The Civil War in Turkey

By Dr Jan Best de Vries:

In the present civil war in, since 1923, fascist Turkey, a sharp distinction should be made between the continuous attacks upon quite different war aims. On the one hand, subdivisons of the Kurdish PKK exclusively aim their attacks on government buildings and police or military stations and convoys; on the other hand IS directs its attacks indiscriminately upon civilian buses, airports, nightclubs and so on. The PKK fights the Turkish State with its police and military executors as a retaliation for the massive genocide of Kurdish civilians in South-East Anatolia (future Bakur) during 2015 and 2016.

The random attacks of a weakened – at least in West Asia – IS are also a logical reaction, in this case against what it perceives as high treason by Mr Erdogan, who between 2012 and 2016 supported IS as an ally with weapons, food and medical care in its war against the regime of Mr Assad, but who now fights IS in Syria, albeit as a pretext to destroy the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) because most soldiers of this people’s army with the YPG/YPJ and Arabian forces are Kurds, but nevertheless!

When, after the Kurdish victory in Kobani, identity cards with their addresses were found on the corpses of Turkish fallen IS members (many who came from Konya), their bodies were sent back to their parents so that they might bury their sons. In Rojava we also teach the Ilias of Homer in which Achilles, although himself deeply mourning for his best friend Patroclus who had been killed by Hector, gives, with due respect, the body of Hector back to his mourning father Priamus. In Rojava our young students do still believe in Peace. But for Mr Erdogan looms doom. For the Turkish parents who have received their dead children back and the Turkish parents whose young, patriotic sons were misled by their superiors and now are kept in prison under torture, will one day feel solidarity with the Kurdish mothers in Bakur who still mourn for their little children, killed just because they were Kurdish children. Undoubtedly, IS in West Asia will be beaten, but one day, one day the real civil war of both Kurdish and Turkish parents against a fascist regime will come….

Jan Best de Vries – guest teacher at the University of Aleppo (Qamishlo) and the Yekitiya Star Akademiya (Rimelan)