Iraq & Syrian Civil Wars - Page 286

The war nerd: Tomb Raiders of Kobane

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So in October 2014, as Islamic State convoys pushed toward Suleyman Shah’s tomb on the Euphrates River southwest of Kobane, we had the conditions for a lab-quality experiment: Would IS’s ferocious Wahaabist intolerance for fancy tombs triumph over its sleazy alliance with Turkey? Would ideology trump realpolitik?

Quick answer: Nah. Islamic State “threatened” to blow up the tomb, and could’ve done it easily, since the Turkish military assigned only 40 soldiers to the site. But threats are for suckers; what you watch for is whether they do it or not. And IS never touched that tomb in months of occupying the country around it.

That non-action, from a group like IS that’s pretty much non-stop mayhem everywhere else, is exhibit Z in the long list of indications that Islamic State and Turkey made a deal. They both deny it, but there’ve been too many videos of Turkish soldiers waving howdy to IS jihadis, investigative reporters killed in convenient car crashes, and outright confessions by IS vets about being smuggled back and forth across the Syrian border with full Turkish cooperation.

Turkish policy made sense, in a grim way, back in the Autumn of 2014, when everyone was looking forward to the fall of Kobane. The radical Kurds of PKK/YPG/J were a real threat to Turkish sovereignty in the East, while the Arabs and assorted war tourists of IS seemed like a joke, with no potential to cause trouble in Turkey proper.

It’s not that Turkey likes IS, or shares its attitudes. You won’t find a lot of real support for IS outside a particular demographic: Young, male, middle-class wannabe thugs. It’s the same demographic that supplied most recruits for the James brothers, Quantrill, and Anderson, and the appeal is the same: Rape, plunder, sectarian revenge, escape from the boredom of downwardly-mobile civilian existence.

Turkey’s ruling elite, obsessed with the Kurdish “threat,” just saw IS as a useful pest-control device, and made a deal with it—one that included a promise to make Suleyman Shah’s tomb the only one in IS territory that wouldn’t be touched. If Turkey had really been worried that IS might desecrate the tomb, it would have sent a convoy to recover the coffin back when IS had undisputed control, a few months ago. It didn’t. Instead, Turkey waited until YPG/J Kurdish militia, driving south after liberating Kobane, were about to take the area around Suleyman Shah’s tomb.

Only then, on February 22, 2015, did the Turkish Army decide to drive south and rescue the body of Suleyman. The timing makes their motive clear: Turkey didn’t want to be indebted to the Kurds, the socialist radicals of YPG/J, for protecting Suleyman’s body. There was no threat from the YPG/J; they make a point of respecting all religious beliefs and would never dream of desecrating a tomb. Erdogan and his bigoted hick constituency, which hates Kurds with an insane passion, just couldn’t stand the idea of owing them anything.

Most humiliating of all was the fact that the route to Suleyman’s tomb led south through…Kobane. Oooo, that had to hurt! Back in October ’14, Erdogan was “warning”—which is to say, hoping and praying—that Kobane would fall in hours.

Now the defenders of Kobane were tickling the banks of the Euphrates, after blasting IS’s demoralized amateurs out of hundreds of villages around Kobane. There hasn’t been an offensive like this from a socialist army since 1945, not that you’d know it if you asked queasy pampered first-world socialists.

Erdogan doesn’t like commies (Islamists rarely do, as Indonesia 1965 demonstrated) and he doesn’t like Kurds. And he has the same ol’ birth rate fears all old racists have—so Turkey didn’t take any chances when it sent its convoy south to get Suleyman’s bones. The convoy consisted of 39 tanks and 57 APCs, manned by 572 soldiers.

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