The Daily - The Story of a Kurdish General

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

Turkey has invaded Kurdish-controlled territory in Syria, upending a fragile peace in the region and inciting sectarian bloodshed. The Trump administration has ordered a full evacuation of the 1,000 American troops that remain in northeastern Syria, leaving Mazlum Kobani, the commander of the Kurdish-led militia, and his forces to rely on Russia and Syria for military assistance.Who are the Kurds? How is it that Kurdish fighters came to be seen as allies to the United States and terrorists to Turkey? And what would the fall of Kurdish territory in northeastern Syria mean for the region?Guest: Ben Hubbard, Beirut bureau chief for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background coverage: Turkey’s invasion upended a fragile peace and risks enabling the resurgence of the Islamic State.American troops who fought alongside Kurdish allies have expressed regret after the U.S. abandoned posts in northeastern Syria. “It’s a stain on the American conscience,” one Army officer said.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the Trump administration has ordered a full evacuation of the 1,000 American troops that still remain in northern Syria as Turkey intensifies its bombardment of the Kurdish forces there. How is it that those Kurdish forces came to be seen as allies to the U.S. and terrorists to Turkey? It's Monday, October 14th. Ben, give us a sense of what's going on today, where you are. What are you doing? I'm in Erbil in northern Iraq. I spoke with my colleague, Middle East correspondent Ben Hubbard, on Friday afternoon.

I'm waiting for permission from the Kurdish authorities here to cross the border into Syria so that we can go and cover the Turkish military incursion there. You know, it started the other day with sort of shells flying across the border, a few airstrikes. Today there was a large car bomb in the main city in this area where we usually stay and where we've stayed on our previous trips. It actually happened right down the street from this little fast food restaurant where we used to go and buy sandwiches. Wow.

So that's scary. We all the time see these images from the Middle East of things getting blown up, but when you sort of recognize this place, it brings it home a bit more than just kind of seeing some kind of destruction on the news. How many times have you done this now, gone into Syria? I've done seven trips into Syria since the start of the civil war. My last trip was earlier this year, and that was after Trump had said that he wanted to pull the United States forces. At that time, there were about 2,000 American troops based in northeastern Syria. And we have won against ISIS.

We've beaten them and we've beaten them badly. We've taken back the land. And now it's time for our troops to come back home. The pullout of U.S. troops from Syria has America's allies bracing for more conflict. troops from Syria has America's allies bracing for more conflict. President Trump spoke to Turkey's president on the phone yesterday and warned him not to mistreat members of the Kurdish community who are fighting ISIS alongside the United States. So we wanted to go back and visit and see what this place, you know, what it looked like, how people felt, how they were planning for it. There was a lot of nervousness. People didn't really know how it was going to affect them. And, you know, there was a lot of worry that it would destabilize this part of the country. And there was this one particular

person that I really wanted to meet. His name was Mazloum Kobani. And why did you want to meet him? So Mazloum Kobani is the most powerful person in this northeastern corner of Syria. General Kobani built his army in Syria with farmers, factory workers and students. Members of an ethnic minority known as the Kurds dominate the militia. He is the head of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is an umbrella group of a number of militias. The Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, led by the Kurds, had been the Americans' main allies in the fight against the Islamic State group. And this guy is the head. I mean, he is the guy that, you know, decides what these various militias under his umbrella are going to do

and where they're going to fight and how they're going to deploy. Block by block, house by house, they became the foot soldiers who took the state out of the Islamic State. He's involved in strategy and he's also the go-to guy for the United States. of the Islamic State. He's involved in strategy, and he's also the go-to guy for the United States. A senior U.S. military officer told us much of the credit belongs to this man, SDF leader General Mazloum Kobani.

Mazloum Kobani stands right at the juncture of the United States, of Turkey, of the Kurds, of Syria. This is the guy that's kind of at the center of this whole storm that's just broken out this week. So tell me about the last time that you spent time with him. So I wanted to meet him on our last trip because I wanted to talk to him and ask him, OK, well, you know, you spent this last number of years building up this partnership with the United States. Now the president wants to leave. What how does it affect you? So we put in a message saying that we'd like

to see him and that we were in town and we waited. And then we sort of gave up on waiting, weren't sure when it was going to come through. We actually went off to do something else. And when we were on the road driving in the opposite direction, we got a phone call and said, well, if you want to see him, come now. So we promptly turned the car around and drove out to a base that they have. And they sort of showed us where to park and brought us in and then took us into a little trailer with sort of some seats and carpeting. And I think it had air conditioning and a TV, but nothing super luxurious.

And there he was, sitting there wearing camouflage uniform. He was a fairly modest figure, quite soft-spoken, didn't have sort of the bluster that you get from a lot of powerful military folk. I noticed when I shook his hand that his palm was quite soft, which sort of taught me that he was not somebody who spends a lot of time, you know, holding a Kalashnikov and firing at the enemy, but somebody who was involved in much higher strategic matters.

