WSJ on allegations against YPG

U.S.-Backed Forces in Syria Launch Offensive to Seize ISIS Stronghold Raqqa
Operation comes at same time as battle for Islamic State’s Iraqi stronghold of Mosul

By Raja Abdulrahim and  Maria Abi-Habib in Beirut, and Dion Nissenbaum in Istanbul
Wall Street Journal
Nov. 6, 2016

U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab forces in Syria began a long-anticipated offensive against the Islamic State-controlled city of Raqqa, an operation timed to leverage a similar push in Iraq to crush the extremist group.

The forces launched attacks in the northern suburbs of Raqqa and within hours captured a number of small villages but remained at least 25 miles from the city, said Talal Silo, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces, a U.S.-backed coalition of factions.

The battle has been in the preparatory stages for months and was launched after a delivery of weapons and ammunition from the U.S.-led international coalition fighting the extremist group in the Middle East, Mr. Silo said. The fight to isolate Raqqa and prepare for a coordinated assault on the Islamic State capital could take weeks or months, U.S. officials said.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Sunday he welcomed the SDF’s initial operations to cut off Raqqa and begin to loosen Islamic State’s “barbaric grip.”

“The effort to isolate and ultimately liberate Raqqa marks the next step in our coalition campaign plan,” he said. “As in Mosul, the fight will not be easy and there is hard work ahead, but it is necessary to end the function of [Islamic State’s] caliphate and disrupt the group’s ability to carry out terror attacks against the United States, our allies and our partners.”

Raqqa is a hub for Islamic State’s leadership and an important nerve center for the group’s planning of operations abroad. The city holds some of the most important assets and institutions for the extremist group’s state-like operations in Syria, serving as a capital where, for example, its highest courts rule on cases appealed in other Syrian towns under Islamic State control.

“The battle was contingent on the arrival of a shipment of weapons and ammunition from the coalition,” Mr. Silo said. “Our forces are ready and the coalition is ready.”

The battle for Raqqa comes as Iraqi forces are making their way into Islamic State’s Iraqi stronghold of Mosul, piling pressure on the group that in recent months has given up a number of villages, towns and cities it once occupied.

“Surely this campaign will affect our battle with Daesh here,” said Lt. Gen. Abdulwahab al-Saadi, a commander with Iraq’s Counterterrorism Services, speaking by phone about the Raqqa campaign from inside Mosul. “Any time you start a new front against Daesh, it will weaken them.”

Over the past few days, Iraqi forces have faced a determined and dug-in Islamic State, with one general remarking that it was the most resistance he had yet seen from the militants. Locals have also reported that some militants have begun to fall back deeper into the city and possibly out of the city altogether.

Even so, Iraqi army units kept squeezing in from the south of Mosul and special forces consolidated their positions inside the city over the weekend. Top army leadership said the Raqqa offensive will help Iraqis fighting in Mosul.

“This operation will cut their support lines and distract their efforts,” said Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool, spokesman for the Iraqi army. “This will affect the morale of Daesh because before they were relying on being able to flee to Syria. Now they have no other option than to surrender to Iraqi forces or stay and be killed.”

Islamic State has lost significant territory in recent months to a number of forces, including a 60-mile stretch in Syria along the Turkish border that cut the extremist group’s supply line for foreign fighters.

That seizure along the border was accomplished by Turkish-backed Syrian Arab rebels who have tried to prevent the Kurdish-dominated SDF from using the fight against Islamic State to create a Kurdish autonomous state in northern Syria.

As the Kurdish-led SDF inches toward Raqqa city, several thousand Arab tribesmen from Raqqa province are receiving training in southern Turkey, preparing for the eventual assault on the provincial capital, according the tribesmen involved in the efforts.

Turkey opposes the Kurdish-led SDF taking the city, insisting on an Arab force spearheading the assault to consent to the operation. Ankara has said it wouldn’t play a direct role in the battle for Raqqa if the Kurdish YPG militia was involved.

The YPG—which Ankara sees as the Syrian branch of the PKK, a Kurdish separatist group it is fighting in Turkey’s southeast—is the dominant force in the SDF.

U.S. officials said that there had been no agreement to exclude Turkey from the fight against Islamic State in Raqqa, and that the Turkish-trained Arab forces could still play a role in seizing the city itself.

