Why Syrian Kurdistan Matters - New English Review

An Israel News Talk Radio discussion with Ken Timmerman

by Jerry Gordon and Rod Bryant (March 2018)

n January 15, 2018, the US-led coalition against the Islamic State announced a new role for the Kurdish-led YPG/YPJ Syrian Democratic Force (SDF): the formation of a Syrian Border Force (SBF) to protect the Turkish and Iraqi borders. The purpose was to protect Eastern Syria, which the mixed Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian Christian force had liberated in hard-fought battles in Kobani, Manbij, Raqqa and the oil and gas fields of Deir ez Zor. The announcement was viewed by Turkey as a provocative act by the US coalition, with Turkish President Erdogan calling it a “terrorist army” because of YPG/YPJ’s affiliation with the Turkish Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), designated as a terrorist group by Turkey, the EU and US. This was further exacerbated US Secretary of State Tillerson positing that the US would not withdraw its 2,000 special forces and Marine units from Syria until there was a political resolution of the Syrian civil war. In the interim, the proposed SBF of 30,000, drawn from the SDF units, would engage in post Islamic State stabilization of liberated areas.

Erdogan began mobilizing Turkish and Islamist Militia Free Syrian Army fighters across the border in Hatay Province from the largely Kurdish Afrin Enclave of the Syrian Aleppo Governorate in the Kurd Dagh or Kurdish Mountains. The bucolic area held several ancient monuments, including the Ain Darra Hittite Temple, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the Biblical Shrine of Uriah the Hittite, a captain in King David’s army. There are an estimated 100,000 Kurds in Afrin that had been historically settled by them during the Seleucid period. Because of the seven-year Syrian Civil War more than 316,000 internally displaced Kurds, Yazidis, Arabs and Turkmen found refuge in Afrin. Independent YPG/YPJ fighters who were not part of the SDF were stationed in Afrin. Approximately 500 Russian troops were stationed in Afrin City purportedly to protect against a Turkish incursion.

Erdogan issued a demarche on January 18, 2018 requesting the immediate withdrawal of the small force of 200 US special operators deployed in Manbij in preparation for an invasion of Afrin. Turkey had invaded Jarablus, Syria shortly following his staged coup in July 2016 with a mixed Jihadist militia composed of former al-Nusrah and ISIS fighters that adopted the name of the failed US trained Free Syrian Army. The US contingent at Manbij had provided protection for the SDF units that had engaged the mixed FSA/Turkish invasion force blocking it from crossing the Euphrates into the Kurdish heartland of Rojava, or Western Kurdistan. The YPG and PYD liberation of Rojava created a model government structure of locally elected councils and parties that was a confessional model as it encompassed Christian Armenians, Assyrians, Sunni Arabs, Yazidis and Turkmen. Turkey, a charter member of NATO in 1952, presented a conundrum to both the US, a founding NATO member and the NATO council. While it nominally was a member of the US-led coalition of 74 countries fighting the Islamic State, the Islamist Erdogan regime had provided a gateway for entry of foreign Islamic State fighters into Syria and Erdogan’s family profited in the sale of oil from Islamic State-controlled wells in Eastern Syria.

On January 19, 2017, Russian troops evacuated Afrin City in advance of the Turkish and Islamist FSA invasion. January 20th dawned with cross border artillery shelling, rocket, mortar and air attacks by US supplied Turkish F-16s randomly hitting civilian and YPG strongpoints in Afrin. Turkish tanks and troop carriers invaded eastern villages of Afrin. Stiff resistance was put up by YPG forces and inevitably casualties mounted on both sides. The ancient Ain Dara Hittite Temple, allegedly a model for King Solomon’s Temple, was bombed by Turkish jets destroying most of it. There were reports of the mutilation of dead YPG and women YPJ fighters by the FSA Islamist militia, evidence of violation of the Law of Wars and Geneva Conventions. US Central Command General Joseph Votel informed Erdogan that the US was not going to move US special operators from Manbij. Besides US concerns, there were demarches issued by the Assad regime, French Foreign Minister Le Derain, and the EU council requesting Turkey to withdraw. US concerns were raised over reports that hundreds of SDF fighters from Kurdish, Assyrian and Syriac units in Eastern Syria were streaming to Afrin to join the YPG/YPJ forces. Erdogan accused the US of sending “thousands” of trucks filled with ammunition and war materiel to the front in Afrin.