And I sat across from him, asked him if I could record, set down my recording, and then we began the conversation. Tell me about that conversation. I mean, at that time, it was quite theoretical because Trump had said that he wanted to leave and then a number of people in the administration had sort of talked him down and said, no, this is a bad idea.

And so, you know, his messaging was very much that, you know, we've had a very good relationship with the United States. It was working together with the United States that we were able to get rid of ISIS in Syria. You know, he sort of talked about it as in this partnership was kind of keeping the lid on things. But there was a lot of concern about sleeper cells and about remnants of the Islamic State that were hiding out and just sort of looking for their opportunity to come back. I think he was quite concerned that if the U.S. left, that would be a lot easier for them to do. And Ben, what is it about this man that would cause him to be seen so differently by the Turks than by the Americans? Well, part of it is that the United States history with Mazloum Kobani is very short.

The Turkish history with him is very long. And so we have to sort of go back and look at the much longer history, you know, of who this guy was and what he was involved in before he showed up as a partner, you know, with the Americans a few years ago. So he's Kurdish for one. The Kurds are, you know, one of the largest ethnic groups in the world that does not have its own nation. There are 30 to 45 million of them, mostly in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They were promised their own state by Western powers after World War I, which they never got. And so the current borders of the region were drawn and the Kurds were left in all these different countries. And so most of them have been interested in having some kind of Kurdish independence or an independent Kurdish state since that happened. In Turkey, there was a very strong effort by the state to try to quash Kurdish identity. The Kurds have suffered repression, mainly in education and political representation in the country.

They would ban teaching of Kurdish language in schools and other forms of cultural expression. And in the late 1970s, there was a reaction to this. There were a number of Kurdish activists who got together and founded something called the Kurdistan Workers' Party, also known as the PKK. Although banned, the Kurdish Workers' Party is supported by many thousands of Kurdish villagers, especially the youth.

Most are convinced it's the only way forward. They became a military organization. They were basically an underground guerrilla organization that went to war with the Turkish state. And they would attack Turkish army vehicles, army posts, sometimes Turkish civilians. The Turkish army would respond with raids and attacks on Kurdish villages. And it was just kind of classic insurgency and counterinsurgency.

According to Turkish sources, up to 2008, the conflict between Turkey and the PKK resulted in over 40,000 deaths, including PKK members, the Turkish military, and civilians. And so when Turkey thinks about the Kurdish issue and when they think specifically about the PKK, this is what they think about. So when Turkey calls the Kurdish terrorists, they're referring to Kurds who attempted to stage a kind of uprising within Turkey

to finally get the state that they believed they were owed. Exactly. And the PKK is certainly growing. It now claims 50,000 members fighting for an independent Kurdistan. So in the midst of this insurgency and counterinsurgency that's tearing apart southeastern Turkey, the PKK spreads. You have operatives who leave and set up bases elsewhere in the region. You have Kurds from other countries who sympathize with the movement and join. And this is where Muslim Kobani comes into the picture.

And what does he tell you about his own role in this story? Almost nothing. We don't exactly know what his real name is. I mean, he goes by the name Muslim Kobani, which is a nom de guerre. Muslim isoum is a nickname, and Kobani is the name of his hometown. When I asked him what his real name was, he told me it was Mazloum Abdi. Then if you go and ask the Turks, they tell you that his real name is Farhat Abdi Shaheen. So nobody knows exactly what the guy's real name is. Hmm. But from what you can piece together, how does he fit into this movement that ends up

operating in this part of Syria? So I was very curious about his history. I mean, when you work in the Middle East, you learn that people's histories matter. You know, people don't change affiliations very easy. And when I met Mazloum, he was 52 years old. And I knew that he had studied at Aleppo University and that he had popped up in Syria in his late 40s. And so my question was, well, what did this guy do in the meantime? Where was he? American officials didn't seem very curious about that question. So I talked to other people in the region. I talked to the Turks and I talked to officials in Iraq who told me that, yeah, he had been very active in the PKK. He had joined when he was in university. He'd been an operative primarily based in northern Iraq. I was told as well that he more recently became the head of a special operations unit that oversaw some attacks on Turkish soldiers. So this is how we get to this really fraught moment where the U.S. and Turkey see him so differently because, in fact, he quite possibly is both things. Somebody who was inflicting damage on Turkey and a very reliable ally to the U.S.

