The role of the Kurds in the upended Middle East
With war resuming in Iran, let us look together at the clues now surfacing about the Kurds’ changing role in the Middle East.
My colleague and friend Ruşen Çakır, founder and editor-in-chief of Medyascope, one of the few outlets left in Turkey still doing independent journalism, travelled last week to Qandil, the mountain stronghold in northern Iraq that serves as the headquarters of the PKK, the armed wing of the Kurdish movement in Turkey. There he interviewed Duran Kalkan, one of the organisation’s blunt-spoken and sometimes hardline leaders.
The interview landed just as the New York Times was revealing Mossad’s plan for Iran. As I wrote last week, according to that report Mossad had a plan to install Ahmadinejad, Iran’s former president and one of the most anti-Israel and antisemitic figures the Islamic Republic has produced, back in power. For that plan to work, the regime would first have to fall, or more precisely become ungovernable, through an uprising by a population already known to be furious with it. The plan counted on anti-regime Kurdish militias based in northern Iraq to back that popular uprising, giving it armed support on the ground.
We had already picked up the shape of this plan from what Trump said at the start of the war on Iran. Early on, his language suggested he would welcome the Kurds entering the fight. Within a day or two he reversed course, saying instead that the US had given the Kurds weapons and they had disappointed Washington, and that they should stay out of a war that was already complicated enough. I wrote at the time that this sudden change of language within a day or two carried Turkey’s pressure behind it.
Two days ago, Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi gave a long and significant interview to the programme of Javad Mogooyi, an Iranian social media content creator and documentary maker. On this exact question, he said:
“They [US-Israel] had made plans to divide Iran. On the fourth day of the war, Trump called several leaders in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. That same evening, I called Mr Barzani [Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Democratic Party], Mr Talabani [Bafel Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan], and Turkey’s foreign minister, Mr Fidan. I also spoke with Iraq’s prime minister, Mr Sudani. I gave them this warning: if the smallest threat against us comes from the Kurdistan region, we will retaliate, and they should not think we are too preoccupied elsewhere to respond. Turkey played a highly effective role throughout this process. They held talks with the Americans and took a very firm position on this matter. These collective efforts are what ensured the plot to divide Iran and stir up internal chaos failed.”
Strongest stateless entity
Israel is trying to reshape the Middle East, and Turkey has become its main counterweight, through its hold over Syria, now run by a former jihadist close to Ankara, and through the leverage it wields on numerous fronts by combining military power with diplomatic reach and a readiness to mediate conflicts. All of this is unfolding as Iran’s regime comes once again under heavy US-Israeli bombardment.
As I have long argued, the Kurds are the strongest entity in this order, despite having no state of their own, and sometimes precisely because they have none. Every power trying to remake the region, Israel, Turkey, Iran, and the US among them, needs the Kurds to do it, because Kurdish populations and armed organisations sit astride the exact fault lines these powers are fighting over, in Iraq, in Syria, in Iran, and in Turkey itself, giving the Kurds leverage no other stateless group in the Middle East can claim. The PKK, the oldest and strongest organisation built on Kurdish ideology and founded in Turkey, has spent close to two years now in talks with the Turkish state, built essentially on mutual concessions and transactions. Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK’s founder and leader, imprisoned on the island of İmralı since 1999, is steering that negotiation, and at his instruction the organisation has voted to dissolve itself after forty years of armed struggle.
Meanwhile Rojava, the autonomous administration the PKK’s organic sibling in Syria, the YPG, had built in the Kurdish-majority northeast with American military backing, was lost in the friction that followed Syria’s new leadership. But the YPG’s commanders were folded, in one way or another, into the Syrian state’s military and administrative structure, in roles I would call symbolic and others would call genuinely significant. I do not think the symbolic appointments are unimportant either. Mazlum Abdi, the YPG’s commander, keeps meeting all the while with various European politicians and diplomats. He has taken no formal place inside the Syrian state, and I suspect that is the point. By running this separate diplomatic track, he is working to give the Kurds’ distinct position an international legitimacy of its own.
To understand how all of this is being read in Qandil, it is worth turning to Çakır’s interview with Duran Kalkan.
Israel and the Kurds
Kalkan argues that the nation-state order built a hundred years ago has collapsed, and that a new hegemonic order is rising in its place, led by Israel and backed by the United States. The Arab states, he says, have found their spot in this new order through the Abraham Accords, the normalisation agreements Israel signed with several Arab governments from 2020 onward. But actors like Turkey and Israel remain locked in a relationship that runs on negotiation and confrontation at once. Turkey’s relationship with Israel, he says, runs 24 hours a day, without a break, talks one moment, clashes the next. “We see this. They are constantly aware of each other,” referring to Israel and Turkey.
This shift in the regional order, he stresses, has exposed the potential of the Kurds, the most suppressed dynamic in the Middle East, and every power seeking a role in the region now wants an alliance with them, Israel, Iran, and Turkey included. But he repeats that the Kurdish movement’s strategy is not to lean on outside powers, and that its real goal remains a democratic partnership with the region’s own peoples, Turks, Arabs, and Persians. The relationship built with the United States in Rojava, he says, was tactical, not strategic, and mistaking one for the other is what caused the real damage.
The Kurdish movement, he argues, has no interest in becoming a tool in foreign powers’ games. The only real guarantee of Kurdish existence and freedom runs through a democratic Turkey and a democratic Middle East. The goal is a region where relations run on democratic politics, not war and conflict
“Israel is very powerful right now. It has the US and Europe behind it. It is reshaping the entire Middle East. It has an interest in everyone. To do this, yes, it needs cooperation with certain forces. It needs various forces inside Iran too. Among the Kurds there are naturally those who are close to it. There are those who have had this relationship for a long time. Everyone knows this. Turkey knows it too. Turkey, for instance, is now in its most advanced alliance with exactly the Kurds who have the closest relationship with Israel.”
