US responsibilities in Syrian Kurdistan
On November 20, 2019, the Washington Kurdish Institute held an event at the Russell Senate Office entitled, Repairing the Damage: The future of US relations with our Syrian Kurdish and the fight against ISIS. Following the Turkish offensive into northeastern Syria, Operation Peace Spring, nearly 300,000 Syrians have been displaced and more than 700 have been killed. The anti-ISIS campaign has been put at risk, including the potential escape of ISIS prisoners held in Syrian Democratic Force camps. The event proceeded with three keynote speeches from Senator Chris Von Hollen, Senator Marsha Blackburn, and Senator Mark Warner. All three advocated for bipartisan support for the Syrian Kurds, condemned the actions of Turkey, and warned the audience about the reemergence of ISIS.
Following the remarks from the senators, a panel discussion began. The three panelists were Ilham Ahmed, President of the Syrian Democratic Council, Amy Austin Holmes, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center and Visiting Professor at Harvard University, and Aykan Erdemir, former Turkish parliament member and currently a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The panel was moderated by Najmaldin Karim, President of the Washington Kurdish Institute.
Ahmed started the discussion by advocating that the governance structure that the Kurds established was a model for Syria that included gender equality, representation for the diverse ethnic groups in SDF controlled areas, and an example of democracy that has been unfamiliar in Syria. She condemned Turkey and the Turkish backed jihadist groups that have violated human rights in the land they have occupied. Ahmed called for the cessation of the slaughter of Kurds and Syrians in general, and to allow for the Kurdish democratic project to continue. She recommended that the Turkish backed jihadist groups should be sanctioned and listed as official terrorist organizations.
Amir continued that discussion by stating that there are two sides of the story in Turkey. First, is the official one: 79% of Turks polled support Operation Peace Spring They regard the SDF, YPG, and PKK as terrorists and national security threats to Turkey. Another view holds that Operation Peace Spring is an offensive maneuver against the Kurds. It is Erdogan’s war as much as it is Turkey’s war. Similar to an article written by Dr. Gonul Tol, Director of the Middle East Institute’s Center for Turkish Studies, Amir argued that President Erdogan has faced domestic political turmoil and used the October invasion to rally the population against a common threat, the Kurdish population along the Turkey-Syria border.
A younger Erdogan, Amir reminded, started talks with the PKK, transformed Turkish attitudes towards the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government, and established a joint Turkish-YPG operation to protect the grave of Suleyman Shah, an important cultural site in Syria under threat from ISIS, in 2015. Amir claimed that the present-day Erdogan would jail officials for attempting to pursue any similar initiatives today.
Holmes reiterated the condemnation of human rights violations committed by Turkey and expressed her concern for the risk of ethnic cleansing in Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ayn like what was seen in Afrin. She recommended that the US establish a team on the ground monitoring abuses and war crimes as well as a fact-finding commission analyzing possible ties between the Turkish government and ISIS. She also called for international journalists and academics to be allowed to enter Afrin and report what they observe. Holmes stressed that a mechanism for border security must be established, but it cannot simply give Turkey strips of land. The Kurds represent 1/3 of the Syrian population and the US must pressure the UN to allow them to be included in the Constitutional Committee discussions in Geneva.
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Iraqi Kurdistan faces crisis in Iraq and Syria
The Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq (KRG) named Safeen Dizayee as the new head of the KRG Department of Foreign in Relations in July 2019. Prior to becoming Iraqi Kurdistan’s top diplomat, he served as chief of staff to the prime minister, senior KRG spokesperson, and minister of education, among other posts. On November 20, 2019, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) hosted Minister Dizayee for a discussion moderated by Dr. Bilal Wahab, the Nathan and Esther K. Wagner fellow at WINEP.
Dizayee discussed the ongoing protests and instability reverberating throughout Iraq. Civil unrest has not been uncommon in post-Saddam Iraq. The current widespread protests are a culmination of 16 years of corruption and other problems within the government. From 1999 to 2003, Iraqi Kurdistan was independent of the Ba’athist government, but voluntarily joined the new democratic-federalist government after Saddam Hussein was overthrown. The Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq (KRG) is now an autonomous region and is supporting and working with Baghdad to address the grievances of the protesters.