Exactly. The Turks, when they look at this guy, they pay attention to what he did in the previous three decades and how he was active in this organization that carried out a lot of violence in Turkey and received a lot of violence from the Turkish state, to be fair, the Americans are not really interested in that. What they see is what he's done since 2014, that he's been this very disciplined military leader who has very organized forces, who do what they're told,

and ended up being very successful partners in the battle against the Islamic State. We'll be right back. So this ends up being this kind of fascinating geopolitical collision where in acting as a militia organization fighting Turkey, this group of Kurds ends up in a spot in Syria where they're perfectly positioned to help the U.S. join this fight against the rising threat of ISIS.

Yeah, there's no way that these guys would have had the organizational skills and the military skills to become valuable allies to the United States if they didn't have all this history fighting the Turks. But what's in it for these Kurds to work with the U.S. against ISIS? Well, it starts because they're in a state of emergency. ISIS is on the move again, taking on Kurdish fighters and extending the borders of what they call their Islamic State. I mean, in 2014, their backs were really to the wall. ISIS was expanding and taking over a tremendous amount of territory. It was terrifying people by beheading people on television. And, you know,

they were besieging some of their towns and they wanted to go in and slaughter all the Kurds because they considered them infidels. Well, the Kurds themselves say they need help because they fear a massacre. In that situation, they find out that the United States also wants to fight against the Islamic State, but they didn't want to put people on the ground. So they needed local partners, and they found this Kurdish militia, and the United States started launching airstrikes. This is really when this partnership was born. You had the guys on the ground telling them where the positions were that needed to be bombed, and they push ISIS back from Kobani. That is the town on the Syrian-Turkish border, just on the Syrian side. ISIL fighters there, as you can see, bombarding the town, shells. Then they start putting in place plans to push ISIS out of other towns.

And as their territory expands, as they push the jihadists back, they sort of look around and say, wow, we have all this territory now and we need to govern it. And so this is when the new project comes along, which is trying to figure out how to put their ideology into place and institute a kind of autonomous rule for local communities in these areas. So Ben, what kind of understanding develops between the U.S. and these Kurds in Syria about how deep this partnership will be, how long it will last, and what kind of protections both are going to provide for each other? Well, it's unclear, which is one of the ways that we got ourselves in the situation that we're in now. I don't think it's ever really spelled out. So basically, these guys start taking over more territory.

They come into Arab areas. They come into Christian areas. These places have their own militias. This is what all comes together to become the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is the umbrella group that we're talking about now. These places have their own militias. This is what all comes together to become the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is the umbrella group that we're talking about now. And there's always been, in my view, a contradiction in U.S. policy where we were very happy to work with these guys militarily. I mean, we trained them so that we didn't have to have Americans on the ground. But there was never any real American recognition

that they also had a political project that they were trying to implement. And this finally came to a head. So it was a bit of an inconvenient truth for the United States. So we just focus on the most recent part of their history. We kind of ignored the part that involved Turkey. I think for the United States, it was very much a marriage of convenience. I mean, when I, after I met Mazloum, I went and I interviewed American military people who knew him and had worked with them. And most of them who were around said, oh yeah, we knew exactly who these guys were. And so I think the U.S. government was aware at the time of the PKK background of these guys, but this is not a group that has huge resonance in the United States. They've never attacked American interests. They've never been active or significantly active in the

United States. So I think for American policymakers who were also in a state of emergency, trying to figure out what do we do about the Islamic State, it seemed like the best way to do it. And it was. I mean, it worked. But there was never any agreement about what happens after the Islamic State is gone. What happens in this territory? Who's in charge? That's been a question that's been hanging over U.S. policies. Okay, what next? Right, and now we know what's next is the U.S. is starting to withdraw and giving Turkey the green light to cross over into Syria and attack these Kurdish troops. Yes.

And Ben, would the U.S. have been able to contain ISIS in this part of the region without Moslem and his troops? It's very hard to imagine a scenario in which we could have done that. It was very clear that even under Obama, there was no way that we were going to send significant numbers of American troops onto the ground here. The legacy of the Iraq war kept everyone out of it. We didn't want to do that. And so it really allowed us to outsource the ground fighting. You know, we had very small numbers of American troops on the ground. We were allowed to keep, you know, American jets in the air and American commanders on protected military

bases. And, you know, these guys did a lot of the ground fighting. They were the ones who were on the front lines going into these cities and being spotters for airstrikes. There's just really no way without a massive American deployment that we could have done this. Ben, I'm curious, was the relationship with the U.S. ultimately part of what made the Kurdish fighters such a threat to Turkey? The fact of that partnership? Absolutely. There's really no way that this group would have ended up in control of as much territory as they now have if they had not had the military backing of the United States. I mean, that really turbocharged what they were able to do and left them in charge of this huge swath of northeastern Syria. And the Turks sitting across the border were horrified by

this. They basically said, you know, here's one of our allies in NATO who's working with this group that has a history of fighting us inside of our own borders. And thanks to their partnership with our NATO friends, they're taking more and more territory and setting up governance. And this is going to be a national security threat. At the same time, I think that the Kurds in Syria were very aware that this was maybe not going to go very well. I mean, Trump was very clear as soon as he came in

that he did not want to keep people here long term. During my last trip, when I actually sat down with Mazloum, he spoke about this. You know, he said our ideal would be for the Americans to stay because we think that what we've done is positive. We think we had a positive partnership. We were able to do good things and that we can continue to stabilize this part of Syria.

