Turkey's Forgotten War on the Kurds
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been carrying out an ethnic cleansing with impunity for years
A quick note before we get started today—I mentioned last week the Shield of the Republic crew spent the past few weeks preparing to transition the show into a new era of video simulcasting over on the Bulwark’s YouTube channel. We debuted last Thursday with a tremendous conversation with American patriot (and my old boss) Liz Cheney. The reception has been nothing short of amazing; we debuted at #12 on the Apple Podcast U.S. History chart and the episode has already been viewed by some sixty-five thousand people as of this writing.
If you haven’t already, I highly encourage you to check out the show. Like I’ve said in the past if you like this newsletter, you’ll love Shield:
For four months I’ve watched college students, domestic journalists, and far left politicians lather themselves into a frenzy of selective outrage at Israel’s response to a terror attack intended to precipitate the demise of the world’s only Jewish state. It’s been difficult to view this as anything other than an unhealthy fixation with the Jews when there’s untold suffering happening in the ongoing wars in Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine, and Syria among other places. As a reminder, anti-Israeli protests began before the IDF had even cleared southern Israel of the marauding rapists, murderers, and kidnappers that poured out of Gaza on October 7.
To be clear, every civilian casualty in the Gaza strip is a tragedy. But this war could be over in a matter of hours if Hamas leadership would surrender to face justice for 10/7 and release the hostages that they’ve been holding for months now. But while the anti-Israel lobby falsely accuses the country of committing genocide in a gross inversion of the war goals of the conflict, they ignore the genuine attempt to wipe out the largest population of stateless people in the world just a few hundred miles north of Gaza.
Beginning in 2016, Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan parlayed the international effort to destroy the Islamic State’s territorial holdings into an attempt to ethnically cleanse the Kurds occupying the border regions with southeastern Turkey. Turkey has battled a Kurdish insurgency led by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) for decades but the fighting intensified greatly in 2015 after the end of a two-year ceasefire. But not all Kurds are Turkish secessionist terrorists; Kurds comprise the large majority of the anti-Assad U.S. partnered Syrian Democratic Forces. This has led to a situation where our NATO ally Turkey is actively attacking our allies and undermining our strategic objectives in the region.
And while South Africa is busy accusing Israel of genocide in the International Court of Justice, Human Rights Watch just released a damning report that details the horrific treatment the Kurds have faced under Turkish occupation (which the Kurdish Red Crescent has stated is a deliberate attempt to change the demography of northeast Syria) in recent years:
The 74-page report, “Everything is by the Power of the Weapon: Abuses and Impunity in Turkish-Occupied Northern Syria,” documents abductions, arbitrary arrests, unlawful detention, sexual violence, and torture by the various factions of a loose coalition of armed groups, the Türkiye-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), as well as the Military Police, a force established by the Syrian Interim Government (SIG) and Turkish authorities in 2018, ostensibly to curb abuses. Human Rights Watch also found that Turkish Armed Forces and intelligence agencies were involved in carrying out and overseeing abuses.
Not only are the Turks brutally occupying portions of northern Syria and repressing the Kurds in those regions, they’re also lobbing air strikes into Iraq to target Kurds in yet another country:
Turkish strikes are reaching deeper into Iraq and Syria and covering a wider area, the data analysis shows. In 2017, Turkish airstrikes hit fewer than three dozen locations in Iraq and Syria. In 2022, planes or drones struck more than 240 locations in the two countries. The conflict has killed thousands of people and emptied out hundreds of villages in the past eight years, according to NGOs and local officials.
Read this description of a 2021 airstrike from that Reuters report and ask yourself why the same people rabidly protesting Israel’s campaign to eliminate Hamas are not protesting outside of Turkish embassies, harassing Turkish-American university students, or demanding a ceasefire from Ankara:
The scene at the medical centre was tumultuous after the attack. A video shot by a local journalist and shared with Reuters shows medicine boxes and X-ray films scattered across the ground. People wailed and ambulance sirens blared. Rescuers darted back and forth; four of them carried a lifeless body wrapped in a blanket and gently placed it into an ambulance. Onlookers stood by one of the few remaining walls of the medical centre. It bore a red crescent to indicate the building was a clinic.
I point this out not to minimize the civilian suffering in the war in Gaza, but to illustrate the hypocrisy in the current anti-Israel movement. I have yet to hear anyone chant “from Afrin to the Euphrates, the Kurds will be free” or claim that Turkey is a “settler colonial state” as they displace and kill thousands of Kurds in a calculated campaign to eradicate a minority population.
But Turkey will continue to get a free pass from the #ceasefirenow crowd and western security partners while they bomb Kurdish hospitals and civilians without consequence. In fact, Erdoğan is about to be handsomely rewarded with U.S. F-16 fighter jets after holding Swedish NATO ascension hostage for eighteen months. Don’t be surprised when those jets are inevitably used to kill more civilian Kurds in the Middle East and don’t hold your breath for protestors to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge when it does happen.
Togo
AEI’s Critical Threats project continues to churn out vital coverage of Africa’s Salafi-Jihadist movements, military coups, and the various Russian/Chinese influence operations on the continent. Last week they flagged a report from a French investigative news site that claims Russia has deployed 30 military advisors to the west African nation Togo:
Reports of a small and potentially growing number of Russian military advisers in Togo indicate that Russia and Togo are increasing their ties as the Kremlin aims to expand its influence beyond the Sahel in West Africa. The Kremlin likely seeks to use Togo as a logistical node to support its other operations in Africa. Russia may also have a long-term aim of securing an Atlantic Ocean port in Togo, which would support the Kremlin’s strategic efforts to increase its threat to NATO’s flanks through basing in Africa.
