The Secular Foreign Fighters of the West in Syria.

• Author: Orton, Kyle
• Position: ARTICLE - Essay

The movement of citizens to join Islamist groups in Syria has been a serious security concern for western governments. This has been especially so since late 2015, when 130 people were slaughtered in one evening in Paris by operatives of ISIS, "nearly all" of whom were European citizens who re-entered Europe with forged Syrian passports, having "infiltrated the refugee flow." (1) There was considerable fear that the collapse of ISIS's territorial holdings, its so-called caliphate, would result in a renewed wave of returnee jihadists causing havoc on European streets, though this has not so far materialized. (2)

The stretching of European security agencies by ISIS's networks, (3) the subsequent political focus on the jihadists, and geopolitical developments as the western states mobilized to attack ISIS at its core was the context in which a flow of western citizens joining another terrorist organization in Syria, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), was de-prioritized. As Syria's war moves into a new phase, those decisions begin to look more questionable.

Background

The PKK originates in Turkey as part of the radical movements of the 1960s, its ideology a mixture of Marxism-Leninism, Kurdish nationalism-separatism, and a cult of personality around its leader, Abdullah Ocalan. Having spent most of the 1970s battling other Kurdish and Leftist organizations to try to monopolize that political constituency the PKK was expelled from Turkey by the coup d'etat in September 1980. Regrouping in Syria, the PKK was trained by Palestinian militants in the terrorist training camps of the then-Syrian occupied Bekaa Valley and became an instrument in the foreign policy of the Assad regime and the Soviet Union. (4) The repressiveness of the military junta, in combination with later amnesties for PKK cadres, who had been hardened and indoctrinated in Turkish jails, helped shape the political environment favorably for the PKK. (5) Further outreach established robust relations for the PKK with the Islamic Republic of Iran, providing a crucial logistics hub, and a relationship was struck with Saddam Hussein that allowed the PKK to create the bases in northern Iraq from which they would launch their insurgency against Turkey in 1984. (6)

Between 1992 and 1996, the war between the Turkish state and the PKK was at its height. (7) The PKK' insurgent-terrorist tactics--vast, centrally-directed campaign of systematic atrocities against Kurds who resisted their program and anyone else identified as a "state agent"--amounted to crimes against humanity. (8) The military-dominated Turkish government fought back in a manner that trampled human rights laws, displacing Kurds en masse in an attempt to physically drain away the PKK's support base, (9) and shadowy elements of the state struck down hundreds of Kurdish activists, fifty Kurdish politicians, and a dozen Kurdish journalists. (10) About 15,000 people were killed in this period, three-quarters of all those who would die in the first part of the war, which lasted from 1984 to 1999. (11)

The collapse of the Soviet Union removed important support from the PKK, and Turkeys evolving military tactics in the late 1990s brought the PKK under tremendous pressure. Ocalan's autocratic leadership prevented adaptation when the PKK needed it most and competent commanders were eliminated in internal purges as Ocalan saw them as threats to his position. With the tide turning inside Turkey, the government was able to issue a believable threat to the Syrian government that it either expel Ocalan or face military consequences. Damascus acceded to Ankara's demands and Ocalan was soon arrested by Turkish intelligence in an operation that included the United States (and, so the PKK believes, Israel). From prison, Ocalan ordered a ceasefire and the withdrawal of his forces into the Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq in August 1999. The PKK had been militarily defeated, though it would live politically to fight another day. (12)

While recuperating in northern Iraq, the world was changed by al-Qaeda's assault on the United States on September 11, 2001. The PKK had been designated a terrorist organization by Germany in 1993, (13) the U.S. State Department in 1997, (14) and Britain in March 2001. (15) With the onset of the war on terror, the PKK needed to dissociate from its past.

