It’s Nagorno-Karabakh All Over Again in Syrian Kurdistan

Michael Rubin | American Enterprise Institute

American officials privately, if not publicly, cheer Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s loss of Aleppo and much of northwestern Syria to rebel forces led by the Turkish-backed Sunni Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group that takes its direction from Ankara and previously affiliated with Al Qaeda.

The Assad regime in Aleppo, Hama, and Idlib is not the Turkish-backed militias’ only target, however. Word from multiple sources in Syria suggests that Turkey is now directing an all-out assault on the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the U.S.-supported Kurdish entity that rules northeastern Syria as a pluralistic, multi-confessional, and secular state.

The animus of both Turkey and its proxy militias toward the Kurds is both ethnic and religious. Turkey’s apologists point out that many Turkish officials historically have been Kurdish. Ismet Inonu, Turkey’s second president, was Kurdish as was Turgut Özal who dominated Turkish politics through the 1980s.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has at various times also opened the door to Kurdish participation, seeking to recruit the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) to his coalition and, in recent weeks, furtively reaching out to imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan. Every time, however, he turned on would-be partners with fury after they refused to subordinate their Kurdish identity to the official demand for Turkishness or, in Erdogan’s case, when they refused to make his brand of Islamism their primary identity.

Most Syrian Kurds choose groups that evolved out of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) because, unlike Kurdish groups in Iraq, the PKK is ideological rather than tribal. It promotes equity and progressivism over nepotism and kleptocracy. Erdogan, however, designates all Syrian Kurds as terrorists not because they embrace violence—they do not—but rather because they both reject Turkey’s demands and refuse to subordinate their identity and culture to Erdogan’s more extreme, Muslim Brotherhood-inspired interpretation of Islam.

This conflict came to a head a decade ago when Erdogan supported the Islamic State against Syrian Kurds, believing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s would-be caliphate to be a more desirable alternative on Turkey’s southern border than secular and progressive Kurdish self-rule.

The Syrian Kurds, with U.S. assistance, defeated the Islamic State and today are their jailers in the prison camp at al-Hol. Northeastern Syria has become a haven for freed Yezidi slaves and Christians. In 2018, the Turkish Army and the irregular Syrian militias it supported invaded the largely Kurdish Afrin district in northern Syria and proceeded to ethnically cleanse it, an action met with Western silence.

Today, Turkey’s actions in Afrin appear a dry run as U.S.-supplied Turkish F-16s bomb a region with more than one million Kurds as the Turkish army, if Erdogan is to be believed, prepares to drive 25 miles southward into Syria, essentially driving the Kurds and Yezidis into the same desert in which more than one million Armenians perished more than a century ago.

It is slow-motion genocide, obvious to all observers except for those in the White House and State Department who wring their hands but do nothing to protect an oasis of tolerance and religious pluralism.

Events in northeastern Syria are eerily reminiscent to the September 2023 ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh by Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh was home to one of the world’s oldest continuous Christian communities. In recent centuries, both under Russian and Persian rule, it was autonomous. Even after Joseph Stalin assigned it to Azerbaijan as part of his effort to scramble ethnicities in order to undermine local identities in the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh was technically an autonomous oblast. As the Soviet Union fell, it embraced self-rule and, according to Freedom House, was far more democratic than Azerbaijan, a former Soviet state that today has become one of the world’s most totalitarian dictatorships.

Over 200,000 Kurds flee Aleppo, Syria, following attacks by Turkey-backed Islamic Syrian mercenary militants, December 2024. Photo: AFP

Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev, like Erdogan toward the Kurds, made no secret of his racist and religious disdain of Armenian Christians. Like Erdogan with the Kurds, Aliyev launched an illegal blockade to prevent trade, supply, and free movement. In hindsight, Aliyev’s blockade was meant to soften the population before his final assault. Diplomats and senators warned about Aliyev’s ambitions and the Biden administration assured they would never let him ethnically cleanse the territory.

Yuri Kim, the acting assistant secretary for European Affairs, assured Congress four days before Aliyev’s invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh that “The United States will not countenance any action or effort — short-term or long-term — to ethnically cleanse or commit other atrocities against the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh.” Days later, Azerbaijani forces expelled Christians and ended a millennia-old community, Blinken did nothing.

Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, first withheld assistance to Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians until after their expulsion, and then spent more money on photographers to document her visit to the Armenian Genocide memorial than to assist Armenians warning about impending ethnic cleansing.

Azerbaijan expelled 120,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh and, quite literally, got away with murder. In its aftermath, Adam Schiff—today a senator-elect for California—swore “never again” would Armenians be subject to mass deportation and ethnic cleansing, and yet they were. Power’s frequent “never again” refrain went silent in Armenia. Secretary of State Antony Blinken who often cited the Holocaust experience of his father-in-law to claim moral grounding likewise was silent. Each failed to prevent Azerbaijan’s onslaught when doing so would have been easy.

Today, Sufi Muslims, Yezidis, Christians, Assyrians, Arabs, and Kurds face slaughter in northeastern Syria. The chief difference between them and the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh is that the Syrian Kurdish population is more than an order of magnitude greater. For the Biden administration, however, it does not matter. For Power and Blinken, “Never Again” and “Now” increasingly appear synonymous.

Michael Rubin is a former Pentagon official whose major research areas are the Middle East, Turkey, Iran and diplomacy. He is author of “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes” (Encounter, 2014). He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute AEI. His major research area is the Middle East, with special focus on Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Kurdish society.

The article first published at aei.org

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.