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Porter Goodman is a veteran of the U.S. Army and of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria.

The outdated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is actually the subtle but critical error underpinning the current crisis in Northern Syria. I offer two primary reasons for PKK delistment: 

1. A closer look at how the PKK has evolved since the 90’s will reveal that many of the original conditions of its FTO designation no longer apply. While the PKK remains a combative organization worthy of criticism, one would have to draw a very wavy line in order to define terrorism in a way that applies to the PKK of the last decade without also applying to the French Resistance of WWII or possibly even the armies and militias of the American Revolution.
   
2. The United State’s FTO designation of the PKK is a key component of the anti-terrorism narrative the Turkish Government is using to silence dissent, crush political opposition, erode the foundations of Turkish democracy, attack Kurdish forces friendly to the west, seize territory, and generally pull Turkey down a path where it will eventually either leave NATO, or be expelled from it.

Stated another way, the PKK’s FTO designation isn’t merely an unjust obstacle to peace. It is also detrimental to U.S. interests, as it is facilitating the eventual loss of both Turkey and the Syrian Kurds as democratic allies of the United States. 

This paper will provide some background and context on Turkey and the PKK, and the Syrian Kurds, in order to shed light on the aforementioned  issues.

Turkey 

21 March 2013, the (PKK), under the direction of their imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, called a unilateral cease-fire with Turkish State forces, and announced an end to armed conflict in Turkey. 

Ocalan’s words were read to a crowd of over a million Kurds gathered in Newroz Park in Diyarbakir, Turkey. His words spoke of silencing weapons and letting ideas speak, and of Kurds moving away from armed resistance into an era of democratic political struggle. PKK forces started to withdraw from Turkey as negotiations began a transition to peace. 

This new peace came after a decade of drastic reformation on the part of the PKK in which it ceased targeting civilians, committed to the Geneva Convention, rescinded its goals of establishing an independent state, and abandoned Marxist ideology in favor of Democratic Confederalism. The transformation of the PKK since the 90’s is reflected in the writings of Michael Rubin, a resident scholar for the American Enterprise Institute. Rubin was sharply critical of the PKK, urging greater support for Turkey in their fight against terrorism and criticizing the United States for failing to take more direct action against the PKK as late as 2004 and 2007. But since 2012, Rubin has regularly called for the PKK’s FTO designation to be re-evaluated, arguing that conditions change, ideologies change, and our foreign policy should adapt to those changes. 

The 2013 peace talks should have brought an end to Turkey’s domestic conflict, but today, in 2019, the conflict between Turkey and the Kurds is raging, even spilling over into Northeast Syria and threatening a possible resurgence of ISIS. What happened? 

Election day happened. 

On 7 June 2015, Erdogan’s ruling AKP party lost its absolute majority in parliament, while the pro-Kurdish HDP party saw massive gains in parliamentary seats. The HDP proved to be the primary beneficiary of the peace process. Peace would not serve the political agenda of the AKP after all. Soon afterward, the AKP terminated peace talks and launched new operations against PKK camps in Turkey and Northern Iraq, igniting a whole new vicious war. In hindsight, the United States missed a small window of opportunity to delist the PKK at a time when it might have reinforced the peace process in Turkey. 

Reflecting on Turkey’s new domestic conflict in a 2016 report, UK Parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee stated, “The Turkish Government’s motive for resuming military repression appears to have been electoral… …Distressingly, this disgraceful policy, delivered at the reported cost of at least 3,000 dead in the reignited insurgency, worked, with the AKP recovering its majority at the November 2015 election…”   

The Turkish Government is using domestic conflict for political gain, and they are using the U.S. FTO designation of the PKK to legitimize their domestic conflict. 

Fighting soon intensified inside Kurdish cities across Southeast Turkey. I personally witnessed the slow destruction of Nusaybin in the spring of 2016 from the safety of Qamisli, just across the Syrian border. I would listen to the bombs and gunfire all day, find nothing about it in the news, and wonder how a NATO military could decimate its own cities without the world noticing. But of course, Turkey greatly restricts freedom of the press and the Turkish government was not cooperating with UN efforts to send international observers. The most influential individuals and organizations could not independently verify what was happening. A UN OHCHR report was able to document widespread destruction of Kurdish cities based on satellite imaging the following year. 

