‌Introduction

He came home, went to open his bag, and froze. On it, resting just above the zip, was a piece of human flesh. He was lucky. It was only the bag that belonged to him, not the burnt, blackened charcoal scrap.

You share the nausea he felt. But do not let it blind you. Now more than ever, we must open our eyes and see what is happening around the world.

What I am going to tell you could very easily have been your story. And reading it here makes you one of the lucky ones.

On 10 October 2015, 20-year-old Kadir,1 a dark-haired, bearded young man with a constant smile who had graduated from one of the best high schools in the country and enrolled as an undergraduate in the sociology department of Boğaziçi University – the best academic institution in Turkey – boarded a night bus from Istanbul, along with five friends. They arrived in Ankara around 7.30 in the morning. It was a beautiful sunny day, atypical of October in the capital. Kadir and his friends collected their banners with left-wing slogans on them and strolled to the main train station, where a peace rally was to take place. The rally had been organized by a group of pro-Kurdish and leftist activists, and aimed to urge the Turkish government to return to the process of forging peace with its own Kurds.

Göksel,2 another university student, similar in appearance but a bit older than Kadir, was already there with his flags and banners. The place buzzed with the enthusiasm of the young people gathered to demand peace for their country.

Around 8,000 people showed up in front of the 1930s art deco stone station building. Göksel and Kadir decided to find a place where they could do the halay – a line or circle dance found throughout Turkey, especially in the south and the south-east, which is also performed as a political statement.

A few minutes after they had started dancing and chanting slogans, there was a deafening bang. ‘Don’t worry,’ said one, trying to soothe the others, ‘it’s probably a stun grenade.’ Seconds later, the ground shook with another loud noise. Kadir looked up at the sky and saw ‘things’ flying. What were those ‘things’? Steel balls the size of shrapnel – and human flesh.

The moment before people realized that a bomb had just exploded, the air was filled with cries and screams. Some shouted the names of their friends; some called for their mothers, as small children instinctively do; and some just groaned loudly with pain.

Kadir and Göksel each grabbed their mobile phones to reach out to their family.

‘Mama, there was an explosion at the railway station. I am OK. I may not have reception in the next few hours. Don’t worry,’ texted Kadir. Göksel had to take a selfie to assure his mother that he was alive, but his mother looked at the photo and thought that Göksel had lost his legs, because the photo only showed his upper body, as most selfies do. While she cried at home, her son was facing the bloody reality, walking among scattered human limbs and ripped banners, fluttering in the wind, with peace slogans on them.

Along with other people who had survived the double explosion, Göksel helped the wounded to the ambulances. He searched for his friends in the piles of bodies. He did what he could. And then, like a ghost, each went home.

It was only afterwards that they were able to grasp the horror of the attack.

Göksel took off his navy cardigan, which had come through the day unscathed, though covered in a fine grey dust.

Kadir laid his bag in front of his legs, as if wanting to shed the burden of the day, to unlive what he had lived.

And there they were. On the shoulder of the navy cardigan. On the front pocket of the bag. On each, a scrap of human flesh that brought home to them as nothing else the cruelty of the world they live in today. A scrap that will haunt them throughout their lives.

Kadir and Göksel were survivors of an ISIS attack that wrought havoc on Turkey. Two suicide bombers, one of whom was part of an ISIS cell from the south-east of the country, caused bloodshed on a scale that, to some, was Turkey’s 9/11. It was the biggest terrorist attack the country had suffered since its founding. It killed 102 and wounded 391.

What Kadir and Göksel went through was similar to the experience of Indian air stewardess Nidhi Chaphekar at Brussels Airport in March 2016. In the minutes following the ISIS attack, she sat down on a bench, clothes torn, her shocked face covered in dust and blood. Her photo became iconic, representing the innocent across the world – those who suffer from the display of Islamist extremism in the capital cities of well-ordered, thriving countries.

The horror that Nidhi, Kadir and Göksel suffered was no different from what people in the Charlie Hebdo office or the Bataclan concert hall in Paris went through when ISIS members decided to take lives in the most brutal of ways.

