Looking for allies

Northern Syria has bled Christians a long time. Besieged by ISIS, or Islamic State, historic Christian villages witnessed hundreds of believers taken hostage in 2015. ISIS attacked 35 Christian towns in one day, taking more than 200 Christians captive overnight. Months later ISIS executed publicly three men, but released most of the others. Then Kurdish forces fought ISIS, wrested back the area, and have held it ever since.

Thousands of Christians fled the fighting, but many desperately want to hang on. Christians once dominated the region, and some of the earliest churches and monasteries in the world still function there. In the last century the Assyrian and Armenian Christians—surviving wave after wave of genocide from the Ottoman Turks—managed to hold out in the region, and today they regard it as perhaps the last historic stronghold for Christians in the Middle East.

Now the United States is stepping up support for Kurdish rebels who helped defeat ISIS. Rebels have christened the region Rojava, or the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. U.S. support has been seen as crucial to defeating ISIS in its Syrian capital, Raqqa, where a military assault was launched formally in early June. Quickly those rebel forces gained a “foothold” in Raqqa, according to American envoy Brett McGurk. “The Raqqa campaign from here will only accelerate,” he said.

Rojava means “the west,” and American and European leaders believe the Kurds represent the best friend of Western powers, with the best chance to defeat ISIS and to bring Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad to a reckoning. But the new partnership could invest the Kurds with outsize influence in any post-war Syria. Further, they face stiff opposition from Turkey—a NATO ally—and more and more appear unlikely to preserve the non-Kurdish and non-Muslim population.

Church leaders and congregants in the historic Christian area, which includes parts of Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, say the Kurds discriminate against them, and have pressured young men to serve in their militias. The “annihilation tactics” promised by Secretary of Defense James Mattis to defeat ISIS could, these Christians fear, succeed in wiping them out too.

“Everyone is vying for control,” said Bassam Ishak, president of the Syriac National Council of Syria and an opposition activist. Intimidating minority populations in the conflict, he said, is “just another way to win the upper hand.”

In May the U.S. Defense Department announced plans to provide heavy weapons to the YPG (full name: Kurdish People’s Protection Units), the Kurdish forces controlling Rojava as part of the Syrian Democratic Forces.

Heavy weaponry under the Trump administration began showing up in quantity six weeks before the Raqqa assault began—with dozens of U.S. up-armored Humvees, MRAPs, and tanks arriving along the tense border area. Heavy weapons also include machine guns, mortars, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and anti-tank weapons.

The support represents a major shift in U.S. policy. The Obama administration threw support to the Free Syrian Army, with a slew of guns and missile launchers falling into the hands of al-Qaeda-linked fighters as its forces dissolved into jihadist groups. Eventually U.S. support for any rebels dwindled.

Importantly, Rojava is a resource-rich region, with proven oil reserves and agricultural holdings that once earned it recognition as the breadbasket of Syria. The YPG with its political entity, the Democratic Union Party, last year declared themselves a de facto autonomous region and passed a blueprint for governing that amounts to a constitution. They hope it will become a model for all Syria—although Rojava’s standing has yet to receive formal recognition from any outside entity or from the Assad government.

MORE THAN 200 MILES across Rojava from Raqqa, where fighting currently is centered, the Kurds are creating a capital in Qamishli, a strategic outpost near the borders of Turkey and Iraq. Qamishli until recently was a majority Christian town that’s gradually come under the Kurds’ control. YPG forces control most of the city, though Syrian army units hold an area around the airport, according to Fabrice Balanche, a research director at the University of Lyon 2 who visited the area this spring. One section of the city is held by Christian militia operating under the name Sotoro, with pots of flowers blocking the streets to mark its boundaries. YPG and Sotoro have clashed—with one Sotoro member and eight YPGs killed in one 2016 incident—but locals say they can move freely among the militia-controlled areas.

The YPG has established a town hall at the Hotel Semiramis, a once-luxurious Art Deco hotel built and owned by Syriac Catholics. After World War I and the Armenian genocide, the French used land allotments to help repopulate the area with Christians—mostly Syriac (or Assyrian) believers and Armenians—as a buffer against encroachments from Turkey. The Christians vastly enriched their agricultural holdings, and by the 1950s Qamishli was the center of Syria’s grain and cotton trade. The Hotel Semiramis welcomed tradesmen and merchants from Aleppo and other industrial centers and served French wine and filet mignon, recalled Balanche.

