Muslims and Liberals

America’s festering run-ins with Turkey over Kurdish militants in northern Syria appear to be coming to a boiling point. Ankara has given two weeks to the militants they brand “terrorists” to clear three northern Syrian towns on the Turkish border. If they don’t, the Turks probably will launch a ground operation to chase them out of the area.

The problem for the Turks is that U.S. troops are patrolling parts of the area jointly with the Kurdish militia, known as the Kurdish Protection Units (YPG). (Sorry, getting a hang of this conundrum requires absorbing some alphabet soups!) For years the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been pleading with the Americans to dissociate from these “terrorists” who the Turks say are part of the terrorist organization known as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Since 1984 the PKK has been battling Turkish armed forces to carve out an independent Kurdish statelet in southeastern Turkey.  The Americans are hard-pressed to explain the YPG’s links to the PKK, and so in 2015 they got the YPG to rename itself Kurdish Democratic Forces (SDF) and have some Arabs enrolled in the organization.

In Turkey, “the Kurdish problem” seems intractable.  During three research trips, I found out that many Kurds there want wide “autonomy” for the Kurdish-majority southwest.  They grumble about Turkish “persecution” and suppression of their cultural rights. Kurdish intellectuals also castigate the “betrayal” by Western powers who, at the end of World War I, had promised them a state of their own but later reneged on it and split their territory among four states, including Turkey.

Among everyday Turks, on the other hand, anti-Kurdish sentiments run high, mainly because of continual Kurdish terrorist attacks. Six opposition parties have forged an alliance known as the “Table of Six” to challenge Erdogan and his party at next year’s elections, but they all support Erdogan’s plan to drive the YPG militants out of a 30-kilometer Syrian strip on the Turkish border. They know opposing his fight against the YPG would be politically suicidal.

The Turkish president’s political roots lie in Turkey’s Islamist movement, although he claims to be “secular.” In August 1998 Erdogan, just fired as mayor of Istanbul, told me in one of my three interviews with him, that the Kurdish problem stemmed from ultra-liberal Turkish governments’ insensitivity to the Kurds’ “cultural rights, based on Islam.” It could be resolved in an atmosphere of Islamic “brotherhood.” He was packing his belongings in cardboard boxes to leave the mayor’s office and prepare to go to prison. He had been given a 10-month prison sentence (commuted later to four months) by a secularist court for reciting an Islamic poem at a public meeting.

 In 2012, as Turkish prime minister, Erdogan engaged Kurdish militants in a “peace process.” After three years of arduous negotiations, he stopped the talks, realizing, he said, that the militants won’t give up on their secessionist plans.

President Biden has been openly ill-disposed toward Erdogan since before coming into the White House. During his 2020 U.S. election campaign, Biden denounced the Turkish president as an “autocrat” and proposed that the United States help the Turkish opposition parties “take on and defeat Erdogan” at the next election. Since an abortive coup in 2016, which Erdogan and many other Turks blame on the CIA and its Turkish “accomplices” for the rebellion and the Turkish regime has come down hard on many opposition activists. Congress and the U.S. media often decry Erdogan’s “authoritarian” rule.   

Erdogan is unlikely to back down on his widely publicized ground operation against the YPG, against which the Biden administration has warned Ankara. The Turkish invaders would, of course, avoid encountering American troops, but Biden won’t put up with the Turkish president’s brazen defiance of America and try to kick Turkey out of NATO. Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are already calling for it.

Without Turkey, though, NATO would lapse into the status of the military arm of the white-Christian Western civilization. China would then be spreading its security umbrella over much of the rest of the world. Chinese President Xi Jinping has just returned from a significant trip to Saudi Arabia, after calling for an “independent Palestinian state.”

Would Biden want to rip the world into two rival armed camps? And would other NATO members go along with him? I’m hoping to see cooler minds nudging him and Erdogan back from the precipice.

• Mustafa Malik is an American researcher and retired journalist, who conducted fieldwork in Turkey and five European countries as a journalism fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He researched the outlook for Turkey’s accession to the European Union.