by PATRICK COCKBURN
On 16 June, Kurdish militiamen, with the support of US airstrikes, captured the town of Tal Abyad in northern Syria, a major crossing point on the Syrian-Turkish border. Its fall is damaging to Islamic State: it cuts the road linking the caliphate’s unofficial Syrian capital at Raqqa, sixty miles to the south, to Turkey and the outside world. Down this road have come thousands of foreign volunteers, many of whom became suicide bombers. Now the movement is all the other way: some 23,000 Arab and Turkmen refugees have fled into Turkey to escape the advancing Kurds. Some passed children over tangles of barbed wire before following through a hole cut in the border fence. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, accused Western powers of using airstrikes to support Syrian Kurdish ‘terrorists’. Towards the end Islamic State seems only to have had some 150 fighters in Tal Abyad. It didn’t send reinforcements because it knew the fall of the town, surrounded by Kurds on three sides, was inevitable.
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The fall of Tal Abyad is significant, but it is still only one more episode in the war now engulfing Syria and Iraq, a war in which military success seldom brings final victory much closer. It is, some argue, another Thirty Years’ War. The problem in Iraq and Syria today, as in Central Europe in the 17th century, is that there are too many players, inside and outside the countries where the fighting is taking place, who can’t afford to lose and will do anything to win. In Qamishli, Sehanok Dibo told me that ‘the balance of power in Syria can change abruptly if any of the foreign countries involved here changes its stance.’ Last year that change happened when the US started to support the YPG in Kobani with airstrikes. But the situation could be transformed again, with disastrous consequences for the Kurds, if the Turkish army, as it may, crosses the border to set up a buffer zone on Kurdish-held territory.
Despite the PYD’s insistence that it is more than just a Kurdish nationalist party, sectarian and ethnic loyalties are at the heart of the multi-layered civil wars convulsing Syria and Iraq, whatever the original cause of the conflict. In both countries, the collapse of central government has exposed and sharpened differences between Arab and Kurd, Sunni and Shia, Muslim and Christian, secular and religious. And as Syrians and Iraqis live in a permanent state of war, these differences are now almost always settled violently. From the Iranian border to the Mediterranean, civilian populations are fleeing their towns and villages whenever the army or militia defending them is defeated. Islamic State is more violent than other movements, publicising as it does the ritual slaughter of Shia, Yazidis and anybody else who opposes it. But Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaida affiliate that is backed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, isn’t far behind, forcibly converting Druze villagers to its extreme version of Islam; on 10 June it shot dead twenty Druze in one village, Qalb Lawzeh in Idlib Province. Meanwhile, the Syrian government uses barrel bombs and every other kind of ordnance to pound into rubble, regardless of civilian casualties, any built-up area resisting it. Many of the outer suburbs of Damascus, once held by the rebels, are today in ruins: they look like pictures of Hamburg and Dresden in 1945.
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