Now many of the Syriac Catholics who ran the Semiramis have emigrated to Canada, and the hotel sits forlorn in a wrecked landscape. ISIS suicide bombers have repeatedly struck Qamishli. A truck bomb in the city a year ago killed 48.

Fighting too has raged next door in the Turkish town of Nusaybin. The city of 100,000 has at its center the archaeological remains of St. Jacob Church, which dates to the third century, and a bishop from Nusaybin attended the Council of Nicaea. I visited the site in mid-2015, and the city was a bustling center of commerce, though fighting and smoke rising just across a border fence in Syria was visible.

Now Nusaybin is a war zone. Kurdish militias reportedly aligned with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party have fought the Turkish army since last year, turning once-busy shops into rubble and streets into sniper alleys—threatening, too, what few ancient sites like St. Jacob have survived six years of war. The swift destruction of a once-prosperous town—and its proximity to Qamishli—make clear the deadly intent of Kurdish forces and the difficulty for outsiders to distinguish good militias from bad.

WITH THE OUTBREAK OF FIGHTING in the area, locals say the Christian population in Rojava communities has been cut by half. “Migration has scattered us,” said Shemun Behnam, a resident of Derik, a mostly Syriac Orthodox community in Turkey, also across the border from Qamishli and west of Nusaybin.

Behnam blamed overall insecurity and lack of economic opportunities in Derik on the Syrian war, but he also blames the YPG. He said its militias closed schools and forced Christians to study in Kurdish, even though their first language usually is Syriac (a branch of Aramaic, the ancient language spoken by Jesus).

Behnam said YPG fighters pressured young Assyrian men to join their ranks, arresting or detaining them in some cases. He said the YPG in some communities in Syria and Turkey imposed compulsory duty on men ages 18 to 30 years old and required them to undertake six months of training.

“YPG is the decision-maker,” he said.

The YPG first took control of the cross-border area in 2014, when government forces abandoned the area. Even then, few locals trusted the new authorities, said Rayed Georgis, a car mechanic from Derik. The YPG and other rebel forces did not oppose ISIS militants when they first moved in, he added. When ISIS captured villages along the Khabur River and took Christians hostage en masse, none of those forces responded, for months.

In all, ISIS attacked 35 Assyrian villages along the Khabur in Hasakah province, now considered part of Rojava. The terrorist group struck on Feb. 23, 2015, at 4 a.m., and quickly YPG and government forces retreated.

Facing no armed opposition, ISIS forced at least 3,000 Assyrians from their homes and took 250 Assyrian Christians hostage. ISIS set fire to the church in Tel Hirmiz and bombed an Assyrian Catholic church in Tel Tamer, killing five residents. ISIS took down crosses, forbade religious symbols and ringing of bells, and imposed a tax on non-Muslim residents. The militants threatened to kill anyone who refused to obey their rules.

Those events earned international headlines, as did an ISIS videotape parading three Assyrian men in orange jumpsuits. All three were fathers and landowners and residents of Tel Tamer. On camera each man, one by one, was shot in the head.

Behind the headlines, the common feeling among residents was that both government and Kurdish forces had allowed ISIS in the area to grow stronger and did little to prevent ISIS atrocities. After the attacks, returning villagers had little confidence in the Kurdish forces controlling their areas.

“There were 46 families in our village before the war, there were 24 families after the war, but now our village is empty,” said Daniel Can from Tel Mesas. He said residents continued to flee, dodging snipers. They discovered that in their absence their houses had been looted. Many accused YPG and other units now operating under the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) of the looting, fueling overall distrust of the U.S.-backed SDF that persists to this day.

“Everything from the animals to the trees was plundered,” said Samuel Ushana, another resident.

THE YPG OPERATES as the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) but denies it is the Syrian front of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK was founded in Turkey in 1978 by Abdullah Öcalan, and its ideology mixes Marxist-Leninism and Kurdish nationalism. Öcalan’s calls for separating from Turkey, and PKK terrorism, earned it a top spot on Turkey’s enemies list. Further, the PKK is a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization and is also recognized as such by NATO and the European Union, among others.

