Since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, at least 3,613 Kurdish soldiers have been killed fighting the totalitarian Islamic State and the little-better authoritarian alternative, Bashar Al-Assad’s government. The Kurdish YPG (“People’s Protection Units”) is the largest portion of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a military coalition of Kurds and Arabs that the United States backs through weapons sales and airstrikes. The SDF has advanced into Syria’s northern Deir-al-Zour province, northeast of Aleppo, and east of Al-Bab, liberating 15 villages in its march towards Raqqa, the de-facto IS capital. The Kurds have simply been instrumental in the United States’s war against the Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq. With the possible collapse of ISIS coming as soon as the end of the year, the question is now shifting from “how can we help the Kurds?” to “how do we repay the Kurds?”
Many contend the best way to repay the Kurds (especially the Kurds themselves) is to carve up northern Syria and recognize Rojava, the northern, predominantly-Kurdish region of Syria that has operated as an autonomous region, practically-sovereign region since the beginning of the civil war. Rojava is far more like the United States than it is the rest of Syria. Its 2014 constitution guarantees the right to freedom of speech and the right to freedom of the press. Its government operates on an Athenian-style direct democracy, formed from the ground-up. Towns are ruled by an assembly of their residents, and the national government takes the form of a confederation of these towns. Most of the international press prefers working in Rojava to other places in Syria, due to the lack of media restrictions. Currently, there are no taxes raised in Rojava- the government exclusively pays for itself off tariffs and selling the country’s resources, especially oil. The Wall Street Journal reported that many Syrian merchants find Rojava to be the only place “where they don’t have to pay bribes.”
Rojava is most of the way there to being a sustainable, sovereign state. So what’s holding back the United States? One word: Turkey. The Turkish government for decades has been opposed to an independent Kurdish state, because much of southeastern Turkey (bordering Iraq and Syria) is majority-Kurdish. If an independent Kurdish state was formed and recognized by the international community, it is highly likely these Turkish Kurds would form separatist movements to break and off and join themselves with it. If this was a country other than Turkey in question, however, it would be easy for the United States to recognize the independent state. For a long time, the United States (and the rest of the world) continued to recognize the Republic of China (Taiwan) as the legitimate government of China, rather than the mainland People’s Republic. But when it became no longer in the US’s interest to do so, the administration at the time, Nixon, was all too eager to cast off the Taiwanese and recognize the People’s Republic. However, Turkey has immense strategic importance to the United States, and has since the beginning of the Cold War, explaining its membership in NATO. Turkey controls the Bosporus Strait, effectively blocking off the Russian (and formerly Soviet) navy to the Black Sea. NATO missiles in Turkey would have flight times of mere minutes to strike their targets in Russia. While the latter matters less and less now with the fall of the Soviet Union, the former matters all the more with Russia’s intervention in Syria, Ukraine, and its other interests contrary to the United States’s own around the world. In much the same way as the United States cannot recognize Palestine for fear of ruining relations with Israel, its closest ally in the Middle East, the United States cannot recognize Rojava, for fear of ruining relations with Turkey.
So how do we repay the Kurds? The answer isn’t as clear-cut as simply granting them independence. There is no doubt we owe them for their hard work and determination in the fight against ISIS and for democracy in Syria. But we may have to apologize gently and simply support their autonomy within Syria, rather than granting them sovereignty outright, when the Syrian Civil War is all said and done. The only alternative would be to turn on Turkey, a nation vital for our rivalry with Russia.