I mean, we should be clear there are still incredibly brave non-violent protesters in Syria that are challenging both the regime and these extremist forces. But on a military level, which is the only level the U.S. operates at, ISIS has become, by far, the most powerful opponent of the Syrian regime. And every bombing that the U.S. carries out, further strengthens the regime, not least because it takes forces away from the need for the regime to challenge ISIS. The U.S. is doing its work for it. So, that's a very messy situation.
We also have to recognize that the whole question of Kurdish rights, Kurdish nationalism, has re-emerged in these last six months or so, as a major, really defining component here. And it makes everything far more complicated. If we look at the question in September, when we first saw the U.S. decision to bomb in Syria, something it had, up until then, refused to do. The official reason, at the time, was that the Yazidi community had been isolated and was stuck on Mount Sinjar. It was the heat of the summer, they were stuck without water. It was a lot of old people, a lot of babies, children, women; a desperate situation. The humanitarian situation was an absolute crisis.
And it was that crisis that was the, sort of, public rationale that the U.S. gave for engaging in bombing. Well, in fact, out of about 100 air strikes that were carried out at that time by the U.S., only two of them were actually anywhere near Mount Sinjar. The rest were all up near the oil city of Erbil, the Kurdish oil city in Northern Iraq. The Kurds, the Yazidis, the Kurdish Yazidis on Mount Sinjar were saved by Syrian Kurds, not by the U.S. bombing but by Syrian Kurds allied with the organization known as the PKK, which is an organization of Turkish Kurds which the U.S. considers to be a terrorist organization.
So the Yazidis are saved by people the U.S. considers to be terrorists. That makes things a little bit complicated. What's even more complicated is that the Iraqi Kurds around Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, that whole region has expanded by 40 percent through this period of U.S. bombing and the re-introduction of U.S. forces into Iraq. That Kurdish zone now includes the city of Kirkuk, a long disputed city with a mixed population, partly Kurdish, partly Iraqi Arab, and one that the Kurds wanted to control because it's a wealthy oil center. At the same time and for the same reason, the Iraqi government wanted to keep control of it, keep it out of Kurdish hands.
So now we have a situation where the U.S. is operating militarily in alliance with the Kurds of Iraq, who are trying very hard to divide Iraq, something the U.S. says it opposes. So, everything the U.S. does, whether it's in Iraq, whether it's in Syria, is having an opposite effect as a direct result of each of its military strikes. So everything we hear from the Pentagon "Oh, we got some bad guys. Oh, we got somebody and we got a pick-up truck full of bad guys." Well, that's all well and good, but the result of it is the exact opposite of the medium to longer term goal that the U.S. has and instead is serving the interests of U.S. opponents.
DB: Just staying with the Kurds for a moment, the U.S. has a new sort of feeling of allied with the Kurds, Kurdistan in Iraq, people talk about a new, independent state, but clearly that reverberates in very different ways in Turkey. I mean, there are a lot more Kurds in Turkey than there are in Kurdistan, not to mention the Kurds in Iran. So where does that come into play?
PB: Yeah, this is a big problem because what we're seeing right now, this is the basis for the U.S.-Turkish divide over what to do. The reason that the Turks have been very resistant to playing a bigger military role in Kobani, for instance, the Syrian city that is right along the Syrian-Turkish border, is because they don't want to be helping the Syrian Kurds towards greater independence.
The Syrian Kurds have been, more or less, unofficially allied with the Syrian government. That doesn't mean they like the government, that doesn't mean they necessarily support the government. But it does mean that they have reached a fairly official rapprochement with the Syrian government, which has agreed to not attack Syrian Kurdish areas.
So when Turkey is faced with going after ISIS, in Kobani, they don't want to do that because they don't want to give more support to the Syrian Kurds who are seen as friends of the Syrian leader, who is the deadly enemy of the Turkish government. So, it's all incredibly complicated.
You know, again it comes back to everything the U.S. does in one place, is having a really negative effect on what it's trying to do somewhere else. The Turkish Kurds, who had fought a real guerrilla war against the Turkish government for decades, have not been at war, have not been fighting militarily, have been engaged in negotiations for the last five years or more. And both sides have been reluctant to abandon those negotiations.
But on the other hand the Turkish Kurds are watching their compatriots in Syria and in Iraq, the Iraqi Kurds and the Syrian Kurds, who are having these military victories and suddenly controlling a lot more territory than they used to, and that's giving them ideas that maybe it's time to give up on those negotiations and try a different route. So there's a lot of very dangerous possibilities at stake here.
DB: Oh, there's so much going on. So let's travel across Syria to the other border there. With Lebanon, it's got a busy border. ... You've got Palestinians fleeing Syria on the one hand and you've got Hezbollah joining the war with Syria on the other hand. How does that impact on the region, on Israel, which has already conducted its own strikes in Syria? How do you look at that?
PB: It's hugely destabilizing, and at the humanitarian level, it's disastrous. If you look at what's happened in Palestinian refugee camps like the Sabra and Shatila camps, known around the world for the massacre against Palestinians that happened under the leadership of General Ariel Sharon, then the defense minister of Israel and later the prime minister, known as the Butcher of Beirut, as a result that led to the massacre of over 2,000 Palestinians civilians in a two-day raid by Lebanese Christians while Israeli soldiers provided the light to allow them to kill through the night.
Sabra and Shatila today have been flooded with Palestinian refugees coming into Lebanon from their refugee camps in Syria, and by Syrian refugees who are fleeing the fighting. It's put enormous pressure on the already very fragile, both political and physical infrastructure of the camps, and of Lebanon as a whole.
At the same time, you have, for many Palestinians in Syria, who have been forced to flee in some cases the third or even fourth time they've been made refugees. These were, many of them, were originally refugees in what the Palestinians call the Nakba or the Catastrophe, the massive dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians in the war that led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1947-48.
Many of them first found refuge and set up camps in Syria. Those camps later were filled with refugees from the '67 war. Some of them were people who had gone during the '67 war, had fled to Jordan, and then in 1970, during the Black September operation, had been driven out a third time, had found refuge now in Syria. And now a fourth time are being made refugees again, and are fleeing back into Lebanon. So for Palestinian families it is absolutely disastrous.
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