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An Anarchist in Syria Speaks on the Real Meaning of Trump’s Withdrawal
Analysis Current Events
Following Donald Trump’s surprise announcement that he is withdrawing US troops from Syria, we’ve received the following message from an anarchist in Rojava, spelling out what this means for the region and what the stakes are on a global scale. For background, consult our earlier articles, “Understanding the Kurdish Resistance” and “The Struggle Is not for Martyrdom but for Life.”
I’m writing from Rojava. Full disclosure: I didn’t grow up here and I don’t have access to all the information I would need to tell you what is going to happen next in this part of the world with any certainty. I’m writing because it is urgent that you hear from people in northern Syria about what Trump’s “troop withdrawal” really means for us—and it’s not clear how much time we have left to discuss it. I approach this task with all the humility at my disposal.
I’m not formally integrated into any of the groups here. That makes it possible for me to speak freely, but I should emphasize that my perspective doesn’t represent any institutional position. If nothing else, this should be useful as a historical document indicating how some people here understand the situation at this point in time, in case it becomes impossible to ask us later.
Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria is not an “anti-war” or “anti-imperialist” measure. It will not bring the conflict in Syria to an end. On the contrary, Trump is effectively giving Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan the go-ahead to invade Rojava and carry out ethnic cleansing against the people who have done much of the fighting and dying to halt the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS). This is a deal between strongmen to exterminate the social experiment in Rojava and consolidate authoritarian nationalist politics from Washington, DC to Istanbul and Kobane. Trump aims to leave Israel the most ostensibly liberal and democratic project in the entire Middle East, foreclosing the possibilities that the revolution in Rojava opened up for this part of the world.
All this will come at a tremendous cost. As bloody and tragic as the Syrian civil war has already been, this could open up not just a new chapter of it, but a sequel.
This is not about where US troops are stationed. The two thousand US soldiers at issue are a drop in the bucket in terms of the number of armed fighters in Syria today. They have not been on the frontlines of the fighting the way that the US military was in Iraq.
The withdrawal of these soldiers is not the important thing here. What matters is that Trump’s announcement is a message to Erdoğan indicating that there will be no consequences if the Turkish state invades Rojava.
There’s a lot of confusion about this, with supposed anti-war and “anti-imperialist” activists like Medea Benjamin endorsing Donald Trump’s decision, blithely putting the stamp of “peace” on an impending bloodbath and telling the victims that they should have known better. It makes no sense to blame people here in Rojava for depending on the United States when neither Medea Benjamin nor anyone like her has done anything to offer them any sort of alternative.
While authoritarians of various stripes seek to cloud the issue, giving a NATO member a green light to invade Syria is what is “pro-war” and “imperialist.” Speaking as an anarchist, my goal is not to talk about what the US military should do. It is to discuss how US military policy impacts people and how we ought to respond. Anarchists aim to bring about the abolition of every state government and the disbanding of every state military in favor of horizontal forms of voluntary organization; but when we organize in solidarity with targeted populations such as those who are on the receiving end of the violence of ISIS and various state actors in this region, we often run into thorny questions like the ones I’ll discuss below.
The worst case scenario now is that the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (TFSA), backed by the Turkish military itself, will overrun Rojava and carry out ethnic cleansing on a level you likely cannot imagine. They’ve already done this on a small scale in Afrin. In Rojava, this would take place on a historic scale. It could be something like the Palestinian Nakba or the Armenian genocide. I will try to explain why this is happening, why you should care about it, and what we can do about it together.
To understand what Trump and Erdoğan are doing, you have to understand the geography of the situation. This site is useful for keeping up with geographical shifts in the Syrian civil war.
First of All: About the Experiment in Rojava
The system in Rojava is not perfect. This is not the right place to air dirty laundry, but there are lots of problems. I’m not having the kind of experience here that Paul Z. Simons had some years ago, when his visit to Rojava made him feel that everything is possible. Years and years of war and militarization have taken their toll on the most exciting aspects of the revolution here. Still, these people are in incredible danger right now and the society they have built is worth defending.
