Call it the dark side of liberation. America’s most loyal allies in Syria, the Kurds, are now facing the wrath of Turkish proxies that helped topple Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny earlier this month. As of now neither President Joe Biden nor president-elect Donald Trump have offered any guarantees for the survival of the 200,000 Kurds who are now at risk of being cleansed from the northeastern city of Kobani and surrounding areas.
“We feel betrayed,” Ilham Ahmed, a Kurd who serves as the de facto foreign minister for the North and East Syrian administration, told The Free Press in an interview arranged through The Center for Peace Communications on Monday. “We feel defeated and betrayed, in our hearts.”
Ahmed expects an invasion of Kobani any day now by the Syrian National Army, a collection of Islamist militias armed, paid for, and sponsored by Turkey’s powerful intelligence service. When I caught up with her, she had just concluded a round of negotiations with Turkish officials to forestall this invasion—and she was despondent. “All diplomatic talks with Turkey have failed. They have no conditions, they just want to invade,” she said.
A letter sent to Trump—and obtained by The Free Press—on behalf of the Kurds in the North and East Syrian province, pleaded with the president-elect: “From across the border, we can already see Turkish forces amassing, and our civilians live under the constant fear of imminent death and destruction.” It went on to say, “Your decisive leadership can stop this invasion and preserve the dignity and safety of those who have stood as steadfast allies.”