Should Turkey Remain in NATO After the Fall of Kobani?
This article also appears in The New Republic.
Kobani will fall.
In a matter of hours.
Or perhaps days.
But
the Syrian city will fall, a victim of the cynical reckoning of Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, by refusing to act and leaving his
powerful army stationed along the border with Syria, just a few
kilometers from the already martyred city, seems to have chosen Daesh,
otherwise known as the Islamic State, over the Kurds.
Kobani will
be a victim of the double game of Turkey, which, after having let pass
every jihadist in the region and closing its eyes to the heavy weaponry
that Daesh's forwarders had been sending for weeks toward the besieged
city and that is now being used to shell it, shuts everything down,
blocks everything, plays the innocent while immobilizing not only its
own troops but also the 10,000 Kurdish volunteers who have come forward
in Turkey to try to save Kobani.
The outsize miracle of the
resistance of Kobani, which so far has succeeded, without resources and
against unheard of violence, in delaying the advance of the religious
zealots, cannot last much longer now. The fall of the city and the
hoisting of the black flag of the Caliphate not only in the eastern and
southern quarters but now over the last heights of a place that
henceforth will be powerfully symbolic, will be a catastrophe the full
extent of which has not yet been appreciated, and certainly not
everywhere.
"At this late hour, there is only one way to save what remains of Kobani, and that way is Turkey."
It will be a catastrophe for the combatants both male and female
who for weeks have been struggling with unbelievable courage against
better-armed units that will make them pay very dearly indeed for their
audacity.
It will be a catastrophe for the city itself, where
Daesh will not be content, as it has been before, to enslave the women,
behead the leaders, or forcibly convert the practitioners of minority
religions, but that will assume its place in the long and terrible list
of martyred cities of recent decades: Guernica pulverized by the
aircraft of the Condor Legion; Coventry razed by the Heinkels of the
Luftwaffe; Stalingrad and its million dead; Sarajevo, which escaped with
its life, but at the price of 11,000 dead during a thousand-day siege;
Grozny, in Chechnya, ground into a ghost town by Putin's rabble; Aleppo,
in Syria, with its treasures of civilization and beauty buried by the
explosives dropped from Bashar al-Assad's planes; and now Kobani, the
existence of which was unknown to most of us until recently but that it
is about to become an urbicide.
It will be a catastrophe, beyond
Kobani proper, for secular Kurdistan, the incarnation (if one exists) of
the values of moderation and law that the diplomats state as their wish
for the Islamic world, and whose Peshmerga, moreover, are the only ones
to have taken literally the global order to mobilize against the Daesh
hordes and to fight, face to face on the front line against a
self-proclaimed state that threatens, as we have been amply warned, not
just Kurdistan, but humanity itself.
Because Kobani is not only a
symbol but a key, its fall will be a catastrophe, finally, for the
coalition of which it is the forward outpost, a coalition that will now
see the barbarians of Daesh carve out a wide swath of ground several
hundreds of kilometers long adjacent to the Turkish border -- a
considerable tactical and strategic advantage.
To prevent this disaster we have not only very little time but, above all, paltry means.
The coalition may decide to intensify its strikes, but how does one
strike from the air when the battle is being waged hand to hand, street
by street, house by house on the outskirts of the city?
The
coalition may choose to deliver arms. Even without Turkish assistance,
it has the logistical ability to do so. And if it does not do so -- if
it does not resolve to reestablish a measure of balance between the
jihadists who have brought in heavy artillery, sophisticated rocket
launchers, and tanks taken from the arsenals of Mosul and Tabah, while
the Kurds are armed only with Kalashnikovs, DFDS machine guns, and a few
mortars, the citizens of the world still have the freedom to do what we
did not so long ago for little Bosnia, which, like Kurdish Kobani, was
defending us by defending itself -- but what we lack is time. Time is
required to organize an airlift of weapons to a besieged population
caught in a vise, and time is what we do not have.
At this late hour, there is only one way to save what remains of Kobani, and that way is Turkey.
Erdogan,
whose judgment has been clouded by his obsessional fear of seeing an
embryonic Kurdish state created just outside his borders, must be
reminded -- once again -- that Daesh is no less his enemy and that it is
for Turkey that the bell tolls in Kobani.
He must be made to
understand that if his increasingly authoritarian and benighted regime,
one that strays ever farther from the secular foundations of Kemalism,
is to preserve its chance to forge the economic partnerships with Europe
(and eventually, the political partnerships) to which Turkey's elites
aspire and that the country sorely needs, that chance passes through
Kobani and its defense: That chance depends on the aid delivered to the
heroines and the heroes of the beleaguered city.
But we have to
go even further and tell Erdogan, formally or informally, that the
battle against Daesh is the moment of truth, the now or never, for the
alliances and the system of collective security that was established in
the region in the aftermath of the Second World War, a system in which
Turkey is more than an ordinary member, having become its eastern pillar
when it joined NATO in 1952.
"If Turkey stands down a third
time -- if Kobani becomes the name of yet another Turkish default, this
one inexcusable -- its future in NATO is in doubt."
In 1991, Turkey only reluctantly joined in operations to support the civilian population of northern Iraq.
On
March 1, 2003, Turkey's Grand National Assembly, in a vote that cast a
long shadow over the country's relations with its allies, voted against
allowing 62,000 American troops to pass through Turkey on their way to
Baghdad or to be based in Turkey.
If Turkey stands down a third
time -- if Kobani becomes the name of yet another Turkish default, this
one inexcusable -- its future in NATO is in doubt.
The emissaries of President Barack Obama who have just arrived in Ankara should make this very clear.
French
President François Hollande, who has given Turkey many signs of
friendship, should assume the role of spokesman for France's partners by
informing Erdogan that Kobani is a rampart for Europe.
Here, as at the siege of Madrid, the world must declare, "They shall not pass."