ackground, the Israel National Talk Radio—Beyond the Matrix hosts Rod Bryant and New English Review Senior Editor Jerry Gordon held discussions with intrepid journalist and New York Times bestselling author Kenneth R. Timmerman. The issues covered include the conflict with Turkey in Syria, the debacle that befell the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government following an independence referendum, and emergence of a model democratic political system in Syrian Kurdish Rojava as an exemplar for the other Kurdish regions in Iraq and Iran. Timmerman was in the midst of finalizing a new book, ISIS Begins about the conflict with the Kurds.

Jerry Gordon: One of the things that has occurred was Commander of the US Central Command General Joseph Votel basically drawing a red line for President Erdogan of Turkey that the U.S. was not going to roll over and withdraw its troops in Manbij. They have been in Manbij for over a year and a half when they stopped the Turks from crossing the Euphrates River into the Kurdish heartland, so it seems to have communicated a message. The question is, how robust that message is going to be?

Bryant: Absolutely. And, (it’s) something that we are going to try to answer with our guest Kenneth R. Timmerman. He is going to give us some insights. He is an author and writer for FrontPage Magazine. We are going to be talking about the Kurds and the incursion of Turkey into the Kurdish region in Syria, a very important project. That is why we are putting a magnifying glass on the region of the Kurdish-held areas of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Our sources are telling us that this is an extreme hotbed and we feel very passionate about it because it is one of few opportunities to help establish a sound Republic. Jerry, would you introduce our guest Ken Timmerman?

Ken Timmerman: Historically, the Kurds are a separate ethnic and cultural group. They speak a different language from the Arabs, the Turks, and the Persians amongst whom they are mingled. They were promised—after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I—their own homeland that would have included territories today inside Iran, Iraq, Turkey, a bit in Armenia, and Syria. Of course, they were not allowed to form that homeland. As soon as the Turkish Republic—the modern Turkish Republic was created in the early 1920s—that was the end of Kurdish nationhood. They are 40 to 50 million—the largest ethnic national group in the world to have national aspirations that have been persistently denied.

Gordon: Who are some of these groups that you hear initials about like PKK or YPG or others like it that you have actually had the ability to access?

if you don’t get out of the way we are going to kill you too.

Gordon: To emphasize that point, we understand from certain sources that last Friday at mosques all throughout Turkey, there was a call for jihad against the Kurds—not just the PKK or anything else but the Kurds.

We are trying to find out what was the idea behind the U.S. abandonment of the Iraqi Kurdistan region after the independence referendum in September 2017.

Timmerman: Right. Okay. Let me get to that in just one second. I want to tell you just one more thing about the Kurds, Syria and Russia. The Kurds themselves are hoping that Russia will play a moderating role. The predominantly Kurdish local government in Northern Syria has long had a representative in Moscow. They are talking to the Russians all the time, they are trying to get the Russians to intervene with Turkey, to get them to scale back the attacks and they’ve had some success. Now, let me go back to your question, which is Iraqi Kurdistan, the KRG or Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq. The former President of the Kurdish Regional Government, Masoud Barzani, whose term expired in 2014, resigned in favor of his nephew, Nechirvan. Barzani was warned quite explicitly by the Trump administration on multiple occasions both in public and in private that if he insisted on holding the referendum on September 25th, bad things would happen.