I was fighting alongside the Kurdish YPG to liberate the ISIS stronghold of Manbij, Syria when I was injured by an IED on 14 July 2016. The next day there was a failed coup attempt in Ankara. I watched from a hospital bed in Baghdad as Erdogan and his ruling party used the coup to declare a state of emergency which enabled them to purge the government and military of political opposition. Over 100,000 public employees were detained, dismissed, or suspended. Arrests and disappearances spiked. Media outlets critical of the government were forcibly closed down and many of their journalists were charged with spreading terrorist propaganda. 

Although the coup attempt wasn’t exactly blamed on the Kurds or the PKK, emergency powers enabled the Turkish government to increase pressure on Kurdish political opposition. Eleven Kurdish members of parliament ended up in prison. Sixty-nine elected mayors were arrested on terrorism charges or simply dismissed and all were replaced with administrators appointed by Erdogan’s ruling party. To those Kurds who had hoped to seek redress through the democratic process, the message was clear: there would be no redress. They could submit to oppression, or they could face the wrath of the Turkish State. 

Ironically, those Kurds who felt compelled to resist Erdogan’s oppression may have also served his agenda. Erdogan and his ruling party aimed to transform the Turkish government into a system which concentrated power into the hands of the President. Necessary voter support for such a transformation would be impossible unless the people believed that Turkey faced existential threats. Territory defended by the Kurdish YPG along the Turkish border in Northern Syria is cast as an existential threat by Turkish media and government officials despite a lack of supporting evidence. Sustained oppression of the Kurds in Turkey’s Southeast fuels the PKK conflict enough for Turkish media to substantiate an internal threat. 

With ever tightening control over Turkey’s media, Erdogan’s anti-terrorism narrative becomes easier to spin. Any time a Turkish soldier returns from the fighting in a flag draped coffin, Erdogan can attend the funeral, cameras arrayed, pound his fists on the podium, point at the coffin, and petition the people to give him the expanded executive powers he needs to destroy the PKK once and for all. 

In 2017, Erdogan’s ruling party achieved the first of their ambitious goals by narrowly passing a referendum to abolish the position of prime minister, reduce the power of parliament, and grant the presidency unprecedented executive powers. In 2018 those changes took effect as Erdogan was re-elected President. Pending goals include steps to incrementally restore the Ottoman Empire. Turkish defense officials are already displaying maps of Turkey with borders modified to include territory currently inside Bulgaria, Greece, Syria, Iraq, and Azerbaijan. And the presence of Kurds in Syria is already being used to justify invasion and occupation of Northern Syria. 

The U.S. Department of State published an eye-opening 2018 report on human rights in Turkey which generally described how, “Authorities used antiterror laws broadly against many human rights activists, media outlets, suspected PKK sympathizers, and alleged Gulen movement members, among others.” To give an idea of the extent of repression in Turkey, the report pointed out that, last November alone, 7,000 individuals had been detained for social media posts. One example provided was of Idris Ilhan, an HDP official who was arrested after tweeting “the dollar is up because we are going down” which was seen as criticism of the government’s handling of the economy, and therefore, “terror propaganda”. 

The report goes on to describe mass arrests and dismissals, mass closures of media outlets, companies, and organizations, seizure of property belonging to those organizations, restrictions on freedom of movement, expression, assembly, and association, and restrictions on internet. For example, Wikipedia was banned in Turkey for containing articles describing support received by ISIS from the Turkish State. 

I would invite anyone to read through the State Department’s 63 page report with the following question in mind: If the U.S. government carried out even half of the actions detailed in this report, what is the likelihood we would see armed rebellion across all 50 states? Americans I know would never accept the conditions which Kurds in Turkey are expected to submit to. Violence should always be discouraged, but how oppressive can a state become before the state is at fault for the ensuing domestic conflict? At what point will the United States cease implicitly backing Erdogan’s government in their domestic conflict? 

The Turkish State narrative is so far removed from reality that diplomats to Turkey are constantly forced to either offend the Turkish government or share in their delusion. Through a combination of artificially strained relations with the West, and warming relations with Russia, Erdogan can all but guarantee that Western diplomats pay lip service to his narrative at every geopolitical junction. 

Through this strategy of rhetorical accommodation, the Western world is inadvertently sharpening the very tools Erdogan is using both to chip away at the foundations of Turkish democracy and to carve a path out of NATO.

