Turkey sees the SDF, and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) that make up the bulk of its forces, as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has fought for self-rule in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey since 1984, and therefore a threat to its national security.
Unfortunately for Turkey, Russia does not share this perception. Russia agreed to move the SDF away from the lands now occupied by Turkey, but after facilitating two separate agreements with Turkey, and one between the Syrian government and the SDF, Moscow has called for the Kurds to be included in diplomatic discussions and deployed with SDF forces on the ground.
An SDF source said Russia had set up joint operations centres with the Kurds and that together they were mounting patrols and manning observation points near the Turkish zone. Today, Russia has bases in SDF regions including the cities of Manbij, Ayn Isa, Kobani and Qamishli.
Turkey has remained silent about Russia’s views on the SDF, in contrast to its furore over U.S. assistance to the group. But Aliza Marcus, whose book Blood and Belief focuses on the PKK, said that Russia and the YPG had always had an ambiguous relationship.
“Since the YPG was first active in Syria after 2011, Russia has taken a mixed approach to the Kurdish movement,” she said. “The YPG hasn’t openly threatened Assad, making it easier for Russia to see the YPG as more or less a benign player.”
Russia has never regarded the PKK as a terrorist organisation and has a relationship with it that goes back to the Cold War, when the Soviet Union leveraged Kurdish nationalism against pro-Western governments in the region.
The PKK began as a Marxist-Leninist outfit and its leader Abdullah Öcalan, whose portrait still adorns many SDF facilities and outposts, fled to Syria in 1980 where he received extensive support from President Hafez Assad, President Bashar Assad’s father. Syria and the Assads were stalwart Soviet clients, but even when the Cold War ended, Russia continued to use the group against Turkish influence inside its old sphere of influence.
Öcalan was forced out of Syria in 1998 after Turkey threatened war against it if support for the PKK did not end. He fled to Moscow in October 1998 and was greeted with an outpouring of support from the State Duma, where MPs voted to request President Boris Yeltsin grant the PKK leader asylum. At some point in his brief Moscow exile, Öcalan entertained the idea of a strategic partnership with Russia.
Moscow was supportive of Kurdish groups, including the PKK, as a way of pressuring Ankara to cut support from Turkey-based organisations for separatists in Chechnya. But Russia and Turkey compromised with a 1995 protocol agreement; Russia cut support for the PKK on its territory and Turkey did the same with the Chechens. President Vladimir Putin and then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signed a similar agreement in Sochi in July 2005 to express mutual support for each other’s positions on terrorism and separatism.
The relationship between Russia and the Kurds has at least one consistent theme - it rises and falls depending on Russia’s ties with Turkey. When relations were at a low following Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane on November 2015, Turkey referred to the YPG as Russia’s “hired soldiers”. At other contentious points in the war, Russia provided direct support to the Kurds.
Marcus said Russia does not support the Syrian Kurds out of genuine concern, but does so when it suits its interest and is ready to sacrifice them when it does not.
“To the extent that Moscow is limiting Turkey currently, it likely has more to do with its concerns about Turkey holding onto a larger slice of Syria than anything related to the Kurds living there,” Marcus said.
Now that the United States, which had backed the SDF against Islamic State in Syria, has greatly scaled back its presence, Russia is looking to balance pragmatic relations with the Kurds and Turkey.
A major priority for Russia and Damascus remains ending the war without partitioning Syria. A long-term Turkish presence in Syria would be as disruptive to those goals as the extensive Kurdish autonomy that the SDF wants.
To this end, Russia is positioning itself between the two and using each as leverage against the other.
“Russia has emerged as the new broker on the Kurdish issue in Syria. It will be quite a thorny path for Ankara to adapt itself to this new reality,” said Kerim Has, a Moscow-based expert on Turkey and Russia. Moscow, he said, was using a carrot-and-stick policy towards the Kurds.
“A new offensive by the Turkish army in northeastern Syria plays the role of a stick, whereas the carrot seems to be a narrowly scoped cultural autonomy for Kurds in a new Syria,” he said.
Ahval