The largest Kurdish city in the world is neither Diyarbakir in the Kurdish region of Turkey nor Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, but rather Istanbul. Decades of Turkish repression, insurgency, underinvestment and Turkey’s bulldozing and burning of Kurdish towns and cities forced many Kurds to leave their homes to try their chances in Turkey’s largest city. Conservative estimates suggest 20 percent of Istanbul’s population of 15 million people are Kurdish.
Kurds, of course, are native to not only southeastern Turkey, but also northern Syria and Iraq, and western Iran. Most of Syria’s largest Kurdish cities—Qamishli, Kobane, Amuda, Afrin—are adjacent to the Turkish border or just a couple miles away. This is why Turkey’s talk about wanting only a buffer zone is disingenuous: Any 25-mile buffer essentially would overrun 90 percent of Syrian Kurdistan.
Turkey says it seeks to fight Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) terror emanating from Syrian Kurdistan, but this is nonsense for three reasons. First, the violence is unidirectional: Turkey has been able to present little if any evidence that any attack inside Turkey originated within Syrian Kurdistan.
Second, the problem from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s viewpoint seems to be any Kurdish political organization or self-governance. While he co-opted Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party, the Syrian Kurdish political organization is not tribal; there is not a single person whom he can bribe to subordinate Kurdish interests to Ankara’s diktats.
When forced into a corner and facing annihilation, Kurds will fight to the death.
Third, while the PKK long ago ended its secessionist demands, the reason why there may be some limited PKK presence inside Syria is that Erdoğan demanded it. Against the backdrop of the Turkey-PKK peace process between 2012 and 2015, Turkey demanded that PKK insurgents leave Turkey for Syria; the PKK complied. The PKK exodus coincided with the rise of Kurdish self-governance in northeastern Syria, but the two events were not directly related. For Erdoğan to demand a further exodus is a blatant violation of his previous pledges, laundered only by the amnesia of Western diplomats who rotate every couple years and the deliberate memory hole of Turkey’s state media.
Simply put, Syrian Kurds have nowhere to go. While Turks may deny the Armenian Genocide as a matter of policy, every Kurd understands what happened when the Ottoman Turks (and Kurdish tribesmen) drove Armenians into the Syrian desert a bit over a century ago. When forced into a corner and facing annihilation, Kurds will fight to the death.
While the Kurds foreswear terrorism, two realities loom: Imprisoned PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan does not control Syrian Kurds nor their sympathizers in Turkey. Second, with Kurds concluding that Erdoğan seeks nothing less than genocide, many on an individual level will take the fight into their own hands.
Drones are the tip of the spear for the Turkish military. The drones can terrorize farmers and Yezidi returnees, and they can target independent Kurdish journalists, but they are no good in Istanbul. Should Kurds choose to operate in the dense alleys and crowded neighborhoods of Turkey’s largest city, there is not much the Turkish army can do without causing the type of damage that Turkey so condemns in the Gaza Strip.
While many Kurds are loyal to Turkey, millions are at wits’ end. Many may not engage in violence, but enough may privately cheer it and some may help hide and support those who engage in violence after the fact. After a bomb goes off, closed-circuit television or not, there will be no shortage of safe houses.
Erdoğan may believe he can limit the fight to Syria, or regions of Iraq and Turkey that are out of sight for most Iraqis, Turks, or tourists, but he is kidding himself.
Istanbul is a wonderful city. There is simply no city on earth like it. I have visited Istanbul more than two dozen times since my first trip to Turkey more than a quarter-century ago, sometimes as a guest of the Turkish military, often to lecture at universities, and once at the invitation of Turkey’s Republican People’s Party (CHP). Turks are wonderfully hospitable; even with my own strained relationship with Turkey politically, Turkish diplomats and even ambassadors chat behind the scenes. They understand the bluster of Erdoğan and his troll armies—all the talk about “FETO” and the PKK is nonsense. There are layers of history, and every neighborhood is unique. It is understandable why more than 17 million tourists visited the city last year alone.
Erdoğan may believe he can limit the fight to Syria, or regions of Iraq and Turkey that are out of sight for most Iraqis, Turks, or tourists, but he is kidding himself. Every tourist in Istanbul must recognize that tourist zones easily could be the next battlefields. The Islamic State has previously shown the holes in Turkey’s security. Lone wolves can be hard to detect, whether they are Islamists or Kurds. Add into the mix blood feud revenge and every tourist in Istanbul today risks becoming collateral damage in looming unrest.
Violence soon may come to Istanbul but, this time, it may not be simply a one-time event. Western embassies and consulates should be ready. Erdoğan may believe he can limit a wildfire, but he soon may find constant drone strikes against civilians in northern Syria can spark blowback inside Turkey itself. The city with the world’s largest Kurdish population likely will become its epicenter.