What is happening in Rojava is not anarchy. All the same, women play a major role in society; there is basic freedom of religion and language; an ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse population lives side by side without any major acts of ethnic cleansing or conflict; it’s heavily militarized, but it’s not a police state; the communities are relatively safe and stable; there’s not famine or mass food insecurity; the armed forces are not committing mass atrocities. Every faction in this war has blood on its hands, but the People’s Protection Units (YPG/YPJ) have conducted themselves far more responsibly than any other side. They’ve saved countless lives—not just Kurds—in Sinjar and many other places. Considering the impossible conditions and the tremendous amount of violence that people here have been subjected to from all sides, that is an incredible feat. All this stands in stark contrast to what will happen if the Turkish state invades, considering that Trump has given Erdoğan the go-ahead in return for closing a massive missile sale.
It should go without saying that I don’t want to perpetuate an open-ended Bush-style “war on terror,” much less to participate in the sort of “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West that bigots and fundamentalists of both stripes have been fantasizing about. On the contrary, that is precisely what we’re trying to prevent here. Most of the people Daesh [ISIS] have killed have been Muslim; most of the people who have died fighting Daesh have been Muslim. In Hajin, where I was stationed and where the last ISIS stronghold is, one of the internationals who has been fighting Daesh longest is an observant Muslim—not to speak of all the predominantly Arab fighters from Deir Ezzor there, most of whom are almost certainly Muslim as well.
The Factions
For the sake of brevity, I’ll oversimplify and say that today, there are roughly five sides in the Syrian civil war: loyalist, Turkish, jihadi, Kurdish, and rebel.
At the conclusion of this text, an appendix explores the narratives that characterize each of these sides.
Each of these sides stands in different relation to the others. I’ll list the relations of each group to the others, starting with the other group that they are most closely affiliated with and ending with the groups they are most opposed to:
Loyalist: Kurdish, Turkish, jihadi, rebel
Rebel: Turkish, jihadi, Kurdish, loyalist
Turkish: rebel, jihadi, loyalist, Kurdish
Kurdish: loyalist, rebel, Turkish, jihadi
Jihadi: rebel, Turkish, Kurdish and loyalist
This may be helpful in visualizing which groups could be capable of compromising and which are irreversibly at odds. Again, remember, I am generalizing a lot.
I want to be clear that each of these groups is motivated by a narrative that contains at least some kernel of truth. For example, in regards to the question of who is to blame for the rise of ISIS, it is true that the US “ploughed the field” for ISIS with the invasion and occupation of Iraq and its disastrous fallout (loyalist narrative); but it is also true that the Turkish state has tacitly and sometimes blatantly colluded with ISIS because ISIS was fighting against the primary adversary of the Turkish state (Kurdish narrative) and that Assad’s brutal reaction to the Arab Spring contributed to a spiral of escalating violence that culminated in the rise of Daesh (rebel narrative). And although I’m least sympathetic to the jihadi and Turkish state perspectives, it is certain that unless the well-being of Sunni Arabs in Iraq and Syria is factored into a political settlement, the jihadis will go on fighting, and that unless there is some kind of political settlement between the Turkish state and the PKK, Turkey will go on seeking to wipe out Kurdish political formations, without hesitating to commit genocide.
It’s said that “Kurds are second-class citizens in Syria, third-class citizens in Iran, fourth-class citizens in Iraq, and fifth-class citizens in Turkey.” It’s no accident that when Turkish officials like Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu list the “terror groups” they are most concerned about in the region, they name the YPG before ISIS. Perhaps this can help explain the cautious response of many Kurds to the Syrian revolution: from the Kurdish perspective, regime change in Syria carried out by Turkish-backed jihadis coupled with no regime change in Turkey could be worse than no regime change in Syria at all.
I won’t rehash the whole timeline from the ancient Sumerians to the beginning of the PKK war in Turkey to the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS. Let’s skip forward to Trump’s announcement on December 19: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”
Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.
Let me be clear: Daesh has not been defeated in Syria. Just a few days ago, they took a shot at our position with a rocket launcher out of a clear blue sky and missed by only a hundred yards.
