First comes their effort to claim that “Turkey launched the offensive on Jan. 20 [the invasion of Afrin in Syria] to remove members of the Islamic State [ISIS] and the People’s Protection Units [YPG and YPJ] militia” from the area.
Newspapers around the world dutifully repeat this misleading claim, without taking the time to point out that there were no ISIS fighters in Afrin (besides the ones Turkey recruited into its “Free Syrian Army” mercenary forces, of course).
There have been no ISIS fighters in Afrin since 2011 thanks to the Syrian Kurdish YPG and YPJ that Turkey is attacking with its army and Jihadi mercenaries. The fact is, Turkey never had a problem with ISIS on its border – it first invaded Syria in 2016 only to attack the Kurds there.
The next talking point insists that the PKK and the PYD (the Democratic Union Party, whose fighters are the YPG and YPJ) are the same. While it is true that the two groups have many links and both revere Abdullah Ocalan, they have also maintained some distance.
No US supplied weapons appear to have gone from the PYD to the PKK, and despite baseless Turkish claims to the contrary, there is no evidence of any PYD members attacking Turkey.
Of course the PYD has former PKK members in its ranks, given that some 25 percent of the PKK was composed of Syrian Kurds – many of whom left the PKK and returned to Syria to defend their lands when the civil war broke out in 2011.
Does Turkey reserve the right to invade and attack any country where former-PKK cadres exist? That’s quite a claim to make – indicative of whom we might hold responsible for the failure of peace efforts between the Turkish state and the PKK.
Before 2015, PYD leaders such as Salih Muslim used to regularly go to Istanbul and Ankara for consultations with Turkish officials. If the PYD was sufficiently different from the PKK then, why is it not so now? Could it be that Turkey is using this claim as cover for its desire to prevent Kurdish autonomy in Syria? Would it not be preferable for Turkey to address the problems of Kurdish alienation within Turkey instead of trying and block Kurdish aspirations even in Alaska?
Next come Turkish officials’ repeated claims that Turkey experienced some 700 attacks from Afrin up until 2017. No credible sources point to any significant attacks from Afrin into Turkey before January 20, 2018. On Turkey’s border with all of the Kurdish cantons, over the years there only some two dozen occasional exchanges of light weapons fire – which Kurdish forces claim occurred only after Turkish forces fired at them first. Turkey’s claim that its invasion of Afrin constitutes self-defense therefore amounts to pure propaganda.
Another common talking point focuses on claims about the PYD’s “ethnic cleansing” against non-Kurds in northern Syria and their establishment of a nightmare dictatorship in the areas they control. Yet somehow the cantons of Afrin, Kobane and Jazira are full of Arab, Christian, Turkmen and Yezidi populations, including large numbers who fled places like Aleppo to find safety under the umbrella of the Kurds.
While the PYD are not angels and do have political quarrels with others, the image painted by Ankara appears fantastic. The PYD-aligned local councils and forces in places like Manbij are even almost all ethnic Arabs, while YPG-led forces such as the SDF have large proportions of Syrian Arabs in them.
After this come claims that Turkey’s operation in Afrin is moving slowly because of care for civilian casualties. Some Turkish officials even claim that Turkey has not killed ANY civilians in Afrin. Yet videos of indiscriminate Turkish bombings and artillery barrages in Afrin await anyone with an Internet connection. Turkey even bombed isolated 2000-year-old archeological sites in rural areas of Afrin, destroying priceless neo-Hittite artifacts. Civilian casualties – men, women and children – continue to mount as I type these words.
Last but not least, Turkish government officials love to claim that Turkey “has no quarrel with Kurds” and is only “fighting PKK terrorism.” As evidence of this, people like Deputy Prime Minister Simsek like to claim that Turkey “was the first country to help the Iraqi Kurds against Daesh [ISIS].” In fact, Turkey ignored Iraqi Kurdish calls for assistance in August 2014 when ISIS attacked. It was Iran and then the US that first helped Iraqi Kurds against ISIS. Turkey even threatened the Iraqi Kurds when they held their referendum on independence from Iraq (from Iraq, not Turkey) in 2017.
The rhetoric and policies regularly coming out of Ankara, from Erdogan’s party and his government coalition partner, is actually full of anti-Kurdish animus, from banning the word “Kurdistan” and closing down all independent Kurdish media (including even a Kurdish children’s television station) to claiming that Afrin does not have a Kurdish majority. President Erdogan even went so far as to claim that the Kurds in Afrin are imposters and that Turkey will “return Afrin to its rightful owners.”
Last time this columnist checked, threats of ethnic cleansing are usually indicative of a problem with the threatened ethnic group.
Perhaps officials in Ankara think they can say anything they want without being contradicted. That is, after all, the present state of “democracy” in Turkey today. International media, however, should know better than to accept these Turkish government propaganda lines without objection.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
