Tomb Raiders of Kobane

The War Nerd: Tomb Raiders of Kobane

John Dolan, writing under alias Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, analyzes Turkey's recent cross-border mission into Syria to extract the body of Osman I, founder of the Ottoman Empire, from its tomb. Officially, the Turks went in on the premise that the tomb was under threat from Islamic State (ISIS has gone on a tomb-destroying spree across its conquered territories, enforcing a Qu'ranic edict against showing devotion to the dead).

The real story, as Dolan exposes, is a little more sordid: Turkey and Islamic State have been double-dealing for some time now, Turkey making little efforts to stop any of the flows of jihadists and weaponry over the border and hampering the Kurds in their efforts to reinforce the Kobani front.

And Islamic State has held the region surrounding the tomb for months now - yet has never once made a move against it. What changed the game is that Kurdish forces, fanning out into the countryside and villages to start reclaiming ground after their hard-fought victory in Kobani, had been approaching the area which held the tomb.

The Turks appear to be trying to get the body of Osman away from the reach of the Kurds, not ISIS. Turkey still sees the Kurdish PKK (and its PYD compatriots in northeastern Syria) as the number one threat to its security.

Turkey's approach to the Islamic State crisis is bending the American-Turkish alliance uncomfortably close to the breaking point. This alliance was a creation of the Cold War to prevent the Soviet Union from seeking to extend its reach to the Mediterranean.  There have been other issues before. Turkey and Greece, both members of NATO, have skirmished and politicked against one another for decades now over Cyprus and shares of control over the Aegean islands and sea. The strains have really begun to show more recently, after Turkey elected the Islamist government fronted by Recep Tayyip Erdogan; before Erdogan, Turkey had long been dominated by secular Kemalist parties and by periods of military dictatorship.

Under Erdogan, Turkey opposed the US war in Iraq, fearing the takedown of Saddam's state would enable the Iraqi Kurds to seize power in northern Iraq, strengthening the Kurdish uprising in Turkey as well and providing a base outside of Turkey's borders for Kurdish independence fighters. This in effect did happen - although the Kurdish faction that took control of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq was divided by ideology and clan from the PKK, the hardline socialist group that leads the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey.

Erdogan has also broken with past Turkish practice in being an outspoken critic of Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip, something Turkey under Kemalist rule could hardly have cared less about. Israel's special relationship with the United States has put America in an uncomfortable position as the two have become more and more hostile.

The Syrian Civil War and the rise of the Islamic State have put the latest and largest cracks into this long-standing alliance. Sponsoring jihad in Syria and the overthrow of the Assad government has been a pet project of Erdogan's since the very start of the war. This was never really about democracy, the Free Syrian Army that got so much press in the first years of the war being little more than a coalition of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned militias. This was about installing a sectarian Sunni government in Syria, one that would be beholden to Turkey.

This project hasn't worked out for Erdogan - and he blames the United States for not doing enough to support his scheme. Turkey has a massive, well-equipped and NATO-trained army, one whose only rivals in the region in terms of strength are Israel's and Iran's. Turkey would be capable of conquering Syria if it tried to. But Erdogan has never sent the Turkish Army into Syria - he is either unwilling to accept the losses it would cost him in Turkish lives, or the international backlash that would result from this.

But he was perfectly happy to demand that the U.S. involve itself in the war, to let America face the risks and the losses, and the furious backlash that would result. Thankfully, the United States has shied away from taking such a wrongheaded move - although it has and does continue to flirt with the idea of intervention, and to provide support for the opposition - support that has kept the rebellion going on for years now.

Had Assad been allowed to win, had the US not allowed there to be any international support for the rebellion, it all would have been over in months. Hundreds of thousands who are dead would still be alive. Millions of others who are in refugee camps now would be living in their homes. And Islamic State wouldn't be half as srong as it is today.

Islamic State is the point at which it's become hard to see Turkey under Erdogan's rule as any sort of ally to American interests. Islamic State is enemy number one in the Middle East for the US, for Europe, for Syria, Iraq, the Kurds, Iran, Hezbollah, Egypt, Russia; for every player in the region save two: Israel, which still fears Hezbollah the most, and Turkey - which fears the Kurds more than ISIS and which continues to prioritize the overthrow of the Syrian government over the crushing of the Islamic State.

There are five forces on the ground in Iraq and Syria that are actually doing battle with ISIS directly (while the US and a few European and Muslim allies bomb them from the air). Three of these are effective ground forces that actually put up a fight and wage effective operations. The first are Assad's Syrian Arab Army, backed by elite Hezbollah infantry. The second are sectarian Iraqi Shia militias coordinated by Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers. The third are the Kurdish Peshmerga and YPG militias, who are very tough and determined fighters (they and Hezbollah are the most skilled soldiers  in the war), but are poorly equipped as they don't have as much outside patronage.

The other two forces on the ground against ISIS are the national Iraqi Army, equipped and trained by the Americans, and the "moderate Syrian rebels" (who include al-Qaeda subgroup Jabhat al-Nusra and whose largest forces are all Islamist sectarians). These are the two forces the US and its coalition officially collaborate with as part of the anti-Islamic State campaign.

And they are useless.