It is true that their territory is just a fraction of what it once was. At the same time, by any account, they still have thousands of fighters, a lot of heavy weaponry, and probably quite a bit of what remains of their senior leadership down in the Hajin pocket of the Euphrates river valley and the surrounding deserts, between Hajin and the Iraqi border. In addition, ISIS have a lot of experience and a wide array of sophisticated defense strategies—and they are absolutely willing to die to inflict damage on their enemies.
To the extent that their territory has been drastically reduced, Trump is telling a bald-faced lie in trying to take credit for this. The achievement he is claiming as his own is largely the work of precisely the people he is consigning to death at the hands of Turkey.
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 21 December 2018 06:00.
Mattis resigns in disagreement with Trump, citing need to maintain unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.
CNBC, “Defense Secretary James Mattis is quitting because he doesn’t agree with Trump”, 20 December 2018:
- Defense Secretary James Mattis will be stepping down at the end of February, telling President Donald Trump in a letter that he has “a right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.”
- Mattis served as Trump’s secretary of defense since the start of the Trump administration.
- “General Mattis was a great help to me in getting allies and other countries to pay their share of military obligations,” Trump says.
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary James Mattis will be stepping down at the end of February, telling President Donald Trump in a letter Thursday that he has “a right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.”
In his extraordinary letter to Trump, Mattis said that a long-held “core belief” of his “is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.”
Without maintaining those alliances, he wrote, “we cannot protect our interests or serve” the role of an “indispensable nation in the free world.”
The president has frequently lashed out at America’s allies in France, the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany, while at times appearing to side with U.S. adversaries over his own officials.
“My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors,” Mattis said, “are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.”
Mattis’ resignation letter, which a Pentagon spokeswoman said was hand-delivered to the president Thursday afternoon, comes on the heels of Trump’s controversial plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.
That announcement on Wednesday will reportedly take more than 2,000 U.S. service members out of the country, ending the ground strategy against the Islamic State. Trump said in a tweet Wednesday morning that “we have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”
The move was met with heated criticism from a number of Trump’s usual allies in Congress. But Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Trump made the “correct” move, because the U.S. troops had no legal right to be in Syria.
On Thursday evening, defense officials told NBC News that the White House has ordered the Pentagon to look into plans for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, as well.
CNBC, “Read James Mattis’ resignation letter to Trump: ‘We must be resolute’ against Russia and China”, 20 Dec 2018:
In a letter addressed to Trump, Mattis said that “because you have a right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours” on a number of subjects, “I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”
In his letter, Mattis cited the importance of US alliances, particularly NATO, and said the US must stand ‘resolute and unambiguous’ in the face of authoritarian countries such as China and Russia.
Mattis’ resignation comes on the heels of Trump’s controversial plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.
That announcement on Wednesday will reportedly take more than 2,000 U.S. servicemembers out of the country, ending the ground strategy against the Islamic State. Trump said in a tweet Wednesday morning that “we have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”
Neither the White House nor The Pentagon immediately responded to CNBC’s requests for comment on the president’s announcement.
DOHA, QATAR—Though her words were powerful, it was what Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad didn’t say that echoed with a pall long after the standing ovation she received by the audience at the Doha Forum Sunday in Qatar.
She did not utter the words “United States” once in the painful 45-minute interview this morning, but we all knew it was the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 that created the conditions for the near obliteration of Yazidi villages—including her home of Kocho—from the Iraqi map. It was here in this mountainous region in the north of the country that her people had settled and farmed the land for thousands of years and co-existed as an ethnic and religious minority. Today, she described Sinjar, occupied first by ISIS and then by various militias since 2014, as “completely destroyed, the buildings and schools empty, like ghost villages.”
Now, five years after the ISIS massacres that left over 3,000 Yazidis dead (most executed and buried alive) and over 6,000 kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery or brought into ISIS indoctrination camps, most of the population of 500,000 remain displaced, many in refugee camps. Some 4,000 people are camped out at the top of Mount Sinjar with no running water or electricity, feeling very much forgotten by the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, as Yazidi women and girls are slowly rescued by non-government entities from their captors across Syria and Iraq (there are still an estimated 3,200 still in the hands Daesh, says Murad), they are getting much needed care and longer-term treatment in Germany, Canada, Australia and France. Missing from that list is the United States. Washington’s help came early and were brief: airstrikes on ISIS militants in Sinjar during the massacre in August 2014 and dropping aid to the Yazidis who fled to the mountaintop in the chaos. Determined to keep America’s re-entry into Iraq to a minimum, President Obama sent no further armed assistance to help stop the ensuing occupation, killings or abductions.
