America’s main ally against the Islamic State in Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, publicly opposes the United States selling Turkey new F-16 fighter jets. The SDF fears these fighter-bombers could be used against them in the future, and for good reason.
Aside from being unsurprising, the group’s opposition is far from the first time that Kurds opposed or feared American arms sales to regional powers.
“Our message to the Biden administration and Congress is to not sell F-16 jets to Turkey because Turkey is using those jets to bomb civilian infrastructure and is killing civilians here in northeast Syria,” SDF commander-in-chief Mazlum Kobane told Al-Monitor’s Amberin Zaman in a recent interview.
“The Biden administration is doing nothing to stop that,” Kobane added. “Unless there can be ironclad guarantees that those planes will not be used against our people, we will continue to oppose the sale.”
The SDF chief’s comments come amidst an intensified Turkish campaign of air and drone strikes targeting critical civilian and energy infrastructure across northeast Syria. In the same interview, Kobane noted that while Turkey used homegrown drones for most of these strikes, it also used F-16 to bomb oil wells in Derik and al-Qahtaniyah.
Turkish air power is targeting the areas controlled by the SDF and administered by the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria until recently named the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. The region is more commonly known outside as Rojava, the Kurdish name for Syrian Kurdistan.
These strikes have targeted critical infrastructure and disrupted the supply of water and electricity to millions of civilians.
The present wave of attacks began in October and is justified by Ankara as a response to attacks by the Kurdistan Workers Party, more commonly known by its acronym PKK, inside Turkey and against troops in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The SDF and the Kurdish-run administration deny any connection to these attacks and have slammed Turkey’s targeting of civilian infrastructure and killing civilians, including women and children, in these strikes.
Amidst this campaign, it’s unsurprising that Kobane and the SDF oppose the U.S. selling Turkey any modern F-16s.
The United States has sold fighter jets to all Middle Eastern countries with Kurdish-majority regions, aside from Syria. And, except for Iraq, these American warplanes were used against Kurds at various points in time.
While Iraq is an exception, that did not mean the Kurds there did not fear Baghdad would turn its F-16s against their autonomous region in the north.
In the early 2010s, the Iraqi Kurds actively lobbied the Obama administration against selling Baghdad F-16s, fearing then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would use the edge the aircraft would give his army over the Kurdish Peshmerga to march into the autonomous region.
“I feel Kurdistan’s future is in severe danger because of (Maliki),” Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani warned in April 2012. “F-16 (jets) should not reach the hands of this man.”
Iraq did ultimately get F-16s beginning in 2015, when it was embroiled in its war against Islamic State and after Maliki stepped down as prime minister. Iraq remains the only country the U.S. has sold fighter jets in the region to that has not turned them against their Kurdish population.
The Syrian Kurdish-led forces know full well the dangers of Turkish F-16s as those jets have been deployed against their troops, who lack even the most basic shoulder-launched air defenses, during numerous past Turkish cross-border operations against them, most notably in January 2018 and October 2019.
Turkey’s Kurdish minority is also well aware of the destruction these fighters can cause. Turkish F-16s were used against Kurdish villages as early as 1994 in attacks that killed civilians.
“Turkish fighters, including F-16s, have been used to attack villages and to kill civilians in violation of international humanitarian law,” charged a 1995 Human Rights Watch report. “In other instances, the planes have been used deliberately to destroy civilian structures, contributing to the general process of forced dislocation.”
Turkish F-16s were also used in the infamous 2011 Roboski massacre, which killed 34 civilians in a border trading convoy, primarily teenagers.
A more recent retrospective analysis of these events charged that Washington “ignored realities on the ground, explicit warnings from human rights organizations and direct orders from Congress in order to build Turkey’s F-16 fleet – going so far as to downplay the country’s use of F-16s to kill its own people.”
American-made fighter jets were also used against Iranian Kurds by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as he solidified his hold over power shortly after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Perhaps less remembered is that the United States briefly aided this suppression.
Between the time Khomeini triumphantly returned to Iran in February 1979, shortly after the country’s last Shah fled the preceding month, and before his Islamist followers infamously took Americans hostages in the U.S. Embassy the following November, American supplies for the Iranian air force continued. This was in the same period the Carter administration was assessing whether America could forge relations with this new regime.
Amidst the chaos of the revolution, Iranian Kurds mounted an uprising against Khomeini’s regime, which used the F-4 Phantom II fighter jets and AH-1J attack helicopters the United States had sold Iran under the Shah to drive these rebelling Kurds into the mountains.
“The Carter human-rightists are not only silent about the Kurds, but quietly worked to defeat them: eight times this year, an Iranian 747 cargo jet came to the United States bearing the household goods of ejected U.S. citizens, and returned to Iran with previously-purchased spare parts for the F-4s and gunships that strafed Kurdish mountain redoubts,” wrote William Safire in The New York Times in September 1979, a mere two months before the hostage crisis changed U.S.-Iran relations forever.
In light of this history, it’s hardly surprising that a Kurdish leader is concerned about certain American arms sales to the region today.
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