Public Relations Windfall for the Kurdistan Workers Party

The Gray Lady had surprisingly little to offer over the weekend about the fate of Kobani, the Kurdish-majority town near the Turkish border under siege by Islamic State. Last week news about the important battle for Kobani pivoted between impending doom for the YPG fighters -- the Syrian Kurdish self-defense force aligned with the Turkish Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) -- and hosannas for deadly U.S. airstrikes on ISIS mechanized armor.

When you get such large contradictory swings in reporting it usually means that something significant is underway. This was the state of affairs in the Donbass prior to the "ceasefire." The Gray Lady was reporting that any day Donetsk and Luhansk would fall; then came the rebel counter-assault that sent the junta fleeing.

Kirk Semple and Tim Arango have a story, "Kurdish Rebels Assail Turkish Inaction on ISIS as Peril to Peace Talks." this morning that gets "the newspaper of record" caught up on the Kobani action at the outset of new week.

The scoop the story offers is an interview with PKK founder Cemil Bayik who promises a resumption of PKK's guerrilla war against Turkey if president Erdogan allows Kobani to be massacred by ISIS fighters:

P.K.K. commanders say their halting, nine-year-old peace process with the Turkish government and, indeed, the future of the region, will turn on the battle for Kobani and on Turkey’s response. If Turkey does not help the embattled Kurdish forces in Kobani, the commanders say, they will break off peace talks and resume their guerrilla war within Turkey, plunging yet another country in the region into armed conflict. 

“Negotiations cannot go on in an environment where they want to create a massacre in Kobani,” Cemil Bayik, a founder and leader of the P.K.K., said in a recent interview in a secret location in this area of the Qandil range. “We cannot bargain for settlement on the blood of Kobani.” 

“We will mobilize the guerrillas,” he vowed. 

Despite increased pressure from the United States and pleas from outgunned Kurdish fighters in Kobani, Turkey has refused to deploy its military against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, or to open the border to allow reinforcements, weapons and supplies to reach the town.

Retired U.S. General John Allen, the official Obama put in charge of coordinating the multi-nation response to Islamic State, after two days of meetings in Ankara (one wonders what bargains were actually made) managed to secure basing rights from Turkey. U.S. fighter-bombers will once again fly from Incirlik.

Turkey's public opposition to attacking ISIS and preventing Kurdish efforts to reinforce Kobani has had the effect of unifying Kurds:

Kobani became one battle for everybody,” said Hiwa Osman, a Kurdish political analyst who was an adviser to Jalal Talabani, the former Iraqi president. “This is a matter between good versus evil. For Turkey to be on the other side, by omission, positions all the Kurds in one camp. And this camp will not be friendly to Turkey.”

In addition to unifying the Kurds, the battle for Kobani has been a public relations windfall for the Kurdistan Workers Party. Unlike the pesh merga, constantly celebrated in the Western press for their prowess as fighters, the YPG has actually proved to be a fierce opponent of ISIS:

While Mr. Erdogan’s standing has plunged among Kurds, the Kurdish fighters’ reputation has soared. In the Kurdistan region, the P.K.K. has enjoyed remarkably broad public support in recent months in light of its battlefield successes against the Islamic State militants. 

In the initial months of the Islamic State assault on northern Iraq, the P.K.K.’s performance stood in contrast to that of the Iraqi military, which wilted in the face of the Islamic State sweep, and of the pesh merga, Iraqi Kurdistan’s army, which suffered demoralizing setbacks before regaining its footing with the support of American airstrikes. 

P.K.K. units are widely credited with engineering the rescue of thousands of Yazidis who were trapped on Mount Sinjar and facing annihilation. P.K.K. fighters established an evacuation corridor from the summit of the mountain, where the Yazidis had languished for days. The P.K.K. also rushed to the aid of the pesh merga after Islamic State fighters threatened the Kurdish capital, Erbil, by overrunning Makhmur, a nearby Kurdish town. 

“Had we not intervened, there would’ve been a great massacre,” Mr. Bayik said. The Kurdish government, he said, “would’ve lost face.” 

Many Kurds have called on the United States and the European Union to reassess their classification of the P.K.K. as a terrorist organization — a rebuke of Mr. Erdogan and Turkey. 

“Officially they are on the terrorist list,” Brig. Gen. Helgurd Hikmet Mela Ali, a spokesman for the pesh merga, said in a recent interview. “But if you want my personal opinion, not official: It’s clear now and it’s very obvious who the terrorists are. ISIS or P.K.K.?” 

After the counterattack that recaptured Makhmur, Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan regional government, whose political party has had a bitter relationship with the P.K.K., rewarded its fighters with a visit. 

“We have the same destiny,” Mr. Barzani told the guerrillas.

The limitation to the U.S.-Turkey-KSA strategy of using jihadis as proxies is that eventually the conflict expands and the jihadis have to be beaten down. Support for ISIS can no longer be easily maintained. Popular indigenous responses, like the YPG, rise up. The Turks and Saudis cannot just snuff out such resistance because, as riots in Turkey last week showed, the public will resist.