ‘I myself was in prison for ten years, and my brother died while he was in jail.’

  On the night of 7 October 2014, three weeks into the battle for Kobanî, Turkey’s own tinderbox exploded. This time, as Kurds across the country came out to protest they were met by gangs of Turkish nationalists and Islamists. Thirty-one people were killed over three nights in pitched street battles fought with shotguns and swords. Öcalan had warned that an Isis victory in Kobanî would spell the end of the PKK peace process in Turkey, spurring many of his supporters onto the streets. Now, after fanning the flames, he dampened them down. In a statement from his prison cell he begged for calm, and Turkey’s Kurds retreated. He had pushed the country to the brink, and then pulled it back.

  The damage to Turkey’s image had been done. Erdoğan, forced to walk a tightrope between his country’s two most bitterly opposed camps, had made no public statements about all the things Turkey was doing to help the people of Kobanî. Instead, he pandered to his country’s nationalists, at one point appearing to g
loat about the imminent fall of the town. Officials insist that whatever Erdoğan said about Kobanî was taken out of context, and then spun by a shadowy pro-PKK perception machine to make it appear as if he were waging war on the Kurds by supporting Isis.

  The truth about Turkey and Isis is complex. During my time living on the Syrian border in Antakya in the spring and summer of 2013 I witnessed scores of jihadists travelling openly through Turkey and into Syria. For more than a year the border was a revolving door. Refugees, journalists and aid workers also traversed freely and the Turkish government was praised for opening its border to Syrians fleeing the war, but criticised for allowing jihadists to cross it. Later, when it sealed the frontier with a huge concrete wall and instructed its border guards to shoot at anyone trying to cross it, it was criticised for trapping refugees inside Syria but praised for stopping the flow of jihadists. For the policy makers in Ankara the two went hand in hand, with no middle way and no win–win.

  Throughout 2013 the cheap hotels in the border towns were full of silent, scowling men, with large beards and often dressed in Afghan style. We started to joke that passengers on the flights from Istanbul to the Syrian border could be clearly divided into two groups: journalists and jihadis. One Syrian who had set himself up as a ‘jihadi chauffeur’ would collect foreign jihadists at Istanbul’s Atatürk airport, accompany them on the 24-hour bus journey down to the Syrian border, and then hand them over to the smugglers. They charged $50 to escort their clients through one of the long-established illicit routes used for decades to move guns, cigarettes and drugs, and so open they barely felt illegal – the smugglers unashamedly touted for business in the bus stations of the border towns. The intelligence services turned a blind eye to the extremists traversing the frontier for long enough that Isis mushroomed in northern Syria – and the Syrian chauffeur felt certain enough that he would not be arrested in Turkey that he allowed me to use his name and photograph in my article.