This could be my story. Or your story.

There are many ways to look at the ISIS phenomenon, and one of them must include the new Turkey, which, under the Justice and Development Party (AKP), is rushing headlong towards an authoritarian regime and a new, darker Middle East after the hope of the Arab Uprisings. This book aims to offer an alternative point of view, focusing on a possible solution as well as the roots of the problem. The solution to what is happening in the Middle East, I argue, is directly related to Turkey’s 40-year-old Kurdish problem and how the Turkish government chooses to deal with it.

It is also my task in this book to interpret and lay out the complex tapestry of Turkey’s Kurdish history, which lies at the very heart of the Middle East. Without understanding the Kurdish problem, it is impossible to get the measure of what is going on in the Middle East or to fumble a way towards peace in the region. That is what makes the Kurdish story so important.

‘Boots on the ground’ and the Turkish Triangle

Since the summer of 2015, at the time of writing 685 people have been killed and more than 2,000 wounded in 269 separate terrorist attacks in Turkey. The most ferocious 15 of these attacks were perpetrated by ISIS and the rest were by the PKK, the violent leftist Kurdish group that has been waging a bloody campaign for Kurdish autonomy inside Turkey since the 1980s.

This is Turkey now. A brand new one, as the ruling AKP likes to call it. The new Middle East, on the other hand, is a far more grisly arena, where a proxy World War III is taking place in front of our eyes. Syria is worse than anything we have seen in recent history. How we ended up here is a complicated matter that requires thorough analysis, sincere discussion and self-criticism by all parties involved.

It is true that all the regional powers in the Middle East have been and still are concerned about ISIS and its stronghold in Syria, but they do not always rank their concerns in the same order as the Western powers.

The US, with the bitter memory of the Iraq war still very much alive, did not want to become militarily involved in the Syrian crisis in the early days, when obliterating ISIS would not have been too difficult, especially after ISIS besieged the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014. Several strategies adopted by the US to tackle the problem, such as training and equipping rebel groups, without having ‘boots on the ground’, have proved to be a dismal failure.

While there was a consensus among policy makers that there needed to be ‘boots on the ground’, no one could agree whose boots they should be. To unravel the intricate web of fighting ISIS is a task we will struggle with for decades, but here is a crude simplification:

The Saudis and the Gulf states see Iran as a greater threat than ISIS, and they had already diverted their energy towards Yemen, where what they believed to be an Iranian-backed coup was taking place. The Iraqi government has no control over the Shi’i militias, which fuel the sectarianism in the region that gave birth to ISIS in the first place. Syrian opposition forces, of whom a considerable portion are radical jihadists, see Assad as a bigger threat than ISIS. As for Russia, fighting ISIS means supporting the dictator that is Assad. And Turkey unfortunately sees the Kurds having an autonomous land near its border as a bigger threat than ISIS.

The Iraqi Kurdistan leadership appears to be sandwiched between Turkish pressure and ‘kinship pressure’. While dallying frequently with Turkey, it cannot simply abandon its brothers fighting under the flags of the PKK and the PYD – the latter a Syrian Kurdish group that fights both ISIS and Bashar al-Assad – as dictated by the Turkish government. On the other hand, those Kurds have proved to be an ally of the US.

I argue here that if the Turkish government had not intentionally built an explosive triangle of ISIS, Kurds and Turks, this wrangle over priorities and divergences of interests would be more manageable.

To figure out how Turkey finds itself in this situation, we need to look more closely at its identity paradigms, its coordinates on the map and, of course, its dramatis personae. It is not an attempt to hide in the nook of country exceptionalism but an endeavour to lay out the blueprint of the AKP’s Turkey, its approach to Kurdish conflict and the consequences of that approach for the region.