“We’re just kicking off their move to isolate Raqqa,” one U.S. military official said. “The actual assault, who knows how long that will take and, by then, there may be some more trained folks to take on Raqqa itself.”

The military aid from the U.S.-led coalition was distributed among the various factions taking part in the battle, Mr. Silo said.

Last May, the U.S.-backed forces launched a similar offensive in Raqqa’s northern countryside but the battles subsided quickly as focus shifted to capturing the city of Manbij and cutting off the supply line to Raqqa.

The battle for Manbij raged for more than two months, with the SDF first seizing towns and villages in the countryside and surrounding the city. Mr. Silo said the forces would look to replicate the siege strategy in Raqqa, where Islamic State militants are reported to have spent many months fortifying the city in preparation for a ground assault.

Efforts to retake the Arab-majority city will undoubtedly be complicated by the local population’s distrust of the Kurdish domination of the SDF. Islamic State has been feeding residents’ fears that Kurdish militants will displace them and commit wartime abuses, reflecting an ethnic rivalry that has played out across northern Syria.

The U.S.-backed SDF has been accused of abuses by Arab civilians across northern Syria, including arbitrary arrests and displacing Arab populations in the name of rolling back Islamic State.

That has resulted in local residents joining the extremist group in recent months, giving urgency for the need to create an Arab force to take Raqqa itself or to bolster Arab representation in the operation.

Mr. Silo said the forces involved in the Raqqa battle represented Syria’s many ethnic groups, including Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen.

Write to Raja Abdulrahim at raja.abdulrahim@wsj.com, Maria Abi-Habib at maria.habib@wsj.com and Dion Nissenbaum at dion.nissenbaum@wsj.com
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During Mosul Offensive, Kurdish Fighters Clear Arab Village, Demolish Homes
Kurdish officials cite Islamic State sympathizers and booby-trapped houses in defending expulsions and demolitions

By Margherita Stancati and  Ali A. Nabhan
Wall Street Journal
Nov. 14, 2016

QOTAN, Iraq—Before dawn on Oct. 21, as Iraqi forces pressed their offensive against Islamic State in nearby Mosul, more than a dozen militants from the group entered this mostly Arab village in Kirkuk province and claimed control in a message blared through the mosque’s loudspeaker, say eyewitnesses. Hours later, Kurdish fighters who intervened to liberate the village expelled its residents and began demolishing their homes.

Kurdish forces in Iraq are taking a lead role in fighting Islamic State. But in the process, the Kurds are evicting hundreds of Sunni Arabs and destroying their houses, say residents, local officials and rights groups. That practice has fueled resentment among the local Arab population and risks breathing new life into the insurgency just as a U.S.-backed government offensive pushes into Mosul, the Sunni extremist group’s last major stronghold in Iraq.

“They are forcing the Arabs out of the village,” said a Qotan resident, Ismail al Anizi, speaking on the edge of the village of some 100 houses, almost all of them now flattened, including his own.

The latest wave of demolitions and expulsions by Kurdish authorities occurred in Kirkuk city and nearby villages after Islamic State mounted a failed attempt to capture the provincial capital last month, on the same day its fighters entered Qotan.

Since then, Kurdish forces have expelled 170 Arab families from their homes in the city, and another 450 families from Qotan and two other nearby Arab-majority towns, said Ismail al-Hadidy, a leader of the Arab community in Kirkuk. Over 100 houses were demolished, according to Mr. Hadidy and rights groups.

“The Kurds made a big mistake, and it is affecting relations between them and the Arabs,” he said. “If ISIS tried to attack Kirkuk after what happened, the Arab reaction would have been different—they would have supported ISIS,” using an acronym for Islamic State.

Kurdish officials have said the expulsion of Arabs and the demolition of homes is because many residents are sympathizers of the group and to protect against potential Islamic State booby traps. Kurdish authorities have also said they are pushing back against Saddam Hussein’s Arabization of what they consider to be historically Kurdish areas.

In a report released Sunday, Human Rights Watch documented the demolition by Kurdish forces of Arab homes in 20 towns and villages in northern Iraq between September 2014 and May 2016. Satellite imagery provides evidence of destruction in another 62 villages. The report found the destruction typically happened after the battles had ended and the militants fled, and that in some cases it affected villages not captured by Islamic State.

