PHOTO: Graduation ceremony of fighters of the Kurdish militia YPG
Roy Gutman writes for the Nation:
The Kurdish militia that supplies the ground troops in the US air war against the Islamic State has been a systematic violator of human rights in the area it controls in northern Syria, causing the displacement of tens of thousands of Arabs and even more massive flight by Kurds from the region.
A six-month investigation shows that the militia, reportedly under the strong influence of Iran and the Assad regime, has evicted Arabs from their homes at gunpoint starting in 2013 and subsequently has blown up, torched, or bulldozed their homes and villages. The Nation interviewed more than 80 Arabs and Syrian Kurdish refugees in the region as well as militia officials, former militia members, former Syrian government officials, political activists, and officials in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The pace of the expulsions picked up dramatically after the United States began joint operations against the Islamic State in Syria in mid-2015, as the Kurdish militia threatened Arabs with air strikes if they didn’t leave their villages. While they slowed in 2016, expulsions continue even as the militia turns on its political rivals and jails, tortures, or expels them.
At least 300,000 Syrian Kurds have also fled the region to neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan, according to officials there, and no fewer than 200,000 have fled to Turkey rather than submit to forced conscription and political suppression by a group that insists on ruling as a one-party state, according to Kurdish human-rights monitors in Turkey. Officials in Iraqi Kurdistan say that if the Syrian Kurdish militia opened the borders, at least half the Kurdish population under its control would flee.
The YPG and the Turkish PKK
The militia, which calls itself the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, is the Syrian wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has fought a long, off-and-on guerrilla insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984 that reignited in mid-2015 and continues today.
The Obama administration insisted that the PKK, listed by the United States as a terrorist group, is separate from the YPG, a stance that allowed Washington to circumvent laws prohibiting dealing with such groups. Numerous witnesses, including four PKK defectors interviewed for this article, call the US stance a fiction.
Is there a YPG separate from the PKK, The Nation asked Mohar, a PKK defector, interviewed outside Syria. “What’s the difference?” he replied.
All four defectors said policy for the Syrian region that Kurds call Rojava, or west Kurdistan, is made in Qandil, Iraq, the PKK headquarters.
The YPG denies any wrongdoing. “Expulsions never happened in the past and they will not happen in the future,” said Sihanouk Dibo, a spokesman and senior adviser for the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the political wing of the YPG. He said the alliance between the YPG and the (US-led) international coalition against ISIS “is another reason why such violations can’t happen.”
The story of the YPG is not just a tale about the PKK under a different name. It involves other major players that the US government would prefer not to talk about — chiefly, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. It is the story of a governing authority that has arrested, tortured, and expelled rival political leaders; suppressed independent media and issued death threats against reporters; recruits conscripts at gunpoint; has carried out systematic and widespread expulsions; and has attempted to “Kurdify” traditionally Arab towns. It is also the story of a place so at loggerheads with two of its neighbors, Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, that both have closed access to Rojava, including to nearly all foreign reporters. (Some of these abuses will be discussed in part two of this series).
PYD: “Such Things Never Happened”
Those in charge in Rojava, when asked to respond to allegations against them, have prepared responses that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Dibo said there was one exception to his blanket denial that the YPG destroyed the houses of Arabs. Sometimes villages are caught in the crossfire when the YPG captures towns from ISIS. “How can you liberate an area from ISIS without damaging the houses in that area?” he said.
Yet in case after case examined by The Nation, the destruction and expulsions from villages took place after the YPG captured them from ISIS without a fight.
Despite extensive documentation of the expulsions by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a respected opposition watchdog group, the PYD has not carried out an internal investigation. Asked about the SNHR list of 26 completely destroyed villages, 40 partially destroyed villages, and 48 more emptied of all inhabitants in Hasakah alone, Dibo said it’s not the mandate of the PYD to investigate such violations. “Again I confirm that such things never happened,” he said.
The US government has also played down the infractions. Even after Amnesty International and SNHR issued major reports in late autumn of 2015, the State Department devoted but one line to the expulsions in its annual human-rights report early last year.
If Dibo is to be believed, the US government never even raised the question with the PYD. “Until now, such issues were not discussed,” he said. “We didn’t hear anything about these violations.”
Both the State Department and the Defense Department declined to answer specific questions or make any officials available to discuss the Nation investigation, which was underwritten by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. The State Department did not respond when asked to explain how the YPG and PKK are different bodies.
A spokesman for the US Central Command said he had “no specific knowledge” of PYD expulsions. “There are reports and rumors. There’s no way I can speak to any specific allegation,” said Col. John Thomas. “We don’t condone or work with anyone violating human rights or the laws of war.”
Washington officials, speaking on background, said they had brought up the practices with the YPG and told them to desist from future expulsions. One high-level official in the Obama administration, speaking privately, called the region under YPG control a “mini-totalitarian state.”
Iran, the Assad Regime, and ISIS
One reason for Washington’s near-silence may be embarrassment over the company the YPG keeps.
“The dominant force that is managing them is Iranian intelligence,” said Ibrahim Hussein, a Kurd who was a local judge under the Assad regime and stayed on in that position in Hasakah until July 2014. A Syrian Arab who had held a high-level intelligence post in northern Syria agreed. “Iran is the primary funding source for the PKK,” said Mahmud al-Naser, who defected from the Damascus regime in mid-2012.
Kurds and Arabs alike say the expulsions are best understood by looking at the PYD’s relationship with the Assad regime. They say the expulsions were not ethnically but politically motivated, directed against the anti-Assad political opposition. Indeed, former residents said YPG Asayish, or military police, after capturing villages from ISIS, arrived with lists of regime opponents whom they then arrested.
The YPG’s collaboration with the Assad regime extends to recently active battlefronts. An example is Aleppo, where YPG forces in the suburban neighborhood of Sheikh Maksud attacked the last supply route into the rebel-held eastern sector last July, helping the Assad regime close the road and complete the siege, leading to its collapse in December.
Interviews with dozens of Arabs and Kurds who fled Rojava cast doubt on the YPG’s narrative, which the Obama administration regularly promoted, as a heroic opponent of the Islamic State, indeed the only force in Syria capable of fighting ISIS.
The YPG calls itself a sworn enemy of ISIS, and indeed the two have fought ferocious battles against each other. But the two groups have often worked in tandem against moderate rebel groups. In several notable instances, for example in Tel Hamis and Husseiniya in Hasakah province, the YPG fought in 2013 to oust moderate rebels of the Free Syrian Army but failed. Islamic State fighters moved in with their suicide bomb units, captured the towns, and in 2015 handed them over to the YPG without a fight.