Democratic Federation of Northern Syria 

I arrived in Northern Syria in 2016 to find NGO’s, independent journalists, and volunteers operating freely and securely – a contrast to the numerous restrictions on civil liberties in neighboring Turkey. Several hundred U.S. military personnel were already playing an advisory role to Kurdish forces. Unlike the massive cost and limited success of U.S. involvement in Iraq (where I was deployed in 2006) and Afghanistan, the U.S. military did not have to fight their way into an occupation, or impose western democracy on a hostile civilian populace in Northeast Syria. Instead our military was invited into a self-built, pro-western democracy whose goals and values were already largely aligned with the United States. 

The Syrian Kurds were implementing the same Democratic Confederalist model which was championed by many Kurds in Turkey, including the PKK. Their model addresses serious regional issues like corruption, sectarian strife, and gender inequality by allowing communities to govern themselves in accordance with a common charter of rights. Those communities send representatives to regional councils which coordinate security and large projects between communities. Because ethnic and religious communities are left to govern themselves (no group is lording over all the others) tensions are fading and trust and cooperation between communities is growing. Without a centralized government there is little room for corruption. Their constitution also guarantees women’s rights to such an extent that every level of civilian and military leadership is co-led by a man and a woman, and a third of their fighters are women. 

Many Kurds dreamed that this new democratic model might spread to transform and heal the Middle East. I hoped the same thing after seeing that transformation begin to take place in areas of Northern Syria liberated from ISIS by the YPG. What started as a Kurdish project has steadily gained increasing participation from Arabs, Assyrians, and other ethnic communities of Northeast Syria. 

Positive press for the Syrian Kurds has always been answered by the Turkish State ramping up a war of rhetoric against them. U.S. officials stood firm against a barrage of insistence by Turkish officials that the Kurdish YPG was simply the PKK in Syria. While the two groups are very similar ideologically, and have undeniable ties, the U.S. was justified in making the critical distinctions that the YPG is not taking orders from the PKK, has no will or desire to fight against the Turkish State, and constitutes no threat to the Turkish State. 

An unfortunate side-effect of the U.S. continuing to condemn the PKK while supporting the YPG is that Erdogan has been able to spin this seemingly contradictory behavior as evidence that the U.S. and Europe are conspiring to undermine the Turkish State, adding to the growing belief that the United States helped orchestrate the 2016 coup attempt. In other words, humoring Erdogan’s domestic anti-terror narrative has backfired by helping him to foster growing anti-western sentiment inside Turkey. 

Turkish demands for the U.S. to abandon the YPG might have failed up until October 2019, but the tendency of U.S. officials to compromise in the face of those demands brought added difficulty to every phase of the fight against ISIS. Turkish negligence toward, and possible support of, ISIS allowed the militant group to thrive in the first place. Turkish objections delayed U.S. partnership with the Syrian Kurds. And, importantly, compromise with those objections meant withholding advanced weapons and equipment from Kurdish fighters. 

For me, personally, this meant peering helplessly into the darkness during middle-of-the-night guard shifts, on the front-line, knowing that ISIS fighters might have me in the cross-hairs of advanced night-vision optics which they easily acquired in Turkey. In other words, a brutal, backward terrorist organization held absolute technological superiority over a U.S. partner force. For the people of Northern Syria, it meant the needless loss of even more of their bright young men and women in combat. For populations inside ISIS strongholds, it meant massive civilian casualties as coalition aerial bombardment maximized to compensate for under-equipped ground forces. 

Now, folding before Turkish demands may mean the end altogether of the democratic experiment of Northern Syria – a democracy purchased with the lives of over 11,000 fighters. In the face of Turkish invasion, and without support from the United States or Europe, the people of Northern Syria are now turning to the oppressive Assad regime for support. It’s difficult to see how their democratic experiment can survive compromise with, and assimilation into, Assad’s Syria, but, at least they will stand a chance against Turkey. 

The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria is not perfect, but the system is open to observation, criticism, and change. Under the leadership of people like Mazloum Kobane, the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces have navigated the Syrian Civil War on a knife’s edge, building and securing a free, open, tolerant society while largely living up to the critical humanitarian expectations of wealthy western nations secure in their peace. The people of Northern Syria want the United States as an ally, and we should want them. 

The only thing standing in the way of broad western support for the people of Northern Syria, is Erdogan’s Turkish State. Erdogan is now working to dismantle this democratic safe-haven on grounds that its existence poses a security threat to Turkey. 