Iraq needs to be changes in the patronage system, reforms to lower corruption, improvements to the provision of services, but the protests must remain peaceful to reach these goals in a progressive and stable way. As for the potential role of the US, the foreign minister noted that the US has no leverage in the protests and the next head of government will likely be less friendly to the West.
ISIS has regrouped and its militants are active almost daily in Iraq. Dizayee discussed how sleeper cells in many villages have emerged and gained support of locals either voluntarily or by threatening communities. They are mainly active in empty, ungoverned spaces near the Syrian-Iraqi border that the Iraqi government did not move into after the official fall of the Caliphate. ISIS has filled that vacuum and operates primarily at night, when their people are less prone to strikes.
Since the attempted independence referendum in 2017, the KRG has addressed structural flaws between the two Kurdish political parties as well as relations with the Iraqi, Iranian, and Turkish governments. Dizayee discussed how political parties have their own peshmerga forces. The KRG is doing the groundwork now to address the differences between the parties, but the parties and their peshmergas are all loyal to Kurdistan despite disagreements on governance.
Dizayee talked in the end about Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) and the recent Turkish invasion. The Kurds in Syria have faced human rights violations for many decades and did not have the opportunity to influence the country until the beginning of the civil war in 2011. The KRG supported the unification of Kurdish political parties in Syria, but Dizayee said that the PYD ultimately has governed Rojava alone. Looking through a Turkish lens, he discussed how the PKK attempting to impose their agenda in Syria scared Ankara and encouraged the Turks to pursue offensive campaigns to protect Turkish national security.
However, extremist groups spearheaded the October incursion into northeastern Syria and acted in heinous ways against the population. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and most of them will try to find refuge in KRG-controlled Iraq. 16,000 people have already fled to the Iraqi border, adding to the 250,000 refugees who began arriving in 2011.
On the US decision to withdraw troops from northeastern Syria, Dizayee said the YPG was used as a security company to defeat ISIS, and now that the job is perceived to be done, he is not surprised that support was withdrawn. He nevertheless appreciates the support of the US government overall to the Kurdish people. The lack of clear policy from the current administration will not ruin that relationship in the long run.
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Stevenson’s army, November 24
– There is now bipartisan agreement on the 302(b) allocations, so each appropriations subcommittee has a topline for their conferencing.
– CRS has a new report on the legislative appropriations bill.
– Two longtime diplomats note how US presidents have regularly acquiesced in Israeli settlement expansion.
– The Post describes the parallel governments for US foreign policy.
– Politico says Trump does more governing from the residence than the Oval Office.
– Documents link SecState Pompeo even closer to Ukraine policies.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Stevenson’s army, November 23
– We’ve talked in class about how presidential perks are part of the chief executive’s toolkit. WaPo has a story about how the White House is using Camp David as a venue for wooing Republicans.
-NYT says US intelligence briefings finger Russia as source of claims of Ukrainian influence in US elections.
-A Chinese defector to Australia details Chinese operations in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
– WSJ reports CFIUS has increased its investigations even before new law took effect.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Geopolitics in the Balkans
These are the notes that used in making remarks via Skype to the Geoffrey Nice Foundation Conference on “Transitional, Post-Transitional and Strategic Narratives about the Yugoslav Wars: from Wars and Search for Justice to Geo-Political Power Games” in Pristina today.
1. It is a pleasure to be with you remotely, even if I do wish my schedule would have permitted me to join you in Pristina.
2. The world has changed dramatically since the breakup of former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
3. That was, we know now, truly the unipolar moment, when the US had no rivals and together with Europe could do what it wanted in the Balkans and much of the rest of the world.
4. With a lot of help from Croatia, NATO ended the Bosnian war at Dayton in 1995 and forced Serbia’s withdrawal from Kosovo in 1999.
5. Europe and the US together invested massive financial and personnel resources in Kosovo as a UN protectorate mandated to build self-governing democratic institutions.
6. The unipolar moment ended with the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the US responses in Afghanistan and Iraq.
7. But the state-building process in Kosovo had significant momentum and continued, first with standards before status and later standards with status, leading eventually to supervised and unsupervised independence.
