The Syrian Kurds Are Winning!
There is a new Great Game unfolding in Central Asia, and it centers on the belt of mountainous land that stretches from southeast Turkey, across northern Syria and Iraq, and into northwestern Iran: the land of the Kurds, or Kurdistan. The region is home to not only 30 million or so ethnic Kurds, the largest ethnic group worldwide that lacks its own nation, but also rich reserves of oil and gas. Iraqi Kurdistan is thought to have the world’s eighth-largest oil reserves. The civil wars in Iraq and now Syria have created political space for the Kurds to establish quasi-independent enclaves that are likely, eventually, to achieve a large degree of autonomy or even statehood. And that makes the Kurds a possible economic force in the region. In Syria, according to this long piece of reportage by Jonathan Steele in the New York Review of Books, “some 2.2 million Kurds have created a quasi state that is astonishingly safe—and strangely unknown abroad.” The oilfields of Rojava, as the Kurdish enclave is known, are dormant, for now, but the ability of the Kurds to fight off the Islamic State and establish a relatively stable haven means that they are unlikely to stay that way.
Russia, Turkey Trade Accusations Over Who Bought Oil from ISIS
Meanwhile, the historic role of Turkey as an entrepôt for the energy flowing out of Central Asia to world markets has been heightened even as black-market oil sold by the Islamic State finds its way to energy-strapped countries around the region. The tense standoff between Russia and Turkey following the downing of a Russian fighter jet on November 24 took new shape this week as “Russian military officials laid out what they say is ‘hard evidence’ that Turkey is involved in an oil trade with ISIS.” Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has flatly denied the charges, but the exchange has added another level of complexity to a fluid and exceedingly tangled set of alliances and counteralliances that continue to mutate as the Syrian civil war moves into its sixth year.
The Sultan of Turkey
Erdogan himself is playing a dangerous game, joining in the international coalition seeking to unseat ISIS in the territory it controls while essentially fighting a cold war against Russia and refusing to negotiate with Kurdish separatists and find a solution to the long separatist conflict within its own borders. Oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea region to the port of Ceyhan, on Turkey’s Mediterranean, have fueled Erdogan’s ambition to be a regional power broker. But his policies “are the cause of many of his country’s failures in Syria,” reports Christopher de Bellaigue, also in the NYRB, and the suicide bombing that killed 102 people at a peace rally in Ankara in October underlined the risks those policies entail.
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