There are 550 Yazidi refugees in the U.S. today.
Murad, 25, is strikingly youthful in appearance but for her eyes, which are world weary, and sad. For good reason: six of her brothers were killed when Daesh raided her village in August 2014. Her mother was also killed, along with the older women and elderly. She was taken then, with the younger females of her family, and held as a sex slave in an ISIS-held home in Mosul. After repeated rapes and beatings, she escaped within months, and was living in a container in a refugee camp when she told the world her story in February 2015.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 29 November 2018 19:38.
Stasi-Minded Experiments in human pan-mixia
Voice of Europe, “Is Angela Merkel behind the UN Migration Pact? New document sheds light”, 29 Nov 2018:
Germany’s Deception: Internal documents from Germany’s Federal Foreign Office divulge that Angela Merkel’s government has been the main mastermind behind the controversial UN migrant pact.
The document, described by MP Petr Bystron of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), reveals that the Federal Foreign Office taking credit for the disastrous UN Migrant Pact, claiming they’ve been working on the agreement since 2016.
The deception runs deep, the Foreign Office having stated that the German government has been behind the Global Compact on Refugees and the Global Compact on Migration, saying that though they are not legally binding, they were both designed to be “politically binding”.
Belgian International Law professor Pierre d’Argent, has explained that the agreement sets up a “legal framework” that can be used by lawyers in interpreting the meaning of the law. “…one can imagine that in some cases before international jurisdictions, lawyers use this pact as a reference tool to try to guide them,” d’Argent said.
Alexander Gauland, Co-leader of Germany’s populist AfD party told Breitbart London:
“It’s becoming glaringly obvious that the German government was trying to deceive the public, and still is. They are trying to retroactively legalise Merkel’s illegal opening of the borders since 2015. If the AfD had not raised the topic of the Global Compact, no one would ever have known about it until it was too late.”
“Now we are discovering that this contract has been in the works for a long time, and on German initiative, no less. However, those responsible never bothered to mention it. For good reason. We will do everything we can to avert this disaster in the making,” he said further.
The US, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Israel, Australia, The Czech Republic, Italy, Slovakia and more have backed out and will not sign the pact.
“We are only responsible to our Austrian population as government officials. Austrian sovereignty has top priority for us, this must be preserved and protected,” Austrian Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache said about pulling out of the pact.
Hitler and Nazism were Not White Nationalism, Part 3
Thus we have established a first principle of this discourse, a positive tautology that the World Wars are history, the people of today are not to blame and should not be subject to the collective punishment of losing their peoplehood and corresponding nations.
There is a second principle that we will invoke at this point, one which the internet has provided for in spades, but which White Nationalists have not utilized to anything like its full potential.
That is correctability, the correctability of ideas and understanding through interactive participation, whether through comments or speaking directly to people and engaging correction.
To date, what has been imposed as if correction, has largely been World War II revisionism - which tends to be dishonest excuses and apologetics for Nazi imperialism where not outright recitation of Nazi propaganda that could be falsified rather easily if they cared to do it.
Misrepresentation and omissions of important facts can remain if would-be interlocutors are not of good faith, don’t really want to pursue the truth, though Nazi apologetics usually claim the truth as their mission.
On the other hand, taking interactive correctability for granted and expecting the voices of correction to chime-in has left me susceptible to allow oversights to linger, because many would-be WN, who’ve accepted the rightist identity and its own political correctness will not say “boo” and alert me to oversights, especially when calling attention to these matters will call negative attention and shoot holes in their pro-Hitler/Nazi position.
Graudenz, Kulm, Thorn and Bromberg, a would-be occlusive salient. To the south of those cities, Poznan and Gniezno are the cradle of Polish nationhood.
There is a third and ancillary tautology to be invoked which is that for whatever grievances that either side had of the times, they were more than made up for.