Confused? You are not alone

Turkey’s neo-liberal, Islamist ruling party the AKP had great aspirations when it came to power in 2002. It mended a broken financial system – by religiously following an IMF recipe – and turned a shrinking economy into a blossoming one, while restarting discussions about joining the EU. Because of the EU accession process and its pledge to eliminate the military’s tutelage, the AKP received support from Turkey’s intelligentsia and the West. According to the AKP’s national and international proponents, it was a flawless combination: a pro-business party which was developing its own Islamic middle class while adhering to the basics of a democratic system. Unlike their predecessors, or the so-called secular establishment, they were not detached from the majority of the population, who were conservative Muslims. For this reason, the AKP’s Turkey had become an archetype for consonance between Islam and democracy.

On the other hand, the EU accession process was, it seems clear now, just another tool used by the AKP and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to gain approbation both within and outside the country. ‘Democracy is like a train,’ Erdoğan had once let slip, ‘and you get off once you reach your destination.’

To get to its ultimate destination, the AKP formed a tacit alliance with an Islamic network led by an imam from Anatolia called Fethullah Gülen. Gülenists were followers of Sufi Islam who had been investing in education to raise their so-called ‘Golden Generation’.

On top of building a global empire of Gülen schools, the movement has also infiltrated the Turkish judiciary, bureaucracy and police since the late 1980s. Initially, for the first decade of the AKP’s rule, Gülenists formed the backbone of the bureaucracy, lending the AKP a helping hand in its struggle with the secular establishment. When Erdoğan began to consolidate his position in the government from 2011 onwards, a power struggle erupted between his party and the Gülen movement. Former partners became bitter foes. The 15 July 2016 coup attempt – when F-16s attacked the capital city and the parliament building – was the final skirmish in this battle.

Erdoğan’s AKP conceived a different authoritarianism that brought about a new kind of state–society relationship, spiced up with political Islam.3

Power became simultaneously more personalized and more populist. This new authoritarianism had democratizing potential, but it could also become, as one analyst has stated, ‘more oppressive than any other regime Turkey has previously experienced’,4 especially for those who did not fit into the alliances Erdoğan relies upon, such as secularists, leftists and Kurds. True, the 15 July coup was botched, but an attempted coup can only take place in a country where the democratic institutions are enormously eroded and social harmony is strained.Although the nuisance in society is the product of the failed Kurdish peace process, this was caused by the erosion of the very democracy that was supposed to protect all Turkish citizens. Ironically, the AKP was the first government to seek a genuinely political solution to the Kurdish issue, but in the end it destroyed it.

This book tracks the sequence of events from the emergence of the AKP to that of the Turkish–Kurdish peace process. It also reveals a very little-known aspect of the unrest – the feud in the AKP–Gülen movement – which revolves around the Kurdish issue. As human memory is fallible, the chronology followed in this book may clarify events and essential issues for anyone interested in looking at the Middle East and conflict resolution from another perspective. The story of Erdoğan’s deeds in the context of the peace process can also serve to demonstrate how a populist strongman can instrumentalize people’s hopes to maximize his own individual power.

The consequences of the collapse of this Erdoğan–Kurdish peace process affected not only Turkey but also the EU and the US. The key variable that determines Turkey’s relations with the Middle East and the West is and will be the Kurdish issue. With the Syrian war, the Kurdish issue has just become a global one.

Syria, and the Collapse

On the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement that partitioned the Ottoman Empire, the Syrian civil war and the emergence of ISIS marked a shake-up of the old world order and became a matter of national security for the Western world – it was a perfect symmetry, as if to remind everyone that today’s Middle East is the product of World War I. When the war in Syria first erupted, Turkey’s leadership was adamant that it would be only a matter of months before Bashar al-Assad was ousted. In 2012, President Erdoğan bragged that he would go to Damascus and pray at the Umayyad Mosque. This did not happen.

Turkey’s Syrian policy has proven to be an epic failure, which has brought Turkey into conflict with its Western allies and stifled the global fight against ISIS. Overconfidence and frivolous neo-Ottoman and pan-Islamist aspirations aside, the main reason for this failure of policy has been the Kurdish issue. When it became apparent that Assad was not going anywhere any time soon, Turkey’s main objective in Syria shifted to obstructing Syrian Kurds, led by the PYD (Democratic Union Party/Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat), in their bid to form an autonomous region in the north of Syria called Rojava (‘Western Kurdistan’ in Kurdish). Indeed, from the end of 2013 to the start of 2015, Turkey saw no problem in having an open-border policy for the jihadists in Syria. Not surprisingly, this turned the country into a hub for jihadists from all around the world, including ISIS recruits. This has caused huge security vulnerabilities, not only for Turkey but also for Europe as a whole.