William Roebuck made the following observation in a memo later printed by the New York Times: 

“In all the time I was in the northeast, since January 2018, I heard — and sometimes delivered — points that articulated appreciation about Turkey’s legitimate security concerns regarding the border with Syria. And yet that border stayed quiet on the Syrian side the entire time — over 20 months — I have been in Syria, until Turkey violated it with its October Peace Spring military operation. When quietly called on this discrepancy, a senior U.S. official explained to me, “well, it’s a perceived threat (because of ideological and other affiliations between the PYD and the PKK) that Turkey feels, so we have to take it seriously.” But eventually the talking point became reality. We began speaking as if there really were attacks across the border into Turkey, causing real casualties and damage.” 

Real casualties and real damage result, in part, from western nations continuing to pretend that Turkey’s security concerns are not of their own making. If Erdogan wants to insist that the PKK and the YPG are identical, then let’s investigate whether the YPG qualifies as a terrorist organization and, if not, we can update the PKK’s designation accordingly.

  

Why Delist the PKK? 

The divide between Turkey and the West is growing rapidly. As long as Turkey remains in NATO, the U.S. and other NATO states cannot absolve themselves of some responsibility for Turkey’s actions. As a result, an increasing number of Western politicians are calling for Turkey’s membership in NATO to be challenged. However, while expulsion from NATO should certainly remain on the table for any state jeopardizing NATO interests as flagrantly as Turkey is, we should remember that the people of Turkey are not a monolith. 

Turkey, the country, is not bad for NATO or democracy, except under Erdogan and his ruling party. Erdogan, despite the progress he has made toward dictatorship, can still be replaced by popular vote. Turkey was once secular and westernizing, and there are many people inside Turkey who are distraught at the direction their country is moving. Unfortunately, the large component of Turkish citizens struggling to preserve democracy, resolve domestic conflicts, and unify with the West, find themselves severely disadvantaged by the diplomatic efforts of Western nations. Every time a Western official directly or indirectly validates Erdogan’s narrative, they provide Erdogan’s state controlled media with additional resources to reinforce that narrative. 

Intimidation and suppression alone might have resulted in civil unrest throughout Turkey similar to what we saw in Syria leading up to the Syrian civil war. But a steady diet of state propaganda pushing a narrative regularly validated by the Western world seems to be the medicine Assad lacked, but which Erdogan enjoys in abundance. The combination of intimidation, suppression, and narrative, is steadily reducing the number of Turkish citizens willing to speak out against the Turkish government. 

Central to that narrative is the United State’s FTO designation of the PKK. That designation is the subtle but critical error underpinning the entire crisis in Northern Syria. That designation, once justifiable, now only serves as an obstacle to peace and reconciliation. The PKK is a violent insurgent force. But insurgency and terrorism are not synonymous, and the PKK has long demonstrated its willingness to work toward peace. For the sake of democracy in both Turkey and Syria, the U.S. should delist the PKK, mediate new peace talks, and publicly reject the false anti-terrorism narrative of the Turkish State. 

The purpose of this essay is not to suggest that the U.S. should endorse Erdogan’s political opposition. It is to point out that the United States government is already endorsing Erdogan and his ruling party, albeit unintentionally, and should cease doing so immediately. The U.S. government has been interfering in the political process of a NATO ally by implicitly backing the insidious narrative of that ally’s current President. We know his narrative to be dangerous and false, and yet we are humoring it through diplomatic rhetoric, even while Erdogan uses that narrative to undermine Turkish democracy, crush political opposition, fuel anti-western sentiment in the Turkish population, and justify attacking a pro-western democracy in Northern Syria. 

In other words, U.S. diplomatic rhetoric is facilitating the eventual loss of two democratic allies in the Middle East, Turkey and Northern Syria, in order to preserve niceties with the current Turkish president in the very short-term. 

Delisting the PKK is hardly a cure-all for the worsening conditions in either Syria or Turkey. Rather, the PKK’s outdated designation is a subtle obstacle frustrating the best efforts of western governments and diplomats to end conflict and promote democracy in the Middle East. Delistment will certainly strain relations with Erdogan, but as dismal as Turkey’s future in NATO is currently looking, our long-term chances of keeping Turkey in NATO might actually be increased if we cease reinforcing his narrative.

With both feet firmly planted in reality, and a bit of backbone, the United States might find the diplomatic levers necessary to press Turkey’s withdrawal from Syria. The people of Northern Syria might preserve their democratic experiment. We might still heal our bruised friendship with the Kurds. And by delisting the PKK we will bring domestic conflict in Turkey one critical step closer to resolution.