Its hesitancy is understandable and logical. Iran has invested heavily in Syria, single-handedly shoring up the Bashar al-Assad regime with billions of dollars a year, establishing Shiite proxy militias to fight on the regime’s behalf, and even deploying its paramilitaries to organize regime operations.
Tehran has also sought to establish a land bridge extending from its border, through Iraq and Syria, to its Hezbollah proxy in Lebanon.
The US, which has approximately 2,000 troops on the ground in Syria, wants to counter Iran’s presence throughout the region. In Syria the SDF is America’s best bet, since it has a large battle-hardened force and controls most of eastern Syria, amounting to about one-third of the entire country, and most of its natural resources.
Preventing Iran from establishing a land bridge would help reinforce the harsh sanctions regime the US is levelling against Tehran by denying it a significant avenue for commerce with its allies in the Levant.
SDF officials recently confided to journalist Matthew Petti that the current US policy against Iran benefits them insofar as it gives the US incentives to retain forces in Syria. At the same time, however, the SDF fear a wider conflict breaking out since it would have direct ramifications for their region and hard-won autonomy.
Directly siding with the US in its maximum pressure campaign against Iranian interests throughout the region would likely result in Tehran working to undermine, through Assad or even Turkey, Kurdish-led autonomy in Syria in response.
Furthermore, there is no guarantee maximum pressure on Iran will remain a consistent US policy, especially if Donald Trump is not reelected in next year’s presidential election.
More generally Kurds have always been hesitant to allow themselves to become America’s proxies in the region. This was especially true in Iraqi Kurdistan since the mid-1970s when the US participated in a covert operation with the Shah’s Iran and Israel to arm the Peshmerga in the Second Iraqi-Kurdish War.
Kurdish leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani never trusted the Shah and wanted a guarantee of support from the US. However, when the Shah unilaterally pulled the rug out from under the Kurds to make a separate deal with then-Iraqi Vice President Saddam Hussein in March 1975, the Kurdish rebellion collapsed.
The Kurds were embittered by that betrayal.
“We do not want to be anybody’s pawn,” Barzani said from exile. “We are an ancient people, we want our autonomy, we want sarbasti – freedom.”
Later, in 1991, US President George H W Bush encouraged Iraqis to revolt against Saddam following his military defeat and expulsion from Kuwait the previous month. The Kurds and Shiites launched large-scale uprisings, but quickly found American support was not forthcoming.
Only after millions of Kurds fled their homeland in terror as Iraqi gunships once again bombarded their region did public opinion convince the Bush administration to lead a humanitarian mission and establish the no-fly zone to protect Kurdistan.
While the no-fly zone certainly helped the Kurds consolidate their autonomy, they were subjected to two crippling embargoes, one by Baghdad to nip their nascent autonomy in the bud, and the other by the United Nations, which refused differentiate between the free Kurdish enclave and Saddam’s Iraq.
The US was also hesitant about supporting the Kurds to an extent that they could split from Iraq, invariably speaking about the importance of preserving Iraq’s ‘territorial integrity’.
In the later years of Saddam’s rule, the Kurds would not rule out becoming a federal region within Iraq, which is ultimately what happened after the dictator was removed from power.
As Masoud Barzani put it in 1998: “The Americans do not have a policy for the Kurds. They have sentenced us to remain the enemies of Iraq and also to remain part of Iraq.”
On the eve of the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq, the Kurds welcomed the prospect of Saddam’s overthrow.
However, they also worried about the future status of their region, especially when the Americans were urging the Turkish Army to help them establish a northern front against the Iraqi regime, which would have seen 70,000 Turkish troops enter Kurdistan and likely dismantle its nascent autonomy.
Senior Kurdish leader Sami Abdul Rahman insisted at the time that the status quo as it stood in 2002 was hitherto “the best thing our people have had in their recent history and it would be good if it continued”.
“We hope that such a successful experiment will not be strangled for no reason.”
Ultimately, Turkey did not participate in the US invasion and it was the Peshmerga who helped the Americans. It also helped the US military during the Iraq War, most notably in Mosul. Kurdistan’s autonomy was enshrined in Iraq’s new constitution.
Following the bloody rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), the Peshmerga would serve as one of America’s foremost allies on the ground early in that war.
While US air support doubtlessly helped save Erbil from an ISIS attack in August 2014 and gave decisive air support to several Peshmerga offensives against the jihadists, the Kurds later argued that the US was not providing them with their fair share of military aid for the campaign.
After Masoud Barzani pushed ahead with the independence referendum in September 2017, the US did nothing when Iraq closed the region’s airspace and used military force against the Peshmerga to seize the disputed Kurdistani territories of Kirkuk and Shingal.
Barzani, in comments clearly directed at the US, questioned where the support for democracy and human rights were and why Washington did not lift a finger after the region sacrificed approximately 1,700 Peshmerga to combat the ISIS threat.
“They praise Peshmerga sacrifices, but don’t let Peshmerga and our martyrs’ families decide their destiny,” he said.
In light of these events, Iraqi Kurds will likely feel hesitant the next time the US seeks to use them as a proxy force in the next inevitable war in the Middle East.
In Syria, the Kurdish-led SDF similarly sacrificed approximately 11,000 of their men and women to defeat ISIS and were the ground force that did the most, by far, to roll back and destroy the Syrian wing of the ISIS ‘caliphate’.
All the while the US has been hesitant to give them and their autonomous region any political recognition, largely in order to placate Turkey.
Today, however, there are some indications that Syrian Kurdistan will finally get some political recognition in light of an increased number of diplomatic visits to the region. The US and France have also sought to reassure the region’s leaders “that there will be no serious political process without the Kurds and representatives of northern and eastern Syria in the negotiations to find a solution”.
The Syrian Kurds were horrified when Trump announced he was withdrawing US troops from Syria in December 2018 – a move that would likely have seen the SDF attacked by either Turkey or the Assad regime.
While the US troops were not withdrawn, the Kurds cannot be blamed for questioning how long they will ultimately stay for and deter the larger predatory powers around them from militarily dismantling their autonomy and destroying their armed forces.
If the US does seek their help in combating Iran’s interests and proxies in Syria, the Kurds, if their history is any indicator, would be foolish not to demand long-term guarantees of protection and recognition of their autonomy in return for the immense risks they would be taking.