We will apply this as a third tautological principle then, after ‘it’s history and nobody had anything to do with it’, and after correctability, that is, the tautology that for whatever complaints of the time, “they more than made up for it in retaliation.”
We will take a critical perspective on grievances and injustices alleged by the Nazi apologists, such as allegations made against Polish nationals and partisans, since those allegations have tended to go uncorrected within the philoNazistic PC of so called White Nationalism.
But we need to circle back to our second principle at this point, which is interactive correctability and the fact that so called WN has not been acting in good faith to call matters to attention, especially when they would reflect badly on Nazi Germany.
In previous discussions of Hitler’s complaints over where Versailles borders were drawn, I have made the claim that there were really only three cities of significance lost by Germany - Poznan, Bromberg and Thorn and one made neutral, Danzig (made neutral, not Polish, as in something the Poles could unilaterally return to Germany as misinformed Hitler apologists often claim they should have); and there were some village areas in the corridor and near the Versailles established border where Germans were caught in Polish territory, and we must add that there were Poles caught in German territory. But though Danzig was at the time occupied by Germans, it was a historically disputed city and a strategic city for all concerned, thus justifiably deemed neutral by Versailles. Cities to the south of the corridor, such as Poznan, Gniezno and Leszno, should not have been considered anything remotely but Polish.
While it is true that in previous discussions of this issue I had neglected to mention two cities of significance in the Polish corridor which were inhabited by Germans, Graudenz and Kulm , known in Polish as Grudziądz and Chelmno, it does not change the thesis.
First of all, circling to principle three (mis-spoke; it is “principle two”, correctability that is invoked here) again, that the comment section has been open and feedback of good will is expected to correct oversights such as that.
More fundamentally, these cities being under German political jurisdiction would only extend the salient that would be formed by Bromberg and Torun to obstruct and potentially occlude crucial strategic and economic sea access for Poland.
In addition, Graudenz and Klum were formed of brutal Teutonic and Prussian imperialism on cities that were originally Polish.
Finally, it is a history that only provides more examples of the enormous toll that the Nazis took against impositions of Polish patriotism in these areas; invoking principle three, that they more than made up for it.
Thus, it is no wonder that the Hitler redemptionists didn’t particularly care to take me up on my open offer to correct whatever prior oversights of mine…
No, the Hitler redemptionists, in their claim to be after the truth of history, tend to begin history at or about World War I. And of course, Germany was a sheer victim of the rest of the world, from the Schiff’s backing of the Trotskies, to the Balfour Declaration to the Treaty of Versailles. But really, to do enthnonationalism justice, we need to go further back in history…
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 10 November 2018 19:20.
Nordic episode: penchant to confront Augustinian, natural challenges, exposes naive susceptibility to invasive, viz. Manichean species?
An illustrative episode in which:
A Nordic woman expresses her nature to confront the Augustinian (Augustinian devils = natural devils, e.g., the cold), and anthropomorphized as such, indicates her natural inclination’s potential naivete and susceptibility to invasive, human species, particularly those of a more Manichean, trickster nature (Manichean = human, trickster devils, that can change the rules).
Augustinianism would be an evolutionary adaptation by those people confronted primarily with natural challenges (such as in the cold north), while Manicheanism would be an increased evolutionary adaptation by those confronted primarily by inter-tribal challenges (as in the Middle East)
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 08 November 2018 06:01.
...some maimed beyond recognition in the massacre.
Erasing the Liberty.
The genesis of terror and war by deception following Israel’s illegal land-grab.
The story of Israel’s sustained massacre of the U.S.S. Liberty and its crew in a false flag event staged to blame Egypt in the initiative to direct America’s foreign policy.
An interview with one of the survivors of the USS Liberty, a US research ship which was attacked in 1967 by Israel. Dave Gahary and survivor of the U.S.S. Liberty, Phil Tourney, take us through this often overlooked historical event.
Stasi-Minded Experiments in human pan-mixia
Graudenz, Kulm, Thorn and Bromberg, a would-be occlusive salient. To the south of those cities, Poznan and Gniezno are the cradle of Polish nationhood.
Nobel Peace Price 2018 winner Nadia Murad speaks at the Doha Forum in Qatar on Dec. 16, 2018. (Kelley Vlahos/TAC)
