Peter
Schwartzstein

Syrian Kurds are superb hosts. Between the frequent offers of steaming, overly sugared tea, to the feasts cobbled together at short notice, most will stop at nothing to smooth the stay of foreign guests. Even at a time of war and severe economic privation, they’re quick to burn through precious fuel supplies to heat their drafty houses for passing visitors.

But when talk turns to the US and other western countries’ continued refusal to arm their YPG and YPJ fighters, the warmth fades. “Why aren’t you giving us weapons?” one otherwise affable retired businessman growled, after he’d treated me and two other weary, water-logged journalists to a lavish meal at his house in the Kurdish-controlled city of Al-Maabadah. “They have big guns and are terrorists, we have Kalashnikovs and are fighting your enemy. Where’s our support?” his policeman son railed, noting the trove of American military hardware captured by IS (the so-called Islamic State) and turned on its Kurdish foes.

As ever, there are a series of ready-made excuses to sidestep these anguished calls for help. “We’re fearful of angering our high maintenance NATO ally in Ankara to the north, much of whose strategy in Syria appears to have been determined by which groups it feels are best placed to stymie Kurdish territorial ambitions. We’re wary also of the Syrian Kurds’ strong ties to the banned PKK group,” which is deemed a terrorist organisation by the US and EU, and whose pseudo-Marxist ideology and wave of past bombing campaigns sit uneasily in Washington and London.

Above all, though, “we” — the West — cling to our vision of an undivided Syria, and feel that backing a people dead set on attaining a high degree of autonomy —if not independence — would contribute to the war-ravaged state’s eventual break up.

But as with so many western government policies in Syria, our stonewalling of the Syrian Kurds is grounded on a pretty iffy calculus.

It seems inconceivable that the regime of Bashar al-Assad, still surrendering turf and army bases in the country’s east, will ever claw back all its lost territory —least of all from a long-persecuted minority. In providing material support to the Syrian Kurds, we’d merely be embracing a fait accompli and garnering a lot of good will in the process.

Also left unsaid, of course, is the fact that toppling Assad has become a distant policy consideration. We’re primarily intent on neutering IS now, and with the emergence of this new enemy, aligning ourselves with a force that has shown itself willing and able to take on jihadists armed with little more than antiquated small arms seems like something of a no-brainer.

This is not to say our reservations about the PKK’s enduring links with their southern cousins can be easily cast aside (“we and Turkish Kurds complete one another,” one senior Syrian Kurdish official told me). At a time when the militants’ fragile peace with the Turkish state is fraying, we’d have to be very careful in ensuring no weaponry or other kit is siphoned across the border. But after fruitlessly pinballing around the country in pursuit of acceptable rebel allies, it appears counterintuitive to pass up an eager would-be collaborator whose values most closely resemble our own western ones.

A strong belief in relative gender equality means that fighters of the YPJ — the female branch of the Syrian Kurdish armed forces — serve as frontline combat troops. The civilian administration’s apparent respect for freedom of religion has allowed for the preservation of the largest Christian community outside of the Assad-held southwest (though some Assyrians and Armenians remain sceptical given local Kurds’ orchestration of anti-Christian pogroms in the 1930s).

Still, no one’s claiming that the Syrian Kurds are a perfect partner by any means. Boys and girls as young as 16 have allegedly been forced into military training camps, while many young men have fled to neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan to avoid compulsory active service.

And then there’s their awkward arrangement with the regime, which retains a number of security installations in the centre of Qamishli — the largest city under Syrian Kurdish control. Locals insist the continued presence of a token government force, along with murals of President Bashar al-Assad and an unsettling statue of his father Hafez, who greets passers-by from his perch in a centrally located roundabout, is merely an olive branch to the city’s Christians, some of whom still favour Assad.

But however deep this association might be, one could scarcely blame the Syrian Kurds as if they had done a deal with the devil. They’re trapped between Turkey, which has slammed its border shut (and kept it much more tightly closed than along IS-controlled territory), and jihadists, who dominate to their south and west and exact punishing ‘taxes’ on all goods passing along the highways.

Amid trying circumstances, the local administration has done well to keep schools functional, roads manned by traffic police, and generally preside over a significantly better-run mini-state than that of its IS adversary. There’s only so much they can stand though.

The volume of refugees seeking sanctuary in the northeast’s relative stability climbs higher by the day, and they must be housed and fed with minimal aid from the UN, which is, for the most part, reluctant to operate beyond regime-controlled territory. IS hasn’t reined in its assaults either. The group is intent on safeguarding the routes leading into nearby Raqqa and their other bases, and understanding most Kurds’ staunch aversion to its radical teachings, it sees the YPG as a threat to consolidating its gains.

It’s certainly correct to have some misgivings before propping up this new political and military force. Many of our policy turns to date have only contributed to the mess. But with no obvious way out of the conflict, supporting Syria’s Kurds is a moral and strategically wise move.