Jabhat al-Nusra are the only decent fighters the Syrian rebels have - and they're al-Qaeda foot soldiers, a bunch of savage, extremist freaks that are only a lighter shade of black next to those of ISIS.

The rest are losers, a disorganized rabble that can be counted on to flee, to surrender their weapons to jihadists in exchange for their lives, to sell their guns to ISIS for quick cash, or even to defect and join it. More than a thousand armed groups have sprung up over the course of the war in Syria, and hundreds of them have lasted just long enough to receive shipments of weaponry from the West or the Gulf - and then promptly switched over to the jihadist forces, taking their freshly-delivered guns and bombs along with.

And the Iraqi Army is a joke. This army, a creation that America built up from scratch during the occupation, after disbanding the old one, is an absolute embarrassment to its nation and to ours. It is one of the most colossally failed projects we have ever undertaken in our foreign policy. Years of training efforts, tens of billions of dollars in funding, advanced U.S. equipment like the M1 Abrams tank were put into this new army.

It fell apart the first time it ran into an enemy that would actually fire back against it. It turned out that half its brigades were imaginary, scams for the officers to pocket extra money. It surrendered an enormous haul of American weaponry to the Islamic State, enough for IS to equip tens of thousands of newly recruited and conscripted soldiers, to turn itself from a terrorist group into a terrorist army.

These are the same Iraqis that Saddam Hussein marshaled into an eight-year war with Iran. They didn't win, but they stayed fighting the whole eight years and never broke down.

Give Saddam some credit: he clearly knew better than we do about how to create a working Iraqi Army. His army wasn't that good; it didn't last a week against ours. But Saddam's army would not have been run out of Mosul by a few thousand jihadis on armed pickup trucks. ISIS wouldn't have had a chance against it.

So the two forces the US officially sponsors against ISIS are garbage. Two of the forces that actually are worth a damn when it comes to a fight - the Hezbollah-backed Syrian Army and the Iranian-led Iraqi Shia militias - are ones the United States refuses to support for ideological reasons (don't like Assad, don't like Iran), even when we have strong strategic reasons to cooperate with them.

Which leaves the Kurds, the last of the effective fighting groups. They are people that we like, the Europeans like, the Israelis like, that even the Syrians and Iranians are willing to cooperate with.

The only problem is that the Turks hate the Kurds - and the view them as a larger threat than ISIS. The Islamic State they see as a tool for their ends (it's the most dangerous and effective group fighting to overthrow Assad). The Kurds they see as an enemy.

Turkey is what's keeping America from throwing its full support behind the Kurds. The US is helping out Kurdish forces wih air strikes, but has refrained from supplying them with the weapons they need to mount a major offensive against Islamic State. The Kurds are actually much better and more experienced fighters than most of ISIS' troops (with a few exceptions like the Chechens, jihadists who came from a war with Russia and are some of the most feared guerrilla warriors in the world). The problem is that ISIS soldiers have better weapons and more ammunition than the Kurds.

The US and its allies could level the playing field by delivering major arms shipments to the Kurds, letting their superior combat skills tilt the tides in their favor. The problem is that Turkey won't allow this. The Turks are thinking ahead to tomorrow: they are asking themselves what the Kurds are going to do with those weapons after ISIS has been defeated? The answer is that they'd probably end up being turned against Turkish soldiers. Putting together a Kurdish army strong enough to defeat ISIS would pose a serious threat for Turkey: Turkey has fought against a Kurdish insurgency for decades, and it has never been as strongly equipped before as it would be if it received a full package of American weaponry.

So the Turks have become the biggest obstacle to the formation of an effective anti-ISIS coalition (one that would include US, European, Gulf, Iranian, and Jordanian air support for a joint ground campaign by the Kurds, the Syrian Army (with a ceasefire, truce, or surrender from the Syrian rebels), Hezbollah, and an Iraqi Army directed by Iranian officers and reinforced with Shi'a militas). This coalition working in concert would crush the Islamic State.

But the Turks won't allow it (and the Israelis, the Saudis, and John McCain do their part to sabotage it as well by refusing to cooperate with the Iranians or the Syrians). And what's most frustrating of all is that Turkey could do it all by itself. It has an army of hundreds of thousands of troops, well-trained, NATO-equipped, freshly rested. If the Turkish Army went in full force, it could wipe out Islamic State on its own - and it could do it even faster than the battle-weary Syrians, who are drained by four years of war and terrorism, let alone the Iraqis, who continue to stumble about like their shoelaces have been tied together.

Erdogan's not interested, though. He's still too caught up in his pipe dream of installing a puppet government in Syria, and too invested in Turkey's decades-long feud with the Kurds (a problem he inherited, not that he started, to be fair). So the Islamic State still stands, and the Kurds and the Syrians struggle valiantly against it, unsupported by the US, which is stuck blundering about trying to get the Iraqi Army and the "moderate jihadists" of the Syrian opposition rabble to do something useful - which may or may not happen before the Israelis and Palestinians decide to be best friends.

And the mighty Turkish Army, fresh off its little tomb raiding adventure in Syria, sits on the border and watches the show, carefully keeping its eyes on the slaughter while the latest batch of European jihadists sneaks past to go and join the Caliphate's war.

Tim Mulhair
February 25, 2015