West of Eden: Syria update

Sheikh Rasho Rasho Hussein, keeper of the Yazidi temple in Khanka Kavin, Iraq. Photo by Julia Harte/National Geographic, July 2013.

The collusion of seemingly unrelated news items converging on the town of Ayn al-Arab/Kobanê is getting really interesting. It's not really part of the Rectification task to spend so much time covering these things, but I feel the press is not putting them together very well, so I hope readers don't mind. I'll get back to the literary criticism soon. (Tuesday is Brooksday!)

Airdrop supplies from the US included lethal weaponry for the first time, we heard first thing in the morning, with the weaponry being provided not by Americans but by Iraqi Kurds, and then over the BBC that the Turkish government has suddenly changed its mind about permitting volunteer Kurdish fighters to cross the Turkish border to Kobanê—only, officially, not Turkish Kurds, just those same Iraqi Kurd peshmerga, for whom a corridor will be opened along the border from Iraq.

Just yesterday President Erdoğan was denouncing the Syrian Kurds as terrorists and demanding that the US not supply them. Then, it seems, he got a call from President Obama and his views changed to a startling degree. (Turkey was also reprimanded this week by Arab countries refusing to support its bid for a two-year seat on the UN Security Council. In the audio version, by the way, BBC presented speculation that the restriction to Iraqi Kurds is Erdoğan's face-saving method of claiming that he hasn't exactly changed his mind, but in practice Turkish PKK members will probably join the fighting as well; in this sense it's a bigger turnaround than it looks like, and likely more significant from a military standpoint too.)

Meanwhile, Jean Aziz reports in Al-Monitor that the most powerful security official in Syria, Hafez Makhlouf, a cousin of Bashar al-Assad, has been fired from his post and relocated to Belarus (lolwut?). Another Alawite security official, Col. Sakr Rustom of the Homs Popular Defense Committees, has also been dismissed. Al-Monitor speculates that in getting rid of some especially evil henchmen Assad is signaling his readiness to "reform" his government in anticipation of coming to some kind of agreement with the secular rebels he has been fighting so brutally over the past two years.

He wouldn't be doing this because he has decided to become a nice person; he would be doing it because whatever combination of military and political and financial pressure he is under is having an effect. When he makes an agreement with the "moderates" it is not going to be a very morally edifying resolution—you'd like to see him jailed forever and his family despoiled of all their riches and publicly humiliated in some extreme fashion—but the morally edifying resolution was never in the cards in the first place, as Obama, I think, has understood for a long time, though he has only recently been willing to say it straight out, in his UN speech:

the only lasting solution to Syria’s civil war is political – an inclusive political transition that responds to the legitimate aspirations of all Syrian citizens, regardless of ethnicity or creed.

That "regardless" points to one important factor that never gets enough attention, which is that for whatever reasons Syrian minority groups, in particular Christians, have regarded Assad's (Alawite-led) forces as protection against the more frightening Sunni majority, which may have seemed crazy as long as we were thinking of the Sunnis as "doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth" but not so much now that they are also the Caliphate. Assad is a horrible criminal, but he also stands for the country's cosmopolitan side of Kurds, Druze, Arab Shi'ites, Syriac Orthodox and Armenians and Greeks, Yazidi, Turkmen, and the 50 or so remaining Damascus Jews.

(A bizarre story on BBC audio only interviewed an American Christian ex-GI, discharged for "personal reasons" which may have included PTSD although he had not seen any combat, if I was listening right, who is now in Syrian Kurd territory fighting on the side of the YPG in defense of Christianity and says "hundreds" are going to follow, working off their frustration at not being allowed to reconquer Iraq. Perhaps they will one day be known as the Reagan Brigades. But the good side was this particular soldier had come to admire the non-Christian Kurds a good deal and to recognize, somewhat to his own surprise, that Muslims have rights and needs too.)

One long-term nonmilitary aim of US encouragement of the Syrian Kurds (and Yazidi), regardless of whether they manage to hold Kobanê or not, is to foster the development of an alternative cosmopolitan politics, beyond Assad, in which all these people are at home alongside those Sunni farmers and pharmacists. This, as I've been suggesting, is the strategy, a political one with military elements, and it may be coming together rather faster than I would have thought.