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Airstrikes Target ISIS in Syria Near Turkish Border In a Maze of Alliances, Syrian Kurds Find a Thorny Refuge at the Border
(about 14 hours later)
SURUC, Turkey — Airstrikes hit Islamic State military sites early Wednesday, targeting eight Kurdish villages that the militants had seized in recent days in northern Syria near the Turkish border, residents reported. SURUC, Turkey — Turkish tanks dot the hills here, guarding against Islamic State militants advancing just across the Syrian border. Lines of police fan out across fields, brandishing riot shields to stem the flow of Syrian Kurds fleeing the militants.
It was not immediately clear who carried out the strikes, but the Syrian government has not previously conducted operations in the area. Residents said they believed the air attacks were carried out by the American-led coalition against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Tear gas mixes with wind-blown dirt as the police disperse refugees desperate to get into Turkey and Turkish Kurds trying to help them. The police also clash with Kurdish men equally desperate to cross in the opposite direction — Turkish and Syrian citizens bound for Syria to defend the Kurdish enclave of Kobani from an Islamic State assault.
The strikes took place overnight; at daybreak Islamic State fighters resumed their offensive on the Kurdish villages, residents reported. Refugees who reach Turkey sit on dry, loose earth, unsure where to find shelter. Behind a border fence, thousands have waited for days, some with herds of sheep and goats, which they say are in danger of dying of thirst.
The advance of the Islamic State has spread fear among Kurds, who have been harassed by the extremist militants in both Iraq and Syria. The assault has driven at least 150,000 Syrian Kurdish villagers into Turkey, one of the most dramatic flows of refugees in the three years of the Syrian conflict, and has fueled a mushrooming humanitarian crisis on the border as some refugees are turned away by the Turkish authorities. The chaos on this one small stretch of the border illustrates the complexity of the conflict into which the United States is now inserting itself far more forcibly than it has yet during three years of Syrian civil war.
Khoshnaw Tillo, who heads a Syrian-Kurdish community organization, said from Gaziantep, Turkey, that contacts inside Syria reported the strikes to the west and south of the Kobani area, the region of Kurdish villages in northern Syria that has been attacked by the Islamic State. Here, where Kurdish communities straddle the border, the three-way battle among the Islamic State, Syrian insurgents and President Bashar al-Assad overlaps with a far older conflict between Turkey and its Kurdish minority.
Witnesses interviewed by Reuters said that warplanes arriving from Turkish airspace headed toward Islamic State positions. They said that the Turkish police used tear gas to drive crowds of Syrian Kurds back from the border. Kurds on both sides of the border here accuse Turkey, nominally an American ally against the Islamic State, of creating the extremist group to kill Kurds and stop them from using the chaos in Syria to establish autonomy there. That view was only strengthened this week, they said, as Turkish authorities impeded both those trying to flee the Islamic State and those trying to fight it.
Reuters also reported five new airstrikes on the Syrian-Iraqi border. “It’s a lie that the U.S.A. and the Turks are bombing ISIS; they are the ones who made ISIS to fight Kurds and weaken us,” said Mustaf Uzcan, 52, a Turkish Kurd who had brought aid for refugees from Adana, where he works in construction. He used an alternate name for the Islamic State.
Turkish officials said that neither Turkish airspace nor an American air base in the southern Turkish town of Incirlik had been used for the strikes, according to Reuters. Citing Turkey’s open borders that facilitated the flow of Islamic State fighters from foreign countries into Syria, he added, “ISIS is not an enemy of Turkey — Turkey sees the Kurds as the enemy.” The Turkish government has provided safe haven for many Syrian insurgents and called for Mr. Assad’s ouster, but denies supporting the Islamic State.
The reported strikes came a day after the first air raids inside Syria by the United States-led coalition against the Islamic State, the extremist militant group that has seized areas of Iraq and Syria. President Obama has sought to package the American airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria as a single straightforward battle, to “degrade and destroy” an organization that has accelerated the destabilization of the region and poses a potential, though not imminent, threat to the United States. And on Tuesday evening, American and Arab forces again attacked Islamic State targets in Syria, according to Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary.
The chaotic scene on the Turkish-Syria border underscored the complexity of the conflict into which the United States is now inserting itself, with far more force than during the three years of the Syrian civil war. But unleashing American firepower against Islamic State introduces new, unpredictable dynamics that vary from place to place in the volatile and increasingly fragmented conflict. Hitting the Islamic State means different things to different players in different places — adding to the difficulties Mr. Obama faces in building a coherent coalition against the group.
Turkey, a NATO member, has said it will participate in the coalition against the Islamic State but is wary that the fight against the group is empowering separatist Kurdish militants on both sides of the border. Syrian insurgents, including some that the Obama administration says will act as its ground force against the Islamic State, have criticized the strikes, while one official in the Syrian government, which has condemned the strikes as a violation of its sovereignty, told Reuters they seemed to be “proceeding in the right direction.”
Kurds as well as the Syrian government view Turkey’s involvement with some skepticism. Turkey’s open border with Syria has long facilitated the movements of Islamic State recruits from foreign countries into Syria. The fighting in Kobani — a collection of Kurdish villages whose cinder-block buildings can be seen just beyond the border posts — is just one of the many wars within the war that have tangled alliances across the region.
Humanitarian groups say more people are trying to flee Kobani but that thousands are trapped in Syria because the Turkish authorities are blocking the border. That has made the Kurdish population even more restive. Kurds in the area, home to about 400,000 people, had largely ruled themselves for the past two years after government forces withdrew, allowing a Kurdish party to take over military and government posts. The party’s military wing is affiliated with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey; the PKK, as the party is also known, is a bitter enemy of the Turkish government, which considers it a terrorist organization.
Turkish police officers and soldiers stand guard across dusty fields with riot shields and armored vehicles, having already set up metal gates to control the refugee flow from Syria. Nearby, knots of women sat in brightly-colored long dresses on the ground as the hot wind whipped dirt onto their faces, unsure of where to head to after having made it across the border. Those allowed in, mostly women and children, said that people on the Syrian side were in need of food and water and that livestock were dying of thirst. After having arrived in Turkey, refugees were sleeping in streets and storefronts for lack of shelter, the people said. But in July of last year, fighters from the Islamic State surrounded the area, leaving it largely besieged, with only limited aid coming across the Turkish border. Over the past week, Islamic State fighters advanced deeper into Kobani with tanks and artillery, taking dozens of villages, with the United Nations reporting massacres of civilians.
Turkish Kurds have also been flowing into Syria to fight the Islamic State, multiple residents said. At the border, hundreds of cars and herds of sheep and goats were lined up behind the fence. The Turkish government says 150,000 people have crossed into Turkey since the new attacks began, one of the most dramatic refugee flows of the war. Humanitarian groups say thousands more want to cross, although others hoped to go back, saying they preferred to die at home than to face what they called a hostile reception in Turkey, where many slept in the open.
“Our sons are still fighting and I want to join them, even though I hear they are surrounded,” said Souad Saleh, 45, clutching a garbage bag full of clothes.
Turkey says it closed the border to refugees for security reasons, and has provided a medical tent, vaccines and a team of emergency response officials. Municipal officials and residents in the mostly Kurdish town of Suruc have been helpful, refugees say, but their resources are limited.
Local Kurds had hoped that American airstrikes would target the advancing militants, much as they hit Islamic State fighters threatening Kurds in Iraq. But while airstrikes were reported in the area Wednesday morning, the Pentagon denied carrying out any there. American military officials did report strikes in another region against oil refineries controlled by the Islamic State.
By Wednesday night, residents of Suruc were reporting that the militants had advanced miles more, coming within sight of the Turkish border.
Despite checkpoints on the roads to the border and dozens of armored vehicles patrolling Suruc, residents said that hundreds, perhaps as many as a thousand, Turkish Kurds had crossed the border to fight, with some pulling up fence posts and squeezing through.
Hajjar Sheikh Mohammad, a young Kurdish man who was born in Syria but has family in Turkey, leaned against a metal border barrier as if wanting to catapult himself across it. His story further illustrated the complex alliances in Syria; he said he was a fighter in Aleppo with a Syrian insurgent group, the Fatah Brigade, that included many non-Kurdish Turks who helped train fighters.
But when he heard that Kobani, where his relatives were staying, was in danger, he said, he went there to bring them to Turkey. Now, he said, he wanted to return and defend Kobani alongside Kurdish militants, although he disagrees with their goal of an independent Kurdistan.
“I don’t want separation,” he said. “I want Syria to be safe and I want Kurdish rights and to speak my language inside Syria.”
Nearby, protesters chanted “Freedom!” in Kurdish, calling for accountability for Turkey’s Islamist ruling party, which they said had fostered the Islamic State. Some were from a Turkish teachers’ union, on strike in solidarity with Kurds, including those in Turkey who want the option of schooling in the Kurdish language.
Servin Aydin, a high school teacher in Suruc, said a student had come to say that he was going to Syria. “He is pretty and smart, but he doesn’t like school,” she said. “He thinks in Kurdish, but we have to teach him in Turkish.”
She said she supported the attacks on the Islamic State “because it’s a terrorist organization.”
“But we don’t support other American policies,” Ms. Aydin added, “because America is an imperialist country.”
Asked if they saw Mr. Assad — who put down Kurdish protests in 2004 — as a protector, Kurdish refugees said he had not shielded them from the Islamic State.
“He barrel-bombs us,” said one, Abu Hishaar. Another said, “They want us to defend ourselves by ourselves.”