Why Kobani?

Last week Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan questioned the international community’s focus on Kobani: "Why Kobani and not otherwise towns like Idlib, Hama or Homs ... while Iraqi territory is 40 percent controlled by the Islamic State?" he asked. The Prime Minister added, "There are only 2,000 fighters in Kobani it is difficult to understand this approach. Why has the coalition not acted in other zones?"

The Prime Minister’s statements reflect an enduring anti-Kurdish perspective in Turkey. Years ago when a few international activists would occasionally come to Turkey for events such as the Musa Anter Peace Train, Turkish police would ask them “Why are you coming here? Why not go to Palestine, or Chechnya, or Bosnia?” The implicit view was that the Kurds did not deserve sympathy or support, and that anyone taking their side did so out of anti-Turkish motives – perhaps part of a larger foreign conspiracy to weaken Turkey dating all the way back to the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres.

Many Kurds, meanwhile, would ask “Why Palestine, Bosnia or other places, and not us?” The Kurdish plight in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and especially Syria seemed far below the radar of the international community. It seemed that the world’s largest stateless nation had no shortage of powerful states oppressing it and few friends apart from a smattering of sympathetic activists in Europe. The old adage of “The Kurds have no friends but the mountains” seemed all too true.

Even in academia not too long ago the Kurds elicited little attention. I myself became interested in the Kurds after my first trip to Turkey in 1990. All I knew about them before then was what I saw on television as a teenager in 1988, when images emerged from the chemical weapons attacks on Halabja. In Turkey half the people I met said “there are no Kurds in Turkey” and the other half said they were either “terrorists” or “freedom fighters.” When I went to my university’s library to learn more, I found only two books in English and one in French on the modern politics surrounding “the Kurdish issue.” When by 1995 the situation seemed little improved, I decided to pursue my own doctoral studies on the issue in order to learn more. I reasoned that the library shelves already had plenty of books on the Palestinians, the Arabs in general, Turkey and Iran...

By 1998 I had learned Turkish reasonably well, and I remember more than one inter-city bus trip in eastern Turkey (northern Kurdistan) where soldiers stopped the vehicle to check everyone’s identification. Unaware that I understood Turkish, their most common comment as they looked at my Canadian passport was “As long as he’s not a journalist.” When leaving Tunceli (Dersim) once in 2007, the officer at the checkpoint outside the city asked “Who let this guy into the area?” One of his soldiers sheepishly explained that I had come in the week before, on a day when he was not at the checkpoint.

This, I think, answers Mr. Erdogan’s question of “Why Kobani?”  In the past, events in Kurdistan were like trees falling in the forest with no one around to hear. It was as if they never fell. Huge military campaigns against Kurdish populations would be mounted with hardly any notice from the world. With new media technologies, an autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq, new academic work on Kurdish issues and an international public that finally discovered the world’s largest stateless nation, Kurdistan is no longer what it used to be. With exceptions in some parts of especially Iran, the Kurdish mountains have stopped being like the dark places of a Joseph Conrad novel. 

Kobani is a perfect example. Nestled right on Turkey’s border in full view of the international media, the world witnessed a small, outnumbered band of lightly armed Kurdish men and women heroically resist well-equipped jihadis. They defended their land against ruthless killers who routed half the Iraqi army not long before. Unlike in places such as Idlib, Hama or Homs, the defenders of Kobani could have easily been helped from the beginning. Instead, the world also saw Turkish tanks sit massed a few hundred meters from the fighting, idly watching the show on the other side of the border. While Turkey armed and supplied anyone willing to fight Assad, jihadi or otherwise, it prevented even food and water from going to the defenders of the town now besieged by the Islamic State.

It was then that world asked “Why not Kobani?”  Mr. Erdogan and his government had best get used to the change.

David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).