From time to time, Turkish officials issue statements calling for the acceleration of the implementation of the March 10 agreement signed between the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Damascus authorities. In the Turkish official imagination, acceleration and implementation mean stripping the SDF of its institutional and national character, subsequently integrating its members as individuals into the Syrian “Arab” Army. Naturally, this Turkish vision implies one thing: the dissolution of the SDF rather than its “integration,” according to the clear meanings the word integration carries. Perhaps this Turkish demand has been bypassed by both the SDF and Damascus, which agreed in early October on preliminary outlines for integration with American blessing. The essence of these outlines is the transformation of the SDF into a set of military divisions and brigades in a manner that strengthens the fragile structure of the Ministry of Defense—a structure that has aroused Washington’s suspicion following the major breach within its security sector revealed by the Palmyra attack and the killing of American soldiers.
In the past few days, Turkish Defense Minister Yaşar Güler emerged to complete the mission of Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, waving options and scenarios understood as an attempt to pressure the SDF by keeping the military option on the table. Perhaps the opening of confrontations by factions loyal to the Damascus authorities in Sheikh Maqsoud on Monday evening is a reflection of Turkish pressure tools in one respect. Despite this, the intensity of Turkish anger seems contrived and of little impact, given the winding and difficult path Turkey has been navigating since last February, with the announcement by PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan of the end of the armed struggle and the move toward a political option instead of the cycle of repetitive armed conflict. Consequently, what is happening internally represents a breaking of the cycle of armed conflict in favor of democratic, civil, and popular struggle. Since then, Turkey has been witnessing an active peace process that it occasionally masks with other names. Although the conditions for a “difficult peace” require a degree of self-restraint to prevent peace efforts from relapsing, Turkey finds in these statements a vent to absorb the congestion of fascist and chauvinistic trends that reject settlement and the correction of the dialectical relationship between Kurds and Turks.
Within this atmosphere charged with mutual apprehension, Defense Minister Yaşar Güler made hyperbolic press statements regarding the SDF over the past few days, demanding it join the Syrian army as individuals and accelerate the integration process, despite the absence of established or clearly defined security and military institutions in Syria. Güler’s call implies, in one sense, that the SDF—and behind it the regions of northeastern Syria—would move at an accelerated pace toward the abyss, chaos, and a renewal of civil war. This is especially true since the principle he proposed in the press conference, “one state and one army,” does not apply to a fractured country torn apart by factions that have not yet transformed into an army. This means the priority should be focused on the formation of “one state” according to a new contract, in which the issue of building a national army—supra-factional and supra-sectarian—occupies the highest priority.
On the surface, the Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs appear reserved regarding the Syrian peace path, displaying much extremism, rhetorical provocation, and an effort to disrupt the March agreement and stir fears of potential repercussions on the internal Turkish peace process. The military establishment “rolling up its sleeves” takes us back to recent Turkish history, specifically the period between 2007 and 2008, when the Ministry of Defense endeavored to crush every hope of reaching a free and honorable negotiation with the PKK, moving toward testing the war option with excessive confidence. At the time, it seemed that the duo of Prime Minister Erdoğan and President Abdullah Gül were less inclined toward costly military options, anticipating the possibility that the generals would fail to achieve the miracle of delivering a final defeat to the PKK. The generals sacrificed their status as troublemakers for Turkish governments and suffered a major defeat in the Zap region of southern Kurdistan. It was perhaps this defeat that changed the weight of the ideological military institution within the state structure; thus, that war adjusted the internal balance of power, as the camp of those rejecting the peace process through negotiation was forced to surrender to the fact that the issue could no longer remain purely security and military and could be managed through politics and negotiation via networks of Kurdish and Western mediators.
At that time, Defense Minister Yaşar Büyükanit seemed eager for war, but what happened contradicted all optimism for progress on the military track. Following the defeat, and about a month later, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani traveled to Ankara and met with Erdoğan, Gül, and Intelligence Chief Emre Taner. After the official meeting ended, Erdoğan and Gül remained alone with him. After closing the door, they asked him: “What happened in Zap? What is the status of the PKK?” Talabani explained the field situation to them, but after returning to Sulaymaniyah, he commented: “What I saw was this: the defeat of the Turkish army in Zap made Gül and Erdoğan happy. Their eyes were laughing!” By relying on the testimony of the late Iraqi President, one can infer a picture of the sharp and chronic divisions within Turkish institutions regarding the position on the peace file, where the defeat of one trend within the state meant the victory of another. What occurred was not a game of “role-swapping” but rather a competition over who holds the decision-making power. Is Turkey currently witnessing a division regarding its handling of the SDF file, or is the matter entirely a game of role-swapping?
From a cautious point of view, the harsh Turkish statements toward the SDF can be interpreted as signals of two possibilities: First, a rift and fracture within the house of power, similar to what occurred in 1993, 2005, 2007-2008, and 2013-2014, which ended in the defeat of the moderate trend in the state and government in favor of “experimentalist” forces that believed a defeat of Kurdish fighters was possible—political delusions that drew strength from the regional and international circumstances. The second possibility is that the mix of hardline statements and others pushing for an understanding with the SDF comes in the context of a role-swapping game to push the SDF toward making greater concessions. In both cases, however, there is a common denominator indicating a defect within both the “deep” and “visible” states, stemming from a desire for “experimentation” and a failure to consider peace between Turkey and the Kurdish world as a strategic issue through which Turkey transitions to the era of a “Second Republic” based on equality and recognition.
Ultimately, Turkish threats to resort to “other scenarios” in dealing with the SDF—an allusion to the military option—seem unconvincing given the positioning and rotation of Syrian policy around the American decision. Thus, they appear to be a means of re-engineering the March agreement according to a Turkish nationalist vision that no longer concerns the United States or regional countries. Meanwhile, Washington emphasizes proceeding with the implementation of the agreement, indifferent to Turkish perceptions of the integration mechanism. This is because the path to stability in Syria, from the American perspective, passes through the positioning of the SDF at the heart of the Syrian defense system, as the SDF still constitutes the solid lever in the path of fighting ISIS—as revealed by the Palmyra attack, which was disconcerting to anyone who imagined that the era of reliance on the SDF was nearing its end.
It has become self-evident to say that any reckless Turkish military decision would not only anger Washington but would mean the destruction of the entire Kurdish-Turkish peace process. Most likely, Turkish threats come according to a preemptive Turkish perception based on the idea that the advancement of the resolution of the Kurdish issue in Syria will inevitably spill back into Turkey. For this reason, Ankara is trying to mitigate the results of “just solutions” to this issue in Syria, so that the “contagion” of those just solutions does not transmit to its own territory.
