War in the Age of Trump by Patrick Cockburn

Author:Patrick Cockburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

PART V. THE SIEGE OF RAQQA

The Syrian conflict is in practice a tangle of separate, though interrelated, conflicts in different parts of the country, each with their own separate set of players and rules of the game. Foreign powers like Russia, Turkey, Iran, and the US have their own zones of influence and their own interests, which invariably take precedence over those of the Syrian people. The nature of the conflict in north-east Syria, in which Kurds, Americans, Turks, and—before its defeat—Isis, are the main players, has until recently differed radically from that in the north-west where Russia, the Assad government, Turkey, and armed opposition in the Idlib enclave are the most important forces. But the Turkish invasion on 9 October, swiftly followed by the advance of Russian and Syrian troops and the on/off US withdrawal made a complex situation even more complicated.

Access to either government-held territory or Rojava was never easy. The government could arbitrarily deny one an entry visa: I spent tedious weeks in Beirut waiting for visas that never came because I had reported, illegally in the eyes of the government, from the Kurdish-held zone. At another moment in 2016, I drove to the crossing point into Rojava on the Tigris, where the Kurdistan Regional Government territory in Iraq abuts the Syrian Kurdish statelet, only to find that the promised permission to cross the river had not arrived.

To visit Rojava, I would fly to the Iraqi Kurdish capital Erbil and seek a permit to cross into Syrian Kurdish territory. The process was complicated by the fact that the two Kurdish administrations detested each other, making the move from one to the other tricky and unpredictable. I had influential friends among the Kurdish leaders in Erbil and could usually obtain a permit after persistent effort. Once at the river, I would, if all was well, walk down a slipway into a metal motorboat to make the short river crossing, though I could see a perfectly good pontoon bridge 300 yards downriver. I never discovered why pedestrians like myself were not allowed to use it, but it presumably had something to do with intra-Kurdish feuds.

Once on the western bank of the Tigris, I would wait to see if the Syrian Kurdish authorities had told their local officials to let me pass and, almost equally important, had sent an essential scrap of paper telling their checkpoints to let me through. Without this, I would have had to join the enormous queues of traffic at the entrance to every Kurdish-held town and village. If all was in order, I drove two hours to the Kurdish capital Qamishli or an attractive town called Amida twenty miles further west. Everything appeared so calm and well ordered that it was easy to forget that the Turkish frontier was less than a mile away and the Turks were always saying that they were about to launch an invasion. This was not an idle threat as Turkish incursions culminated in the over-running and ethnic cleansing of the Kurdish canton of Afrin in 2018.

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