Ilham Ahmed: Washington suggested not to negotiate with Syrian government, but we won’t wait for any suggestions

Following Washington’s decision to send 500 troops to Syria to continue fighting the Islamic State group (ISIS) and to protect oil, Foreign Policy magazine interviewed Ilham Ahmed, the chief executive of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), under the title “Trump wants U.S. troops in Syria to protect oil, but the Kurds may not welcome them”. 

“We hear an intention for U.S. troops to stay, but we don’t know how they will do it. What we want is to lead our lives and protect our human dignity”, Ms. Ahmed said in an interview with Foreign Policy.  

She explained that, “the U.S. has always tried to urge the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) not to communicate with the Syrian government, because this step may cause the withdrawal of the United States from the region, but the SDF has now begun to search for other options, and it won’t wait for any suggestions or recommendations from any other country”.  

“There is a campaign of ethnic cleansing against our people, not only against the Kurds, but also against the major demographic components of northeastern Syria. The targeted region by Turkey isn’t just the Kurdish one, but there is a majority in that region, such as the Syriacs and the Arabs, who cannot return to their houses. So, there is an urgent need to stop this Turkish project and its consequences”, she added.   

Answering a question whether she trusts Russia, Ilham Ahmed said: “We trusted the U.S., and unfortunately they opened the airspace for Turkey. Also, we can’t necessarily trust Russia when it comes to that, because this has happened in Afrin”. 

She added, “The staying of the U.S. forces carries the pros and cons, where it will complicate the matters, but it may carry some positive aspects at the same time, where we need some assurances from the United States: The foremost contribution is the political solution in Syria, and not to leave the political solution in the hands of the Assad government only. We also want to participate in the political process which we have been excluded from, and which is one of our most important terms”.   

Concerning the relationship of the SDF with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Ilham Ahmed said that, “We don’t have organizational relations with the PKK, and we don’t receive orders from them, but we must ask ourselves why the PKK was founded in the first place, and why it was classified as a terrorist party: Because it fights inside Turkey to defend the Kurdish people, and because Turkey is a NATO member, they have classified the PKK as a terrorist party, while the PKK has never targeted the interests of the U.S., or any other NATO country, its problem is only with Turkey.”

Ilham Ahmed, the chief executive of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) concluded by responding to Trump’s claim that people of the region want to fight eternal wars, saying: “It is not the people, but the totalitarian governments in the region which are fighting, they aren’t wars of peoples against peoples, but they are conflicts of a government against the people, and if Turkey didn’t intervene, we could live together as Arabs, Kurds and Syriacs peacefully, and this is what happened in northeastern Syria for eight years, we were living together, the Kurds, the Arabs and the Syriacs, as we were the most successful region inside Syria”.