When President Trump pulled troops from a region of northeastern Syria, it was denounced as a “shameless betrayal” of the Kurds, who were left on their own to fight off an invasion by Turkey. But Kurdish history is filled with such betrayals.
As the skies over northeastern Syria blackened with smoke this week, as Turkish warplanes swooped down and gunfire and shelling resumed in what had briefly been an oasis of relative peace in the region, the world recognized what 36 million Kurds already knew: They had been betrayed, not for the first time, by their putative allies. In this case, the United States.
That army was the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led militia known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, which had borne the brunt of the war to destroy the Islamic State group’s caliphate, a prime goal of American policy and an achievement Trump frequently claims as a personal victory.
The history of betrayal, and of enmity with Turkey, begins a century ago with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who created the modern Turkish state out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. For millennia, Kurds — traditionally farmers and herders skilled in carpet weaving, copper working and fighting on horseback — lived in the contiguous mountain regions of what today are Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran.
Only one language could be spoken in public, one culture preserved, and that was Turkish, his version of it. Those who didn’t embrace his vision encountered his army. On Jan. 22, 1946, with backing from the Soviet Union, the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad was created in a finger of land in northwestern Iran that the Red Army had occupied. Kurdish printing presses were set up and schools opened, teaching classes in Kurdish, the first seeds planted in Kurdish soil. By the end of the year, however, the Soviets had pulled out and the Iranian shah had reclaimed Mahabad, promising more autonomy but instead executing its leaders and ending its independence.
In 1991, when Bush urged the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Shiites in the south “to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside,” they listened and mounted a short-lived rebellion that Saddam put down through airpower, defying the no-fly zones the U.S. had proclaimed.
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