According to the New York Times, the vast majority of American ISIS recruits used Turkey as a staging post,5 while the BBC reported that at least 1,000 British jihadists and thousands more Europeans are believed to have evaded police and intelligence surveillance to cross into Turkey and reach ISIS territory.6

Turkey’s policy was not directly to help ISIS but rather to suppress the Syrian Kurds. Why would Turkey prefer jihadists as neighbours, rather than Kurds, who had lived side by side with them for hundreds of years? For the very simple reason that the PYD/YPG was ideologically affiliated with the PKK and that an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria would serve as an example for the Kurds in Turkey.

If Turkey had made peace with its Kurds and helped the Syrian Kurds fighting ISIS rather than fighting them, there might have been a viable plan for a truce in Syria, and both Turkey and the Middle East would now be safer and stronger.

Turkey’s peace process with the Kurds had collapsed in the summer of 2015, mainly owing to the expansion of the Syrian Kurdish cantons next to the Turkish border and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ambitions to create an executive presidency for himself. It was exactly at that time that things in Turkey started disintegrating, exacerbating the turmoil in Syria.

A year later, following the botched coup, Turkey launched a military operation in northern Syria on 24 August 2016. The offensive was primarily aimed at preventing the PYD from moving to the west of the River Euphrates, and was not against ISIS, as initially proclaimed. Indeed, ISIS had vacated Jerablus – a city in northern Syria – before Turkish forces and the forces of the Free Syrian Army set foot there.

Around the same time, President Erdoğan started to express an irredentist rhetoric regarding the Middle East, where an international proxy war was taking place. He made constant references to the 1920 National Pact (Misak-ı Millî) as an aspiration, and repeatedly called the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne – which ended World War I and settled modern Turkey’s borders – a failure. The Treaty of Lausanne marked the point at which Turkey had disclaimed the rest of the Ottoman lands and settled with the borders of today.

As so often with Turkey, the explanation for its present is to be found in its past. Misak-ı Millî was a national political declaration that was adopted at the last meeting of the Ottoman parliament as a reaction to colonial occupation. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his comrades defined the borders of a new Turkish state arising from the ruins of an empire. Their ideal map was slightly different from the one ratified in Lausanne. It showed Mosul, Sulaymaniyah and Kirkuk belonging to what would be called Turkey, the argument being that these three now Iraqi cities were Kurdish and Kurds and Turks were inseparable.

Mustafa Kemal – the founder of modern Turkey – was a realist leader above all. Although he used Misak-ı Millî as a call to arms against occupying powers, when the war in Anatolia ended in 1922 he did not allow yet another struggle in the south-east. He and his fellow founding fathers of Turkey accepted the deal they got in Lausanne and also agreed that the fate of such Misak-ı Millî cities as Mosul would be decided later by the League of Nations. But the first Kurdish uprising in 1925 weakened Turkey’s hand at the League of Nations. ‘Turks were told, “Kurds don’t want to be with you.” Turkey’s warring strength was limited; so Mosul was left to Iraq by the terms of a treaty signed in 1926. And the chapter was closed.’7

‘The status quo will change somehow,’ President Erdoğan said in a cabinet meeting he chaired in October 2016. He pointed at the map. ‘We will either leap with moves forward or we will be bound to shrink.’8 Turkey’s military presence in northern Syria was an indication that references to Misak-ı Millî were more than internal politics.

Turkey’s leadership was rekindling an old endeavour that had failed. And the government is now channelling the internal legitimacy that it garnered after the coup – using legal means gained through the declaration of a state of emergency – and moving against not only the followers of the Gülen movement but also against academics, journalists and Kurdish politicians.

