For nearly two months, the attacks of the Turkish-backed military groups, all of whom fight under the name of the Syrian National Army, have continued on Syria’s northern town of Ain Issa.
The Syrian opposition coalition includes a Kurdish party, whose only political position regarding the ongoing violations of the Turkish state and its affiliated armed groups has been suspicious silence.
Although these attacks carried out by the opposition groups are taking place under the suspicious Russian-Turkish complicity in the interest of Syria’s president Bashar Assad and his regime, and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood did and still does consider Russia an ally of the Syrian regime, it considers this confrontation and adherence to the Russian-Turkish plan a patriotic stance and in the interest of what they call “the Syrian revolution.”
And here lies the great political paradox resulting from the dependency on the agenda of regional countries which trade in everything – even the blood and pain of millions of Syrians – to serve their national security interests.
The belief now prevailing among most observers is that the Turkish president is racing against time and betting on getting rid of his national security enemy in northern Syria (the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)) and their political project at this stage with a final blow.
Before US President-elect Joe Biden takes power in the United States, Russia will put difficult choices before the SDF that may force them to hand over the area to the Assad regime.
The presence of Assad’s forces on Turkey’s southern borders is far more reassuring to Turkey than the presence of the SDF.
Herein lies the second paradox, which is that the skulls of the Syrian opposition are paving the way for the regime army’s boots to regain control of these areas once again.
This paradox blatantly reveals the degree to which Turkish president and the Syrian political opposition trivializes blood of these people, and the extent of their compliance with the Turkish national security agenda.
The Russians, in turn, abandoned the pledges and guarantees they made to the SDF in October 2019, that the Turkish army and the militias loyal to it would not penetrate deeper than 30 km into their territory. It is known that Ain Issa is about 37 km from the Turkish border.
However, in his last attempt, the Russian president wanted to deepen the division further between the Turkish president and the United States and NATO countries by pushing Turkey to become more involved in the confrontations with SDF. By pushing for these confrontations before the start of the Biden administration, this would rule out Erdogan repairing ties with the US administration, and its remaining ally is dependent on Russia’s agenda in Syria.
The other matter is to achieve more geopolitical hegemony and influence for the benefit of the Syrian regime without engaging in any direct confrontation with the Global Coalition or the US.
The Turkish president, with his opportunistic instinct, appeared very cautious this time, aware of the consequences of direct military involvement in the battle, unlike what we have been familiar with in previous battles when he was flexing his muscles and making threats before each battle.
He seemed like a fearful and apprehensive hyena, watching what was happening on the ground and monitoring international reactions, especially the possible reaction of USA.
Of course, he has not abandoned his previous political agenda nor his goals, except that he wants to achieve them this time through cheap arms, represented by the Syrian opposition groups, without costing him a drop of Turkish blood or political losses.
Syrian blood is free, available, and can be wasted without accountability from the Caucasus to North Africa. As the battlefield is in Syria this time, he does not need funds to encourage the mercenaries to go to battle nor to slogans to justify it, for this latter is the Brotherhood opposition that is set up to manufacture and unleash it voluntarily.
Likewise, he does not want to gamble with any possibility of restoring the relationship with the new US administration, as the troubled Turkish domestic situation at all levels forces him to make a very careful political review of his international relations again.
Undermining the geopolitical basis for the existence of the Kurdish issue has remained the main goal of the Turkish president from the beginning of the Syrian crisis until now, as it is the goal of his current battle in Ain Issa.
To achieve this goal, it had to sweep the demographics and Kurdish presence in north Syria or west Kurdistan under the rug. This goal alone prevents the Kurds from claiming any political status or constitutional representation in the future, as happened in Iraqi Kurdistan after 2003.
Most of the parties that claim to represent the national cause, especially those involved in the frameworks of the Brotherhood opposition, ignored or abandoned the geopolitical basis of the national issue, and thus the concept of the political right of the national group.
This coincided with a deliberate disregard for the geographical and historical connotations of the concept of Kurdish national existence. In the end, this matter completely repudiated the geopolitical concept of the Kurdish people.
Hence, the concept of national identity in the attitudes, practices, and slogans of these people has turned into a metaphysical and anthropological confiscation that misunderstands the reality of the national existence of the Kurds, which lacks any cognitive credibility, whether legal or political. Hence, it is not possible to guarantee any political or constitutional rights through them or to bind any party to them.
The stripping of any identity from its geopolitical dimension makes it a purely cultural concept at best, and makes talking about the Kurds an empty riddle which reduces them to a group without any political features or historical characteristics.
We can understand why national geography and demography were the main victims of the invasions of the Turkish president and the Syrian opposition groups under his command.
Why is all this barbarism that we are witnessing in Afrin and Sere Kaniye (Ras al-Ain) represented by demographic change and forced displacement policies? Why was Erdogan keen from the beginning to dilute the independent political character of the Kurdish issue by drawing Kurdish parties to the framework and agenda of the opposition?
So far, he has succeeded in transforming the geopolitical basis of the Kurdish and demographic issue into a distorted and deviant archipelago, with which it is impossible to demand any rights or political representation equivalent to the national cause of the Kurdish people.