Like Operation Euphrates Shield in 2016 and 2017, the fall of Afrin showed the effectiveness of the Turkish military and of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) against Daesh with the first operation and then the People's Protection Units (YPG). Those who claimed that the failed coup of July 2016 and the firing of Gülenist Terror Organization (FETÖ) members that followed had weakened the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) have been proven wrong one more time. As a result, the main, not to say the only, argument in the West to support the Syrian PKK-affiliated Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its YPG militia is deprived of any substance. Indeed, why choose a terrorist group to fight another terrorist group instead of relying on a NATO ally? The release of jihadists by the YPG of Afrin in exchange for the promise to fight the FSA and TSK and the agreement between the YPG in Raqqa to allow Daesh members to leave safely also show the degree of the trust the Kurdish separatists deserve.

Those who would claim that Turkey only recently began to fight against Daesh, in 2015 or 2016, are equally wrong. In summer 2013, then-French President François Hollande and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan agreed to intervene in Syria to clear the country of regime troops and Daesh. Only an unexpected veto from then U.S. President Barack Obama prevented the project. Then in autumn 2013, the Turkish military began to shell Daesh positions and provide weapons to Ahrar al-Sham, a rebel group fighting Daesh as well as the Syrian regime. Also in autumn 2013, the construction of a wall on the Turkish-Syrian boundary began. The PYD strongly opposed this wall despite that it has been the most efficient instrument against Daesh recruits entering Syria. Then, by 2014, the Turkish military provided logistic support to peshmerga forces from Iraqi Kurdistan, training and providing them with arms. All this shows that Turkey was the first country to fight Daesh on the ground and not only with words.

PKK in Western Europe

Regardless, comparing the effectiveness of the Turkish military and its Syrian allies on one side and the YPG on the other is not enough. Those who have been blinded by the argument that the YPG are heroes who fight against Islamists not only miss the realities of combat against Daesh, but also fail to understand the danger the PKK and YPG represents for Western countries. The most obvious issue is represented by PKK activities in European countries. This group was banned in Sweden in 1984 after a series of assassinations of Kurds who had refused to give money to the PKK or who had left the group, disgusted by its methods. The first assassinations perpetrated by the PKK in Germany and France took place in mid-1980s. More recently, during the 2000s and 2010s, France dismantled PKK funding networks in Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille and Reims. Several others were dismantled in Germany during the same period. As a result of its racist, Kurdish nationalist ideology, as previously explained in this column in "The roots and ideology of the PKK," on Aug. 27, 2017, the PKK also organized a series of arsons on Turkish cultural associations and cafés in 2007, and one other since 2016. Such facts corroborate the observation of the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service in 2015: "The PKK should continue to be viewed as a violent-extremist terrorist group, whose potential for violence has not diminished."

Even more recently, PKK and PYD supporters attacked police in Rome, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Marseille and Paris, during demonstrations – banned or legal – against the Turkish military's operation in Syria. The worst assault took place in Marseille, where a police officer barely escaped a demonstrator who tried to throw him in front of a van. This aggressor is now in jail, but it would be excessively optimistic to believe that he is the only one able to behave that way. Indeed, the assaults on police in EU countries during the past months shows that the PKK never learns any lesson from the past. In 1996, the year PKK members were sentenced for the first time for terrorist activities in Germany, it targeted German tourists in Turkey. Then in 1999, the PKK ordered its members and sympathizers to attack Israeli diplomatic representations in Western Europe, as a result of the role played, according to it, by Mossad in the capture of now imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. In Berlin, the number of police was insufficient.

As a result, 50 demonstrators entered the Israeli Consulate by force with iron bars. They were driven back with gunfire from the Israeli guards and three assailants were killed and 16 wounded.These events are not sufficiently remembered in Germany, Israel or elsewhere, but they are highly significant, as they show how fanatic sympathizers of the PKK can be. Trying to blackmail a country like Germany, even more after its unification of 1990, or attacking an Israeli Consulate with iron bars, even more after the failed attempt, PKK supporters again tried to enter the Turkish Embassy in Berne in 1993, during which the Turkish guards killed one assailant, display a certain tendency for self-destruction. Such a tendency is not limited to the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK), a PKK splinter group that undertakes suicide bombings. Considering the level of violence used in the West since the 1990s, there is no reason to believe that assaults on police in the EU will end soon unless stronger measures are taken, for example, a systematic closure of Kurdish cultural associations defending the PKK, PYD and YPG or renouncing the various pretexts of European states use to refuse most of Ankara's demands for extradition of members of these terrorist organizations.

The red jihad

That having been said, the PKK's criminal activities are not the only subject of concern from an EU perspective. Indeed, the refusal to admit that the PYD, YPG and PKK are one organization, the romanticism spread by a series of journalists and writers and, of course, the delivery of weapons by Germany and the United States considerably helped what can be called the "red jihad," namely the flow of European far leftists to YPG camps in Syria. Not only is there a risk similar to the one Western recruits of Daesh – namely the return to Europe after having developed knowledge in bomb making and guns – but far leftist groups in EU countries have already begun to act in solidarity with the YPG. For example, a blog called "Fight4Afrin" claimed in March 2018: "Armed with Molotov cocktails, we attacked and burned some vehicles from the German army (Bundeswehr) in Soltau last night. The trucks were parked on a NATO-wire-secured site in the Soltau industrial area, Carl-Benz-Strasse. We acted in solidarity with the fighting revolutionaries in Efrin [Afrin]." It should surprise nobody.

Indeed, the Red Army Fraction (RAF) perpetrated murderous attacks until 1993 and pronounced its self-dissolution in 1998. More recently, in August 2017, German authorities banned the linksunten.indymedia.org blog, for "sowing hate against different opinions and representatives of the country" and also because a police investigation found knives, batons, pipes, catapults, expandable batons and butterfly knives in the home of the blog's editors. Then, from September to December of the same year, the clashes increased between far-leftist anti-fascists and far rightists – members of the Alternative for Germany, (AfD). As a result, it would be foolish to think that this act of violence, perpetrated in support for the PKK and YPG would necessarily remain isolated. The convergence of fights is indeed one of the obsessions of the far left, violent or not.

In France, "red jihad" seems to be, for the moment, limited to very small groups of far leftist separatist in Brittany and to even smaller groups of anarchists. Regardless, it should not be considered an insignificant affair. Indeed, if France never experienced the degree of far-leftist terrorism practiced by the RAF in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy or the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups (Grapo) in Spain, in May 2016 and April 2017, far leftists attacked the police with Molotov cocktails and, if not with the intent to kill, at least the full knowledge that their acts could kill.

In conclusion, in their own interests and in the interests of the populations, EU cabinets and the EU itself have the duty to protect and should meditate on the notion of solidarity.

* Master of Arts in history at Paris-Sorbonne University