Ocalan claimed to change his ideology away from the Stalinism of the past to "Democratic Confederalism," an admixture of anarchism, ecological themes, feminism, and stateless direct democracy. "The construction of a democratic nation based on multi-national identities is the ideal solution when faced with the dead-end street nation-state," Ocalan explained. "The emerging entity could become a blueprint for the entire Middle East and expand dynamically into neighboring countries." (16)

The PKK would also adopt a "confederal model" to implement this new, ostensibly decentralized doctrine. In each of the four states where the PKK operates, the PKK created structures that were marketed as more localist: the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party (PCDK) in Iraq; the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing, the People's Protection Units (YPG), in Syria; and the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK) in Iran. Even in theory, however, the PKK and its armed units, the People's Defense Forces (HPG), the PCDK, the PYD/YPG, and PJAK are components of a transnational umbrella organization, the Kurdistan Communities' Union (KCK), which is under the command of Ocalan. (17)

The relationship between the PKK on the one side, and PJAK and particularly the PYD/YPG on the other, has now become a subject of political controversy, as will be discussed below. But before there were incentives to obfuscate the point, there was no dispute. The U.S. designated PJAK as a terrorist entity in 2009, noting that the PKK had created PJAK to "portray itself as independent from but allied" to the PKK, yet the reality was that the PKK "controlled" PJAK and micromanaged it down to the selection of field commanders. (18) Likewise with the PYD, American intelligence was clear that it was the PKK in Syria--and has now reverted to this analysis. (19)

In terms of command structure, ideology, and resources, the PKK, PYD, PJAK, and PCDK are one organization. People who have traveled with the PKK in southeastern Turkey have seen its members change to YPG patches as they cross the Syrian border. (20) Ultimately, as a study for a NATO think tank concluded, "the PKK truly has no affiliates," merely a series of names and fronts that are shifted around "like a shell game" to obscure the reality, while the PKK leadership in Qandil retains "direct command and control." (21)

The Structure of the PKK in Syria

After Ocalan's expulsion from Syria in 1998 and the Assad regime's signing of the Adana Treaty with Turkey the PKK's operations in the country were constrained. But by 2003, PYD/YPG was allowed to establish itself, a reflagging of the PKK's extensive presence in the Kurdish areas of Syria, a result of the PKK's long integration with the Assad regime.

While most Kurdish groups were repressed by the Assad regime, the PKK was allowed to indoctrinate and recruit freely because it deflected from demands for rights in Syria and steered Syrian Kurds into the war with Turkey. Ocalan denied "the existence of a Kurdish problem in Syria," saying "most Syrian Kurds are immigrants" from Turkey who should "return them to their original homeland." (22) This complemented the Assad's regime policy of stripping citizenship from Kurds on the grounds that they were "alien infiltrators" from Turkey. (23) The collusion was so extensive that those who joined the PKK were exempt from Assad's policy of universal conscription: Assad's state considered those who joined the PKK to have done their military service. For this reason, the PKK has always had a considerable number of Syrian nationals in its ranks, including at senior levels. (24)

Between 2003 and 2011, the Assad regime would alternate a general policy of tolerance and even coordination with intermittent crackdowns on the PYD/PKK in Syria, as it did with the ISIS movement in the same period. (25) From the beginning of the Syrian uprising in the spring of 2011, the PYD retained a cordial relationship with Bashar al-Assad's regime, (26) and there is a wide-spread assessment -from regional intelligence agencies, independent analysts, and within Syria's Kurdish community itself- that Assad at this point recommenced active support to the PYD. (27)

At least three key events are suggestive of renewed coordination between the PKK and the Assad/Iran system in Syria against the western allies in the region. (28) In September 2011, PJAK declared a ceasefire and the PKK's assets in Iran were moved into Syria, almost certainly under a deal with the Islamic Republic. (29) In July 2012, in a crucial development in Syria's war, Assad pulled out of the Kurdish-majority areas in northern Syria, along Turkey's border, in a manner that specifically weakened rivals to the PYD/PKK and left the territory in the hands of the PYD. (30) And a year later, in July 2013, at the PKK's Ninth Congress, the PKK's de facto leader with Ocalan in jail, Murat Karayilan, someone known to be more open to compromise and more favorable to genuine decentralization of the KCK departments, was replaced as KCK executive by Cemil Bayik and Bese Hozat (Hulya Oran), (31) Turkey-centric radicals with connections to Assad and Iran stretching back decades. (32) Bayik personally is known to be close to the Iranian Intelligence Ministry (VEVAK). (33) One of Bayik's most powerful deputies, and a key PKK operatives in Syria from 2011-2012 onwards, Fehman Husayn (Dr. Bahoz Erdal), a Syrian by background, has extensive ties to Assad's intelligence services. (34)

"Qandilians," as the PKK veterans trained at the camps in the Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq are called, (35) hold virtually every...