Kalkan does not name the group here, but the reference is almost certainly to the Barzani family’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which has governed the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq for decades. The KDP’s ties to Israel date back to the 1960s, when Mossad began arming and training Mustafa Barzani’s Peshmerga forces against Baghdad, and Massoud Barzani has spoken openly since the 2000s about the value of relations with Israel. Turkey, despite three decades of fighting the PKK, has cultivated the KDP as its main Kurdish partner in Iraq precisely because Erbil’s rivalry with the PKK serves Ankara’s own interests. That is what Kalkan is referring here.
US and the Kurds
Kalkan’s comments on Rojava are striking too, and it’s clear he doesn’t endorse the steps taken, or the vision followed, by the Kurdish-led administration in Syria. I also get the impression he doesn’t much like Mazlum Abdi. He doesn’t say his name once, but the tone he takes whenever he gets close to the subject is patronising. Kalkan doesn’t speak for the whole of the PKK’s senior leadership, but a significant current within the organisation shares his read on where Rojava has ended up.”In my view, the alliances in Rojava with the Americans were not short. If anything, they went on too long, they could have ended earlier. They were tactical relationships, tactical alliances. Those who failed to understand this made mistakes and paid for them. Where Rojava suffered real damage, that damage came from misreading this relationship and this alliance.”
“It[the loss of Rojava] came from misunderstanding it. They[YPG/SDF] were not prepared. They did not trust their own strength. Or they did not build up their own strength. This is the result. In my view it could have been prevented. This outcome was avoidable. In 2019, during Trump’s first term, the US announced its decision to withdraw from Syria. There was a kind of panic in Rojava. I wrote to them then, don’t be afraid, the withdrawal will not happen yet. But it was going to happen eventually. That was unavoidable.”
Kalkan’s framing here really works for his purposes. By calling the American relationship “tactical” ex post facto, he can credit the PKK’s own caution, and by extension its refusal to build the kind of formal, negotiated autonomy the PYD pursued in Rojava, while laying the blame for what Rojava lost on the YPG’s own misjudgement rather than on Washington’s unreliability as a partner. He argues in a way that he and a few others in the PKK’s higher echelons read Washington correctly the whole time. Whether that reading looks as prescient without the benefit of hindsight is a separate question. I have my doubts.
What’s next for the militants
Following Öcalan’s call, Kalkan explains, the decision has been taken to end the armed struggle and dissolve the organisation, but carrying it out depends on the right legal and political conditions being created first. The members won’t simply vanish, he says. They’ll go through a process of change and transformation instead, one he calls “democratic integration,” a term meant to convey something well beyond individuals filing back into society one by one. What he has in mind is a collective transformation, different units coming to recognise each other and build a new kind of partnership, one that includes the right to organise, to hold a political identity, and to do legal politics. Öcalan, he says, has told the cadres still in the mountains they need to be trained and prepared, in effect rehabilitated, for this transition. And if these rights aren’t recognised, Kalkan adds, all that awaits them under the current legal framework is prison, while the politicians now in exile in Europe would be among the first to come home if the process goes well.
Going forward, Kalkan says, there will be no return to war as it was. As long as current conditions hold, or unless a new party congress decides otherwise, the PKK won’t act as an armed force against Turkey. But… There is a but…
The strategy of armed struggle won’t come back onto the table as long as the path to democratic politics stays open, he says, though if policies of Kurdish identity’s denial continue, he can’t guarantee anything about the future. This is also, obliquely, a jab at what worries Turkey, or more precisely what worries Devlet Bahçeli, the MHP leader who has taken on an unusually central role in this process and has been pressing Erdoğan to pass legislation and bring it to completion, in part to head off exactly this risk.
What Kalkan is really saying is that the PKK dissolved itself strategically, by its own choice, but that it still has plenty of young cadres in its ranks, and if they’re offered no political platform and told instead to come down from the mountains straight into prison, a new armed organisation could form. That stalled conflict resolution processes tend to spawn more radical splinter groups, fighters convinced the main organisation sold out the cause, is nothing new. But by saying it out loud, Kalkan has issued a pointed warning to whoever needs to hear it.
How much instrumentalization is too much
Look across all three fronts, Iran, Rojava, and Turkey itself, and the same pattern holds. Israel wanted the Kurdish militias in northern Iraq to help topple the regime in Tehran. Washington wanted the YPG’s fighters in Rojava as long as they were useful against ISIS, and made clear it would leave the moment they weren’t. Ankara wants the PKK to lay down its weapons and disappear quietly into Turkish politics, on terms Turkey alone gets to set. In every case, a foreign power looked at the Kurds and saw an instrument, and in every case a different part of the Kurdish movement had to decide how much of that instrumentalisation to accept and how much to resist.
What Kalkan’s interview shows, more than anything else, is how conscious the PKK’s own leadership is of this pattern, and how determined it is to describe its own choices, the alliance with Washington in Rojava, the negotiation with Ankara now, as tactical decisions made by Kurds rather than as favours handed down by patrons.
The Kurds’ current role in this new order is not really theirs alone to define. It depends on whether Erdoğan treats the PKK’s dissolution as an opening rather than a defeat to be managed, and on whether Israel and Iran ever stop treating northern Iraq and Rojava as terrain to be fought over and start treating them as places where people actually live.
The Kurds did not choose to become the region’s most useful stateless actor. They became it because every neighbouring power needed something from them, and that dependency is now the closest thing the Kurds have to leverage. Whether it is enough is the open question the whole region is about to answer.
Interesting. These are all older settlements with centuries of shared cultures, traditions, people and histories.
How the newer powers try to penetrate these folds will surely be a sight to observe.