‘We are Kurds; spending time in jail in Turkey is our folklore’

Selahattin Demirtaş, the co-chair of the main Kurdish party in Turkey, is the most popular Kurdish politician ever. He was once dubbed ‘the Kurdish Obama’ by the Western press because of his inclusive campaign during his presidential bid in 2014. I had met him in London days before his arrest. He knew it was coming. ‘We are Kurds; spending time in jail in Turkey is our folklore,’ he had joked. In truth, it was far from funny. A one-time presidential candidate and peace negotiator is now waiting to be tried for terrorism. There is a photograph that Demirtaş kept in his smartphone archive, which was taken some 20 years earlier, during the ceremony marking his graduation as a barrister. Two of his colleagues from Diyarbakır Bar Association helped him put on his robes – Fırat Anlı and Tahir Elçi. Elçi was murdered and Anlı is in jail. So is Demirtaş himself. That photo may be one of the best depictions of a failed peace process. Arresting these leaders was, no doubt, a symbolic blow to the Kurdish movement, but it carries the risk of further radicalizing an already alienated Kurdish youth.

Similarly, curbing the Kurdish presence in Syria by military means not only laid waste to any possibility of reconciling Turkey’s Kurds with the government, but has also threatened any stability that remained in Turkey’s fraught relations with Europe and the US.

In Turkey’s thinking, the PYD is equal to the PKK, which the EU and the US have designated a terrorist organization. However, the US supports the PYD’s armed militia, the YPG, in its fight against ISIS. Similarly, the EU is giving a platform to PKK-related activists, who are both diminishing the legitimacy of Turkey’s Syrian policies and eroding the country’s international image. The more hawkish Turkey becomes in its Syrian policies, the more risk there will be that this in turn will adversely affect Turkey’s relations with the West. The road from a failed peace process to the brink of becoming a failed state has proved to be short for Turkey.

As a journalist, I have been following the Kurdish issue for more than a decade, during which time I have interviewed almost all of the prominent figures who have shaped the course of the Kurdish movement in Turkey. These interviews composed the backbone of this book. Some of the people I talked to have either died naturally or been killed. Some went up to the mountains and joined the PKK, while others are in jail. Some continue to make plans to fight ISIS or liberate Kurds from persecution at the hands of authoritarian regimes. Ultimately, in telling the story of the Kurdish problem and the Kurds, in the context of almost a decade and a half of AKP rule in Turkey, this book argues that this long-standing issue has the power to either make or break the country.

All the while during the writing process, a song by a famous Kurdish singer from Turkey kept coming into my mind. ‘How Will You Know?’ seemed to capture the essence of the book:

I was a young tree, I fell down,

I was a tempest, I calmed down,

I have been tired, very tired.

How will you know what I have been going through?

I come by destroying concrete walls

I come by ripping of steel

I come by destroying my life

How will you know what I have been running away from?

In the skies, stars are fading now

My mother is calling me now

I have a lover, she is suffering now

How will you know why I have been drinking?

I was a fountain; I turned into blood,

I became a roadhouse,

I made a mistake, I have become wasted.

How will you know why I have been silent?9

The song was written by Ahmet Kaya, who had to flee Turkey after receiving death threats. In 1999, he won the ‘Best Singer’ title at the Entertainment Journalists’ Society annual awards. When he came up onstage, he said, ‘I have composed a Kurdish song. Now, I am looking for a brave producer and a brave TV channel to broadcast it. I know there are some among you who could.’10 The audience of celebrities and musicians showed their disapproval by booing and throwing forks and knives at him. He died of a heart attack only a few months after going into exile.

As a Turk born and raised in the western part of Turkey, it took me half my life to really know what Ahmet Kaya and the Kurds had been going through since the foundation of the Turkish Republic. It would be impossible for anyone not born in the Kurdish region of Turkey to fully comprehend the depth of agony conveyed in Kaya’s ‘How Will You Know?’

And yet we all need to know now. We need to know why the Kurdish fountains turned into blood and why the young saplings on both sides were felled. We all need to know how opportunities for peace have been exhausted by government policies. We need to know how and why so many on all sides lost their lives.

How will you know?

In the pages that follow, I will try to tell you.