After decades of a bloody campaign for a so-called Kurdish state encompassing Türkiye and Iraq, the terrorist group PKK strives for legitimacy in Syria’s north. It plans to hold a local election in the coming months in a region controlled by its Syrian wing, the PYD/YPG, which has already dealt a blow to Syria’s territorial integrity amid ongoing civil war in the country.
PKK, which always promoted itself as a “political party,” accentuates it recently in a bid to cultivate international support. The United States has already thrown its full support to the group’s Syrian wing under the guise of cooperation against another terrorist group, Daesh.
Its plan to organize elections is viewed as null and void in Syria, which has been mired in a civil war since 2011. A U.N. resolution adopted in 2015 by the U.N. Security Council, which the U.S. is also a party to, calls for a cease-fire and political settlement in the war-torn country and highlights that the only sustainable solution to the crisis in Syria is an inclusive and Syrian-led political process. It calls for commitment to Syria’s unity and territorial integrity.
The terrorist group conveniently contravened the resolution and launched a “local election” process in northeastern Syria. It initially set the date as May 30 before postponing it to June 11. So-called elections are planned in regions and towns, including Jazeera, Deir ez-Zor, Raqqa, Tabqa, Manbij and Afrin, where YPG has strongholds. Turkish sources say PKK aims to achieve an “autonomous” status first in Syria before moving to the next stage of its plan: an independent state.
Syrian Kurdish National Council (ENKS), a local political party, announced that it would boycott the elections. The party’s secretary-general, Muhammad Ismail, was quoted by media that they viewed the elections as “illegitimate.” More political parties are expected to join this boycott.
Last year, the group hired a U.S.-based PR firm to represent its interests in Washington, according to the Turkish media, in another bid to gain legitimacy.
Taking advantage of the power vacuum created by the Syrian civil war in 2011, the PKK/YPG has since 2015 occupied several Syrian provinces, including Arab-majority Deir el-Zour, a resource-rich region bordering Iraq, bisected by the Euphrates River and home to dozens of tribal communities.
The terrorist group has forced many locals to migrate, bringing in its militants to change the regional demographic structure, conducting arbitrary arrests, kidnapping children of local tribes for forced recruitment and assassinating tribe leaders to yoke local groups.
It has also seized the region's oil wells – Syria's largest – and smuggles oil to the Syrian regime, despite U.S. sanctions, to generate revenue for its activities.
Since then, U.S. forces in Syria have trained thousands of YPG/PKK terrorists in their military bases in the region under the pretext of combating terrorism.
The U.S. has also provided YPG/PKK terrorists with huge amounts of weapons and combat equipment.
Türkiye, which has troops inside Syria and Turkish-backed opposition groups in Syria's northwest, routinely clashes with the PKK/YPG, which seeks to establish a terror corridor along the country's border.
Since 2016, Türkiye has carried out successive ground operations – Euphrates Shield in 2016, Olive Branch in 2018 and Peace Spring in 2019 – to expel the PKK/YPG and Daesh forces from border areas of northern Syria, as well as Iraq and to enable the peaceful settlement of residents.
Ankara, which has taken some steps for possible normalization with Damascus last year, has also repeatedly called on its NATO ally to cut off support to the PKK/YPG, something heavily weighing on bilateral relations.
