-President Trump vehemently defended his decision
to withdraw US forces from Northern Syria,
which exposed the Kurds, who are US allies, to attack.
-If Syria wants to fight for their land, that's up to Turkey
and Syria, as it has been for hundreds of years.
They've been fighting. Turkey, Syria, and all forms
of the Kurds have been fighting for centuries.
I mean, this was going to be a war of lots of other groups
coming in.
This wasn't gonna stop with Turkey against the Kurds.
They've been fighting with the Turks for 300 years,
that people know of. -The Turks and Kurds
have not been fighting for hundreds of years,
but they do have a complicated history.
And to understand what's happening now
along the Turkey-Syria border, we need to go back to 1918
and the end of the first world war.
The Kurds are the largest stateless ethnic group,
but they are far from a single unified block.
In the Ottoman Empire,
regions were loosely defined by ethnicity,
but the idea that these regions could or should act
as separate nation states with unique national identities
didn't really exist outside of academic circles.
-When the Ottoman Empire dissolves
at the end of World War I, you have a number of different
agreements that the colonial powers come to.
You have the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
You have the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920,
which Turkey particularly took a lot of issue with,
basically because it was a lot of the allies
kind of carving up Turkey into a number of parts,
giving territory to Italians and Greeks and British and so forth.
-That treaty did include the possibility of the Kurdish
people having their own state, but Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
played a pivotal role in changing that.
See, he was a colonel in the Ottoman army at the time
and was able to consolidate the remainder
of the Ottoman military to expel the Allied Powers,
founding Turkey.
With that, the possibility of a Kurdish state was abandoned
and the new treaty, the Treaty of Lausanne, divided the region.
-It was kind of the agreement, and this is a really loose way
of interpreting it, but, you know, France would have Syria,
and the Brits would have Iraq, and so forth.
So basically, you have the drawing of boundaries
that not only kind of divide populations based on ethnic
and religious divisions, but also are manipulated
in order to kind of serve the colonial powers' interests.
-That meant the Kurds were split across Turkey, Iran, Iraq,
and Syria.
So what happened next was different,
depending on which country they were in.
We're going to focus here -- on Turkey and Syria.
-Ataturk and his cadre had gone through the Balkan Wars
and had gone through World War I
and saw ethnic nationalism as dangerous.
There was an erasure of Kurdish ethnic identity,
and by erasure, I mean killings, displacements,
changing of town names, moving Kurds across the country.
-In 1978, some young Turkish Kurds adopted communism
to push back against the Turkish government.
They formed the Kurdistan Workers' Party,
or the PKK, led by Abdullah Ocalan.
In 1984, the PKK initiated a war with the government,
and in 1997, the US officially labeled it
as a terrorist organization. Across the border in Syria,
things unfolded differently for the Kurds.
-The collapse of Ottoman Empire made Turkey and Syria
border very much artificially manufactured.
In 1920s, we see French mandate of Syria
in which French would look at Kurds as a strategic asset.
A lot of minorities under French empire would be supported
in terms of their cultural rights, linguistic rights,
and we saw some intellectuals -- Kurdish intellectuals --
coming from Turkey, joining a movement in Syria,
and they are just standardizing the Kurdish language.
-But in the 1960s, Syrian Kurds were stripped of basic rights,
forced to migrate from their towns, and lost economic power.
That changed in the 2000s.
During that time, the People's Protection Unit, or the YPG,
and its political arm emerged as dominant among a wide range
of political parties and groups. YPG is a militant organization
that has strong links to the PKK and Turkey.
-There is an organic link between the PKK and the YPG.
If you go to Northeastern Syria,
you see the posters of PKK leader, Ocalan, everywhere,
which can only be there because the YPG allows it.
-When the US needed help pushing back ISIS in Syria,
it worked with the YPG.
-To try to get around the fact that the YPG is essentially
the Syrian sister organization of the PKK, that is
the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the United States
creates the Syrian Democratic Forces -- the SDF.
The goal was to make that a multi-ethnic fighting force.
-And that relationship lasted until today, fighting
and defeating territorially, the Islamic state and detaining
a large number of Islamic state adherents and their families.
That alliance between the United States and the YPG
is something that Turkey never accepted and now is very happy
to counter as the US withdraws from Northeastern Syria.
-With Trump's decision to remove troops from Syria,
there was no longer a US force mediating between Turkey
and the YPG along the border.
And suddenly, the regional dynamic shifted.
-So, Turkey has long wanted to remove
any PKK-affiliated group from the Syrian-Turkish border.
The Kurds are only in that area, so for Turkey,
it is another way of saying, "We want to get rid,
not necessarily of the Kurds, but of the YPG
that is the main party protecting these Kurds."
-There appears to be a green light
to Turkish forces to invade. They do invade on October 9th.
The agree to a cease fire, and then Erdogan meets with
Russian President Vladimir Putin who essentially takes over
the role of the US and says, "Now we're going to have Turkey
and Russian troops that are patrolling the area."
Keep in mind that it's not just the YPG that's impacted.
After all,
the zone includes most of Syria's Kurdish population,
and not all Kurdish people in this region support the YPG
or the PKK, which brings us back to President Trump
and his justification for this move.
-Turkey, Syria, and all forms of the Kurds
have been fighting for centuries.
-They haven't been at war with each other
for hundreds of years. The Kurds, in fact,
were allies with the Turks during the War of Independence.
There are a number of Kurds who say, "I'm ethnically Kurdish,
but I feel nationally Turkish." -So, the idea that the Kurdish
people are somehow natural enemies
or have been fighting for hundreds of years with the Turks
is completely false, not to mention oversimplified.
Their history is a complex saga of peace, suppression,
resistance, cooperation, and violence.
Most of that violence
is a result of recent political tensions,
and at times, has been on behalf of the United States.
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