8. You have not had an easy time of it, but I think your young state has risen to at least some challenges quite well: the economy has grown, after an initial spurt you managed to limit Islamist radicalization, your courts have begun to prosecute high-level corruption cases, your army is incubating with nurture from NATO, and you have managed several power transitions in accordance with election outcomes.
9. Today’s world is however dramatically different from the one that existed in 2001 or at independence in 2008.
10. While still globally dominant, the US faces regional challenges from China, Russia, Iran and even North Korea that take priority in Washington over the Balkans.
11. Bosnia and Kosovo, the object of top-tier attention in the 1990s, now get much lower priority.
12. That is true in Europe as well, where Brexit, Ukraine, and illegal immigration are issues that, each in its own way, cast a shadow over Balkan aspirations to join Europe.
13. At the same time, Moscow and Beijing are paying more attention than ever before to the Balkans.
14. The Russians are interfering blatantly by both violent and nonviolent means in the Balkans: assassination, media manipulation, renting crowds and financing political parties are all being used to slow if not halt Balkan progress towards NATO and the EU.
15. The Chinese are using their financial strength to build and buy. Caveat emptor of course, though my own view is that Beijing’s behavior is a lot more salubrious than Moscow’s and likely to produce some positive results for those Balkan countries and companies that know how to do business.
16. Turkey—also a strong force in the Balkans for historical, geographic, and cultural reasons—has taken a dramatic turn in a more Islamist and autocratic direction. The secular Turkey that contributed forces to NATO interventions in the 1990s is moribund. Erdogan’s Turkey is building mosques, capturing Gulenists, and encouraging political Islam while trying to maintain its previous good relations with non-Muslim countries in the Balkans.
17. How does all this affect Kosovo?
18. The Turkish influence is direct and palpable: though still largely secular in orientation, Kosovo is far Islamic than it once was and has cooperated with the capture and rendering of Gulenists in ways that don’t seem right to me.
19. As for the Chinese, most Kosovars might welcome more interest in investment from Beijing. I wouldn’t fault you for that but only urge caution about the financial and political conditions, which can be onerous.
20. The Russians have no purchase on the Kosovo Albanians, but their weight with the Kosovo and Serbian Serbs is certainly felt here. Moscow is a strong advocate of land swaps and of course blocks Kosovo entry into the UN and opposes its entry into other international organizations.
21. How Moscow will be brought around to accepting Kosovo’s UN membership is still a mystery, even to those of us who think Kosovo independence and sovereignty is permanent.
22. Washington continues to have enormous influence in Kosovo, but it is not the same Washington as even three years ago. Today’s Washington has an ethnic nationalist, not a liberal democratic, administration. Trump and some of his closest advisors are self-avowed “nationalists” who do not believe in equal rights.
23. That in my view is why they were open to the failed land swap idea, which may have died in Kosovo but still survives in Washington.
24. As for Europe, it’s failure of nerve is all too evident to everyone in the Balkans: the French and Dutch vetoes on opening accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia—negotiations that might take a decade—was tragic. So too is the failure to provide the visa waiver to Kosovo.
25. The Western, liberal democratic influence in the Balkans has declined. The Eastern, autocratic and ethno-nationalist influence—if I can use that umbrella term to refer to the very different roles of Russia, China, and Turkey—has grown.
26. Bottom line: responsibility for keeping the Western aspiration alive now rests more than in the past with you: the government, citizens, and society of Kosovo. The Europeans have already disappointed you. The Americans may do likewise. The Chinese and Turks will try to lure you in bad directions while the Russians will give aid and comfort to your antagonists.
27. But you showed how unified and good Kosovo can be to the English soccer fans. I hope you will harness that spirit to the cause of maintaining a liberal democracy that treats all its citizens equally!
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Stevenson’s army, November 22
– Earlier, NYT said decision uncertain on Hong Kong bill. This Morning, Trump says he doesn’t like it.
– WaPo has background on effort to pardon military personnel. David Ignatius decries decision.
– Pause in South Korea-Japan spat,
CAP has ideas for reducing foreign influence in US elections.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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