Under cover of Syria’s prolonged civil war, PKK forces grew in Syria, where at one time they received training and assistance from the Assad regime and Russia, both willing to use the PKK to destabilize Turkey, a front-line NATO member state.

U.S. Central Command and State Department officials deny a connection between the YPG and PKK. They stress the United States is also working with the wider opposition umbrella group, the SDF, which includes Arab militias.

Those in the region, though, say the YPG and PKK are linked. Last year Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government and a U.S. ally, told journalists: “Any support to the PYD [political leadership of YPG] means support for the PKK. They are exactly one and the same thing.”

Former members of the YPG I spoke to in Iraq in 2015, including American recruits not named because they faced death threats and possible prosecution for fighting as so-called mercenaries, confirmed the Marxist leanings of YPG leadership and said they believed the group had links to the PKK.

The U.S. arming of the YPG risks “the regional stability necessary for the lasting defeat of the Islamic State,” argues Kyle W. Orton, a Middle East analyst and research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, in a recent New York Times op-ed.

Orton argues it’s a mistake to focus only on defeating ISIS. “The narrowness of the focus on jihadist terrorists led to the U.S. disregarding wider political dynamics in the war in Syria—and to a degree in Iraq, too—and partnering with forces that over the long term will undo even this narrow mission.”

Across the region the United States has relied broadly on Kurds to quell Islamist-led terrorism, but as the Kurds have grown stronger, so have complaints. “During my visits to the region, Assyrians and Yazidis have whispered carefully in my ear of the oppression they face from Kurdish groups,” Attiya Gamri, president of the Assyrian Confederation of Europe, told a European Parliament conference on June 6.

But most Western allies welcome the Trump administration’s move toward supporting the Kurdish forces. Joël Voordewind, a Christian Union member of the Dutch Parliament who travels frequently to the region, told me the YPG/PYD authorities in Rojava “represent the least bad opposition group” to support in Syria.

Netherlands’ lawmakers passed a resolution last year supporting Rojava and have hosted its groups on cultural exchanges, while Voordewind criticized the Obama administration for supporting the Free Syrian Army, which he said ultimately fed U.S.-provided weaponry to groups linked with al-Qaeda.

THE U.S.-KURDISH PARTNERSHIP in Syria may speed military progress, but so far Turkey isn’t buying in. In April Turkey launched airstrikes on YPG posts in Derik, an apparent message for the YPG and its Western backers. But the attacks also hit in the area’s ancient Christian heartland and killed at least 18 people.

Turkish military jets carried out multiple airstrikes in Derik and that same day struck near Sinjar in Iraq, killing approximately 50 people. What could Sinjar, once the largest city for Yazidis, have in common with Derik? Besides their non-Muslim population, both had been scenes of grisly ISIS battles—with Islamic State fighters taking Sinjar in 2014 and killing or capturing thousands of Yazidis—and were liberated with support from the YPG units Turkey opposes.

For Turkey’s Assyrian Christian population, the bombings in Derik had “a demoralizing effect,” said Bassam Ishak of the Syriac National Council. The airstrikes coincided with an anniversary of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, which also led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Assyrian Christians. “We have this in our community’s memory,” he said, “but to see it happening in our lifetime again is shocking. We are trying very hard to convince people to stay—and now it is even harder.”

The Syriac Christian himself has become one of the leading opposition leaders American officials can talk to. He told me he’s been shuttling between Washington, the Kurdistan capital of Iraq in Erbil, and European capitals. He was diplomatic in answering whether the United States is right to support and arm the SDF with its large contingent of YPG forces: “We welcome military support by [the] U.S. to SDF. SDF has proved to be the only effective ally to [the] U.S. in its war against ISIS.”

Ishak has watched nearly a lifetime of disenfranchisement for the Syriac Christian population. His father, a member of parliament known as a devout Christian, opposed the Ba’ath Party before it came to power under Hafez al-Assad, father of the current Syrian president. When Ishak was 11 years old, the Assad regime seized 1,200 acres of land belonging to his family, rich croplands in the area marked out for Rojava. Ishak’s family lost everything and eventually was forced to leave the country.

Ishak says, “We are trying to work with the Kurds,” though without giving up essential rights as Christians. “Without achieving the full rights of all the minorities of Syria, no new Syria will emerge and no political actor will win.”