This expansion tracks with Russia’s other efforts to partner with African regimes to provide security services which then lay the groundwork for future rare mineral exploitation, in turn filling the Kremlin’s coffers and war machine. Moscow’s tentacles are far reaching and sow chaos wherever they plunge into—the world will be a much better place when Vladimir Putin’s gangster state collapses.
Houthis
It was always going to come to this. The Houthis have reportedly claimed their first trophy in the Red Sea after successfully striking the Rubymar two weeks ago:
The UK-owned Rubymar, attacked by Houthi militants last month, has sunk in the Red Sea, Yemen's internationally recognised government said on Saturday, warning of a "environmental catastrophe" from the ship's cargo of fertilizer. If confirmed, it would be the first vessel lost since the Houthis began targeting commercial shipping in November, forcing shipping firms to divert vessels on to the longer, more expensive route around southern Africa.
This is the inevitable result of the Biden administration’s timid response to the Houthi declaration of war on international commerce. Instead of addressing the terrorist group head on, the administration deliberated for months. After finally authorizing strikes the administration opted to target weapons caches and some infrastructure instead of targeting the people firing the rockets and drones. If we keep this posture up we’re essentially allowing Iran to shut down the shipping corridor that handles fifteen percent of all global trade.
Taiwan
A lot of coverage surrounding China/Taiwan these days treats a hot war to annex the democratic island nation as an inevitability. But the future isn’t set in stone and the right combination of policies may dissuade Beijing from attempting a military takeover of the ROC.
First and foremost, the collective West needs to maintain the resolve necessary to defeat Russia in Ukraine. The quickest green light we could possibly give Xi Jinping to invade Taiwan is shrugging off a Russian success in their current war of conquest. Secondly, we need to massively increase our defense industrial capacity to both deter our adversaries and prepare ourselves for a situation where we find ourselves bound to defend a treaty ally under attack. And finally, we also need a lot more of this:
In an unprecedented move, US Special forces troops will be permanently stationed in Taiwan, Republic of China. According to Taiwan's United Daily News (UDN), the American 1st Special Forces Group is deployed for a permanent training mission on the island. The 1st Special Forces Group is permanently stationed this year at two bases of the 101st Amphibious Reconnaissance Battalion, a Taiwanese army special operations force. Some of the US troops are based on Kinmen, a group of Taiwanese-controlled islands 10 kilometers from Xiamen, a Chinese port city. Another group is located on the Pescadores islands off the Taiwanese coast.
Myanmar
Myanmar’s ruling junta continues to kill its own citizens indiscriminately in its battle against the pro-democratic alliance of rebels in the country:
At least 12 civilians were killed in Myanmar when artillery shells landed in a busy market in western Rakhine State, as the ruling military and anti-junta forces traded blame for the latest violence to rock the Southeast Asian country. The insurgent group Arakan Army (AA) operating in Rakhine State, which borders Bangladesh, said that a military warship off the port city of Sittwe fired shells into Myoma market on Thursday, killing 12 and injuring more than 80 people.
This news comes just as the UN Commissioner for Human Rights issued a disturbing update on the military regime’s widespread detentions, use of torture, and extrajudicial killings. The world should be doing so much more to assist the Burmese patriots fighting for a free and democratic Myanmar. The National Unity Government aligned forces now claim to control sixty percent of the country and have designs on the capital.
The NUG could benefit from Western assistance in crafting a modern federal constitution and building the democratic institutions that would help ensure the country doesn’t devolve into ethnic conflict should the rebels succeed in permanently dislodging post-colonial military rule. We should be cultivating that relationship now by providing material assistance to the rebels to help them get to the finish line.
Another reason to establish a relationship now is that if successful, the NUG would find itself controlling a long border with the world’s largest communist state and would likely need defensive and economic ties with the liberal west to stave off Chinese influence operations.
Moldova
Here we go: after the ISW rang the alarm bell the other week that Transnistria may attempt to be annexed directly into the Russian Federation, the breakaway region did take the step of requesting “protection” from Moscow at a congress held last week:
Transnistria, the Russia-backed breakaway region in Moldova, held a special congress earlier this week to request “protection” from Russia. It’s a move that alarmed many poeple [sic], who believe it could be part of an effort to give a green-light to Russia to extend its territorial ambitions, lean on its military presence of 1,500 troops in Transnistria, and possibly annex the region.
As The Guardian notes, this is a playbook we saw executed just twenty-four months ago:
The call for help from Moscow has fuelled [sic] comparisons with February 2022, when Russian-backed militants in eastern Ukraine called for protection against what they said were relentless attacks and shelling by Kyiv’s forces.
Russia likely doesn’t have the manpower or political will to open up another war front in Moldova at the moment but if they’re allowed to subjugate Ukraine, they’ll spend the next few years rebuilding their armed forces and preparing for new conquests.
Thank you for reading Son of a Diplomat. I’m so thrilled this newsletter has found an audience of people just as interested as I am in the intertwining threads of global conflict and the modern battle between democracy and authoritarianism. If you want to help the newsletter grow, consider sharing it on social media or directly with a friend: