Turkey’s intervention in the area of Afrin in northern Syria has exposed an essential truth that the Pentagon has long tried to conceal: The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces the United States relies on to fight the so-called Islamic State in eastern Syria is allied with the infamous regime of Bashar al-Assad.
This became obvious because in another theater of this multifaceted, multifront war, in what is referred to as the north Syrian Afrin pocket, the SDF was daily losing territory to Turkey—and asked the Assad regime for support.
(The SDF has many faces, among them the Kurdish People’s Protection Forces, or YPG, and its civilian party, the PYD or Democratic Union Party —about which more later.)
... Both the Obama and Trump administrations have claimed, contrary to ample evidence, that the Kurdish leadership of the SDF is independent of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party or PKK, which is on the U.S., EU, and Turkish list of terror groups. The PKK’s goal has been to dismember Turkey.
At the Pentagon last Thursday, a spokesman was unable to answer a reporter’s question about whether the U.S. had become an ally of the Assad regime by virtue of the SDF’s collaboration with the regime. A later written response didn’t provide much clarity. The armed Kurdish groups in Afrin “are not defeat-ISIS coalition partners,” it said. The U.S. partnership with the SDF “is limited in scope to operations to defeat ISIS.”
As that suggests, to maintain the fiction that there are separate SDF groups, the U.S. government has had to duck reality. The Syrian Kurdish faction now in control of the Kurdish cities in northern Syria—and in Afrin—is in fact the PKK’s affiliate in Syria. It’s gone through name changes at the behest of the U.S. military, from the People’s Protection Force or YPG into the Syrian Democratic Forces or SDF, but the different factions, all of which call themselves SDF, still answer to a leadership beholden to the PKK, which is based in Qandil, Iraq