Barzani persisted with the referendum and bad things happened very quickly. The first bad thing that happened was that the Baghdad government essentially put a cordon sanitaire around the northern part of Iraq. They grounded civil aircraft, they would not allow any commercial flights to come in, so they isolated them from the world. Then they retook Kirkuk, the oil producing area with Iraqi Army troops and the Shia Hashd al-Shaabi Popular Mobilization Force which is a 100,000-man force backed by Iran. They moved all throughout Iraqi Kurdistan, checkmating the Peshmerga. Now, here is the problem with all that. Barzani was not an American ally. He turned to Turkey and it was the Turks who were egging him on. Erdogan was egging him on up until two days before the election. One of my Kurdish friends who I was with in Brussels at this EU conference said Erdogan essentially let Barzani down with a rope into the well. Once Barzani was at the bottom of the well two days before the election, he cut off the rope. So the Turks then came in along with the Iranians, who put the squeeze, on the East side if you wish and the Turks are on the left and they just had the Kurds in Northern Iraq in the squeezer. They were getting it from both sides so bad things happened to them after the referendum. The problem with the referendum was that Barzani was not trying to establish a free democratic secular Kurdistan. The problem was that he wanted to establish “Barzanistan”. In other words, a one-party state, a dictatorship, and that is not what we needed to see in Northern Iraq.

Bryant: Now we heard some good news come out from Baghdad that Iraq released the sanctions on the banking system for the Kurds.

Timmerman: Well it is, but you know Iraq is supposed to give them seventeen percent of the state budget every year with the income from oil and everything else.

he only other country like that is Israel and Israel is multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, although it is a Jewish state. Rojava is not a Muslim state so it is a secular multi-ethnic, multi-confessional entity.

Bryant: This is why it is so important.

Bryant: Over the past few years it has been revealed how feared these Kurdish women fighters are by terrorist organizations like the Islamic State. It is the last thing they want to do is to be killed by one of these Kurdish women. Can you explain?

Timmerman: Getting killed by one of the Kurdish women is the next to the last thing that they fear. The first thing that they fear is being captured by them.

Bryant: Captured by them because there is a process of interrogation that is slightly painful includes a knife.

Bryant: Gordon and I were talking during the pre-show warm-up about an eighty-year-old farmer being killed in an artillery strike from Turkey into the Kurdish area. This man’s son is a doctor who helped to treat U.S. soldiers during combat. It is really a sad ordeal when a human life is not accounted for at all. There is no respect for the law of land warfare with these radical Islamic elements. The only way to deal with this is to get behind this Kurdish government in Northern that needs to be propped up and helped as much as possible. Ken, we really appreciate you coming on this show. I hope that this is not the last time that you will join us. We really appreciate your expert opinion and the research that you have done and if you want to get a hold of Ken Timmerman you can go to, give his website, Kentimmerman.com.

Gordon: We heard from Timmerman about groups in Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan who have different allegiances and different ideologies. The Barzani government that he talks about has been around since 1945 and views itself as the vanguard. It became a dictatorship of sorts. There is also another group in Iraqi Kurdistan headed by the Talabani family who was tilted towards not only Iraq but also unfortunately to Iran. That the reason why Kirkuk, with its large oil field, fell to a combination of the Hashd al-Shaabi the Iraqi Shia who were run by a real enemy of the US, General Soleimani who is head of the Iranian Quds Force. So, it is good that the Iraqi government is loosening the controls over the KRG civil aviation and also making sure that it gets its fair share of the oil revenues from Iraq. This is supposed to be approximately 17 to 18 percent.

Bryant: Right now they are only talking about $210 million.

Bryant: This is a fraction of what they are owed.

Gordon: The declaration that was made by CENTCOM Commander General Joe Votel was important. It certainly bolsters the 200 Special Operators that we know are in the Manbij area. But as Timmerman said, we need to do more.

—another country that might resemble Israel and become a beacon of democracy in the region. Wouldn’t it be amazing if democracy and freedom could break out in these regions that have had nothing but tyrannical governments for centuries and centuries?

Gordon: Absolutely.

Bryant: Thank you for lining up such a good show for our listeners. Shalom.

Gordon: Shalom!

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Jerome B Gordon is a Senior Vice President of the New English Review and author of The West Speaks and Genocide in Sudan: Caliphate Threat to Africa and the World. Mr. Gordon is a former US Army intelligence officer who served during the Viet Nam era. He was the co-host and co-producer of weekly The Lisa Benson Show for National Security that aired out of KKNT960 in Phoenix, Arizona from 2013 to 2016. He is co-host and co-producer of the Middle East Round Table periodic series on 1330amWEBY, Northwest Florida Talk Radio, Pensacola, Florida. Listen to the Israel National Talk Radio—Beyond the Matrix program.

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