Kurds Stuck Between Foes Once Again

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/world/europe/kurds-stuck-between-foes-once-again.html

Version 0 of 1.

BERLIN — Almost four decades ago, a reporter voyaged to a remote village on the Turkish frontier to glean what little news there was to be had on the collapse of a Kurdish revolt.

The empty dirt track wound through gorges under vertiginous peaks, past far-flung hamlets with flat-roofed homes. In the border settlement of Cukurca, there were no functioning phones. It took longer for a cablegram to get back to Ankara, the Turkish capital, than the reporter who left five days after sending it.

Fast forward to a different era. Once again, Kurds just across a Turkish border face a murderous threat.

In 1975, their fight against Iraqi forces collapsed after Iran withdrew support. Now Sunni militants from the Islamic State are seeking to overrun Kurdish defenders in the Syrian town of Kobani, within clear sight of Turkish armored columns.

Technology and globalization have shifted the imagery and reach of an existential battle spanning centuries.

The fight for Kobani, provoking American airstrikes to support the Kurds, is broadcast live. Each boom of high explosive or stutter of machine-gun fire is transmitted in real time — no slow-moving cablegrams are needed to get the news out.

Indeed, electronic images of the fighting have quickly spread far from a dusty frontier settlement to ignite what one senior journalist in Berlin, Claus Christian Malzahn, has called a proxy war between Kurds and their Islamist adversaries among their shared diaspora in German cities and elsewhere.

In other ways, the plight of Kobani’s defenders seems gloomily familiar.

Doomed campaigns against overwhelming odds are something “the Kurds know only too well from their shifting past,” Mr. Malzahn wrote in the daily newspaper Die Welt. Spread across parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, often in mountain strongholds, some 30 million Kurds, he said, are “the biggest people in the world without their own state.” And in each country that hosts them, they are rarely welcome. Think only of the poison gas attack by Saddam Hussein’s forces that killed 5,000 Kurds in Halabja in 1988. Just this week, the authorities in Ankara, loath to take sides in Syria, sent warplanes to attack positions of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party in southeastern Turkey in a further indication that a fledgling truce between the government and the Kurds may be in jeopardy.

Even before the failure of international discussions in the 1920s to create a Kurdish state from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, the yearning for statehood has challenged the Kurds’ hosts as much as divisions that have made them easy prey to regional realpolitik — pawns in the rivalries of the lands where they live.

That was the story in 1975, when the shah of Iran traded his support for the Kurdish pesh merga guerrillas fighting in Iraq for concessions on the demarcation of his border along the Shatt al Arab waterway.

“Iraq’s rebellious Kurds were the big losers,” said a since declassified American intelligence assessment.

What stands between the Kurds and yet one more rout may well be the counterweight of Western support for a people who have long inspired outsiders’ attachment to what is depicted as a proud and noble heritage.

But a bigger key to their destiny lies in Ankara.

The sight of Turkish Army tanks drawn up on the border opposite Kobani without intervening has incensed Turkish Kurds who have taken to the streets to protest Ankara’s refusal to take sides. Dozens have been killed in the urban unrest.

Yet President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made clear that he has no wish to promote a victory among Kurds in Syria that could simply embolden Turkish Kurds, potentially renewing a war for independence on his own soil.

“Turkey fears nothing so much as having strong Kurds as its neighbors,” said the German journalist Christian Buttkereit in Istanbul.

And the corollary of that, to quote Mr. Malzahn in Die Welt, is that the Kurds “seem condemned to live through their tragic history, over and over again.”