But after I left that interview, we drove around elsewhere in the area, and we noticed along the sides of the roads, every, you know, two, three hundred meters, there's a little pile of dirt, and we realized people were digging. And they were digging tunnels because they were scared that, you know, if the Americans left, they were going to be stuck fighting the Turks and being a good old fashioned guerrilla organization. When you do that, you build tunnels so that you can pop out and shoot at people from behind. And so that made it very clear to me that they no longer have faith that the U.S. is going to stay and have their back. And they're coming up with their plan B, which is, you know, they think that they're eventually going to fight the Turks and they're starting to put in place the infrastructure to do

that. Have you had a chance to speak to Moslem in the time since President Trump actually drew down U.S. forces from the Turkey-Syria border and these Turkish forces began this military operation, actually starting to invade this part of Syria. So I was able to reach him on a very poor telephone connection. This was after Trump had acknowledged that the Turks were going in and said that he was going to pull American troops out of the way. But before it had actually started. What did he say about this decision by the U.S.? Does he feel betrayed? about this decision by the U.S.? Does he feel betrayed? He never used that word.

The word that he used was disappointment. He said that this decision was a disappointment for them. Then when I asked him about what was next, he basically said, you know, we're going to resist. If the Turks come in, we're ready for them. We've been at war for seven years, and we can continue the war for another seven years. But without the U.S. as a buffer and a protective force,

what kind of chances do these Kurdish forces have against the Turkish military? I think we have every reason to expect a very bloody battle that could draw on for a very long time. What we're going to see is a NATO country that has a very modern military with jets and tanks and, you know, all sorts of heavy machinery going up against what's basically, you know, a militia that has guns and RPGs and more kinds of light weapons. What they do have is a lot of experience doing insurgency. So I think what we could see is going back to the way that they fought the Turks inside of Turkey. And so we're going to see roadside bombs. We can see, you know, covert attacks that blow up tanks and things like that. But I think that, you know, if the Turks really do keep pushing in, I think it could get very bloody and very violent.

So when you do cross the border, will you try to find Moslem? Will you try to check in with him? I'll definitely try to see him. I'll definitely send a message to his people and say that we're there and that we would like to talk to him and hear what he's thinking and what he's planning for the future. I have no idea if that'll work. He might consider it too risky to meet with us. You know, and I think when he's talked to me in the past, it's because he saw me and he saw the New York Times as a way not just to speak to American policymakers, but also to speak to the American people. The mood has obviously changed. He's seen a decision from Washington that's left his people

and the region that he is trying to protect incredibly vulnerable to a longtime enemy. You know, now we've got bombs going off in cities and shells landing and airstrikes happening. And I think there's probably a sense that the reason this is all happening is because of a decision made in the United States. And he might not feel it necessarily worth his while now to try to send a message to the United States anymore. Well, Ben, stay safe. Good luck in this reporting, and we'll talk to you soon.

Thank you. On Sunday, during an interview with CBS, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, said that he was evacuating the 1,000 American troops that remain in northern Syria for their own protection. So I spoke with the president last night after discussions with the rest of the national security team, and he directed that we begin a deliberate withdrawal of forces from northern Syria. A deliberate withdrawal from the entire country? From northern Syria.

From northern Syria. Which is where most of our forces are. The evacuation will represent a nearly total withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria and the complete abandonment of Kurdish fighters there. In response, the Kurdish fighters announced they had formed a new alliance with the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, a sworn enemy of the U.S. government of Bashar al-Assad, a sworn enemy of the U.S. Amid the U.S. withdrawal, The Times reports that Turkish-backed fighters have brutally executed Kurdish leaders and that Kurdish forces have lost control of a prison holding 700 relatives and supporters of Islamic State fighters,

relatives and supporters of Islamic State fighters, allowing everyone inside to escape. Just in the past few hours online, there have been videos circulating, horrific videos, showing execution of some of these Kurdish allies of ours. There are reports of hundreds of ISIS fighters and family members just running free. It's terrible. It's a terrible situation. We condemn it. We have condemned it.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Times reports that federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into whether the president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, broke lobbying laws in his dealings with Ukraine. The prosecutors are examining Giuliani's efforts to undermine the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was fired by President Trump after two associates of Giuliani waged a campaign to discredit her. Over the weekend, in a show of support for Giuliani, Trump had lunch with him at his golf club in Virginia.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.