Mick Hartley

I posted last week on the Kurdish woman featured on MEMRI TV, campaigning against the Arab betrayal of the Kurds as Syrian forces close in on Kabani. It’s not just an Arab betrayal though, as Roger Boyes shows in the Times. It’s an American betrayal too.

The Kurdish-majority town of Kobani in northern Syria, a hop, skip and a jump from the Turkish border, should be celebrating this week the 11th anniversary of the American-assisted liberation from Isis. Then, Kobani’s Kurds were saved by an airlift of weapons dropped from US planes: the beginning of a partnership with the US in which the Syrian Democratic Forces were armed and trained to help defeat Islamic State.

Now the Syrian army — this time incorporating many former jihadists — is moving ever closer to Kobani through the surrounding countryside. The town of 50,000 is filling up with Kurdish villagers chased from their farmsteads. If the Syrian army takes the town it won’t be pretty. And don’t expect a US airlift this time. At their peak, the Kurds could claim control of over one third of Syrian territory. Only a tiny sliver of that remains.

The Kurds are on their own because Trump has accepted Erdogan’s realpolitik as his own.

Erdogan has persuaded Trump to accept an ex-jihadist as the president of Syria, and to abandon the Kurdish cause, thus betraying an ally that was willing to die fighting the Islamic State terror group.

Erdogan’s intelligence service, the MIT, began to scout out if there was such a thing as a “moderate” jihadist grouping that would broadly follow Turkish directions, sideline the Kurds, hold Syria together and, with coaching, find a path to semi-respectability. It was a long shot but Erdogan was in a pickle: Turkey faced a huge migrant wave as the whole region beat a path towards Europe. Various US presidents were not picking up the phone. A civil war was raging on the southern border, a war moreover that could suck in players like Russia, which saw itself as Assad’s ally.

In the end, Turkey put its bets on a group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), with links to al-Qaeda but a historic rival to Isis. And they found and shaped and eventually tailored the HTS leader who could be plausibly presented as a uniting force. Given his CV — al-Qaeda, Isis, Nusra Front, a stint in the Camp Bucca detention complex networking with other jihadists — it was a gamble. But the moving spirit was not new to the game: the shrewd head of the MIT, Hakan Fidan (now Turkey’s foreign minister and the country’s representative on Trump’s Board of Peace) knew his way around the formation, rebranding and cross-financing of the jihadist groups.

Washed and scrubbed up, the HTS chieftain Ahmed al-Sharaa was not a difficult sell to Trump’s special envoy Tom Barrack nor to the president himself. Sharaa’s sole condition: he needed full American backing for the principle of a united Syrian state. That meant no Kurdish autonomy, full state control over the oil industry, constraints on the Druze and the Alawites. No fragmentation. Erdogan and Trump have given the thumbs-up.

And the thumbs down to the Kurds. And the Druze and the Alawites.