Kurds in Northern Syria Strike Major Blow Against Islamic State

The Kurdish People's Protection Units (Yekineyen Parastina Gel-YPG) militia struck an important blow against the Islamic State militant organization on June 15 by capturing the strategically important town of Tal Abyad, a key border crossing between Syria and Turkey (Rudaw, June 16). The town (known as Gire Spi in Kurdish) was the nearest border crossing to the Islamic State-held Raqqa, the militant group's de facto Syrian capital, and was a key transit point for the Islamic State's weapons, money and recruits. The Islamic State's loss of the town, which it captured from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in 2014, means that the Islamic State's main overland link with Turkey is now located much further to the west, along roads highly vulnerable to U.S. airstrikes. The Kurds' capture of the town is therefore likely to create important logistical challenges for the Islamic State, as well as to increase the group's vulnerability to further attack by hampering their lines of communications. Saleh Moslem, the co-president of the YPG's political wing, the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat-PYD), said the Islamic State's "lifeblood had been cut" by the Kurdish victory (ANF News, June 17).

For the YPG, and its Turkish Kurdish sister organization the Kurdish Workers' Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê-PKK), the town's capture is also of intense strategic importance as it allows the group to link their western enclave of Kobane with their main territories located in the northeast of Syria, as well as further retrenching their current gains. Murat Karayılan, the acting leader of the PKK, said: the town's capture was "important for Rojava [Syrian] Kurdistan not only because it finally united the two cantons but also because it reaffirmed the liberation of Kobane. Kobanê is no longer under siege and will not be attacked easily" (ANF News, June 17). In response, Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government, which has often been inclined to regard the YPG as a potential rival, meanwhile issued a somewhat stilted statement saying that "we highly appreciate the role of other forces along with YPG who cleared the town of ISIS [the previous name of the Islamic State]" (Hawler Times [Erbil], June 17). The YPG, meanwhile, said that it was continuing to attack Islamic State forces in rural areas near the town (ANF News, June 20).

Two important elements of the YPG victory are the group's close coordination with the United States, which supported it with airstrikes, and its increased cooperation with non-Kurdish groups, such as the mainly Arab and largely secular FSA. It is also attempting to build such coalitions elsewhere. For instance, a YPG commander in the group's eastern Jazeera canton said earlier in June that it was working with a range of smaller Arab groups, including the Tahrir Brigade, Revolutionaries of Raqqa, Sanadid Brigade, Syriac Military Council and local Arab tribal forces (ARA News, June 13). The long-term durability of such alliances will depend heavily on how the YPG/PYD manages its newly captured territories. The PYD's Saleh Muslim said that "a civil administration will be formed in which all the social components will be fairly represented," a reference to Tal Abyad's complex religious and ethnic mix, which includes not only Kurds but also large numbers of Muslim and Christian Arabs (ARA News, June 18). Significantly, days later on June 25, the Islamic State killed dozens in a substantial attack on Kobane, reportedly after infiltrating the town while disguised as FSA fighters. The attack is likely intended to divert Kurds from moving further towards Raqqa and to sow fresh distrust between local Kurds and Arabs (ARA News, June 26).

The YPG's capture of the town from the Islamic State also triggered a flood of partisan criticism and thinly-disguised propaganda. From Syria, a group of 12 mainly hardline and predominantly Arab Islamist rebel groups, including Ahrar al-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam, issued a joint statement accusing the YPG forces of implementing "a new sectarian and ethnic cleansing campaign against Sunni Arabs and Turkmen under the cover of coalition airstrikes which have contributed bombardment, terrorising civilians and forcing them to flee their villages" (al-Araby al-Jadeed, June 15). Meanwhile, Harun Yahya, an influential Turkish Islamic televangelist, published a near-hysterical polemic warning that "an attack on the region being carried out by the YPG... [and] coalition planes horrifyingly dropped bombs on the local residents of Tal Abyad," and also that "a communist state is being built on the Turkish border with U.S. help, and that communist state intends to spread violence across the world" (Arab News [Jeddah], June 20). Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based and funded channel, meanwhile gave heavy coverage to an alleged exodus of Arabs from Tal Abyad, likely reflecting the pan-Arabist and pro-Islamist sympathies of its owners (al-Jazeera, June 19). This flood of verbal attacks suggests the difficulties that the Syrian Kurds and the YPG, in particular, will face as they seek to secure their recent gains, even though their recent victory has underlined that they remain the only non-Islamist rebel force capable of effectively opposing the Islamic State in Syria. One effect of this campaign is that the group continues to maintain relations with the Syrian government, one of the few regional powers that has not verbally or physically attacked it; for instance, on June 15, the day before the capture of Tal Abyad, the Syrian prime minister, Wael al-Halaqi, made an unprecedented and apparently cordial visit to the YPG-controlled cities of Qamishli and al-Hasakah (Rudaw, June 15). This underlines that the YPG remains far more concerned with liberating Kurdish territories from the Islamic State and establishing some form of self-rule than with the broader dynamics of the Syrian civil war. Indeed, with each fresh victory such as Tel Abyad, the PYD brings an increasing proportion of Kurdish-inhabited territory under its control leaving less under the control of the Islamic State, a trend which, if continued, is likely to mean the more successful the group is against the Islamic State the more it is likely to progressively withdraw from the fight against the group to focus on its own internal state-building.

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