The YPG are the military wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is allied to the nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) based in Turkey—is acting as both ground troops and spotters for the U.S. YPG spokesman Polat Can described how a member of his organization in the joint operation command center transmits the coordinates for bomb attacks provided by YPG forces on site (civiroglu.net, 14 October).
The PKK leadership’s current alliance with the U.S. is only the latest in a long history of maneuvers by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois Kurdish nationalists to ingratiate themselves with the imperialists and/or regional capitalist regimes. At all times, this program has meant betraying the just struggles of the Kurdish people.
After the Arab nationalist Ba’ath regime that was installed in Iraq in 1963 launched an attack on the Kurds, the KDP got support from an unholy alliance of the CIA, the Israeli Mossad and the Shah of Iran. In return, the KDP turned on the Iranian Kurds, hunting them down and turning them over to the Shah. After a cease-fire with the Ba’ath regime in 1970, the Kurds secured a large autonomous region in northern Iraq.
In 1975, the Shah made a separate peace with Hussein and cut off support to the Kurds, with the CIA quickly following suit. This allowed the Iraqi army to surge back into the Kurdish area. The subsequent wave of repression forced more than 100,000 Kurds to flee the region. Shortly afterward, during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), the KDP got support from Iran while the PUK made a cease-fire deal with Hussein. In 1983, the U.S. began a tilt toward Iraq in the conflict. With arms and other aid flowing in from the U.S. and Europe—including the technology to develop poison gas and biological weapons—the Iraqi regime was emboldened to move against the Kurdish population. The PUK then joined with the KDP and Iranian armed forces, which moved deep into Iraqi Kurdistan. Hussein responded by launching air bombardment and poison gas attacks, killing Kurds by the thousands.
During Operation Desert Storm, America’s first war on Iraq in 1991, the KDP and PUK sided with the imperialists. Following the war, the Kurds rose up in the vain expectation that the U.S. would back them. During the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, both the KDP and PUK operated under American command and then served as military auxiliaries to the occupation forces. For nearly a decade, Barzani has held office in the oil-rich north, and Talabani served as president of the Baghdad government from 2005 to July 2014.
While the Kurdish leaders have benefited handsomely from their services to the imperialists, the masses have paid with their blood.
Throughout the Iraq occupation, the U.S. manipulated and reinforced sectarian divisions, including by mobilizing the Kurdish pesh merga along with Shi’ite militias to crush Sunni insurgents in Falluja in 2004 as American troops leveled that city. From encouraging Shi’ite death squads to rounding up Sunnis associated with Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, the Shi’ite-dominated Baghdad government poured gas on the exploding sectarian powder keg. It was out of the ruins of such communal warfare that Al Qaeda in Iraq, which later morphed into ISIS, emerged and gained support from many aggrieved Sunnis.
The bigger threat to the region therefore is US and not IS.