“Marginalization, displacement and detentions are what gave birth to ISIS,” said Salih al-Mutlaq, a senior Sunni politician and former deputy prime minister in Baghdad, referring to the events in Kirkuk, a region with a mixed Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen population. “The post-ISIS era will be no less dangerous if this situation continues.”

Iraqi Kurds, who already enjoy a large degree of autonomy in their northern region, have consolidated their control of the contested oil-rich region of Kirkuk since 2014, when Islamic State captured much of the country’s north.

The recent expulsions and demolitions that took place in Kirkuk—many of them affecting Sunni Arabs previously displaced by Islamic State violence—are perhaps the most egregious examples to date of a practice many worry is a deliberate attempt to alter the area’s demographic makeup.

“If confirmed, this may constitute collective punishment. That is a line you cannot cross,” said Lise Grande, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator for Iraq.

Kurdish authorities said the destruction of homes were an unfortunate, but necessary, consequence of war. Kemal Kirkuki, who commands Kurdish Peshmerga forces in the region, said Arab homes in the villages of Qotan and Qoshkaya had to be emptied because many of the residents were Islamic State sympathizers.

“We are sorry about it because not all of them were guilty. We weren't discriminatory toward Arabs. But we had to do it for security reasons,” Mr. Kirkuki said.

Such practices extend beyond Iraq. In neighboring Syria, where a battle is under way to isolate and eventually retake Islamic State’s stronghold Raqqa, the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-dominated force leading the offensive has stirred similar concerns.

The Syrian Kurdish militia, the YPG, has expelled Arabs and ethnic Turkmen from large parts of northern Syria, which residents and rights activists say is linked to efforts to create a semiautonomous Kurdish region inside the country.

In Qotan, Kurdish security forces drove Islamic State out of town in a matter of hours, residents said. After that, they rounded up all male residents over the age of 18, detained them and took them to a camp for internally displaced people on the outskirts of Kirkuk. Kurdish forces then brought in bulldozers and demolished most houses. Those still standing in the ruined landscape are marked with graffiti: “Attention: This is a Kurdish house.”

Several residents of Qotan and of two other affected villages acknowledged some of the villagers had left to join Islamic State in 2014, but say they have cooperated with Kurdish authorities, for instance alerting them of the group’s incursion into Qotan last month. They say they are being collectively punished because of the bad behavior of a few.

After Kurdish forces on Oct. 23 told the inhabitants of nearby Qara Tappa to leave their homes and relocate to a camp for the internally displaced, many refused.

“We left the village and moved to an open area [nearby] with our animals,” said one resident, 48-year-old Sukaina al Hamdani. “The decision to displace us from our village only fuels extremism and pain.”

—Raja Abdulrahim in Beirut, Ben Kesling in Erbil, Iraq, and Ghassan Adnan in Baghdad contributed to this article.
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Kurds Declare ‘Federal Region’ in Syria, Says Official
Declaration comes from group excluded from peace talks

By Matt Bradley,  Ayla Albayrak and Dana Ballout
Wall Street Journal
March 24, 2016

BEIRUT—Representatives from Syria’s Kurdish region on Thursday said they would form a new federal system of governance, giving a more unified voice to Syrian Kurdish demands for greater autonomy.

Delegates from the three Kurdish regions in northern Syria made the declaration at a conference outside the city of Hasakah, said Idris Nassan, a Syrian Kurdish politician.

The declaration set out terms for a regional Kurdish self-governance, but stopped short of declaring complete independence for Syrian Kurds, who already have substantial autonomy from the Syrian regime.

Many Kurds hope the announcement, which came as Syria’s warring parties are meeting in Geneva to negotiate a political solution to their five-year conflict, will set the stage for the kind of semiautonomous Kurdish region that the Kurdish minority enjoys in neighboring Iraq.

But the Kurds’ proposal, which was supported by selected Arab and Turkmen representatives at the conference, was immediately rejected by the Syrian regime, opposition groups and the U.S.

“We’ve been very clear that we won’t recognize any kind of self-autonomous—or self-rule, semiautonomous zones in Syria,” said Mark Toner, a deputy State Department spokesman.

But the Kurds seemed confident of being able to gain U.S. support. The U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State has helped support and supply Kurdish fighters.

“We believe we will eventually have good relations with the U.S. The U.S. has their own strategy, and their attitude has been clear since the beginning of the revolution,” said Mustafa Bali, a Kurdish journalist who was also following the conference on Wednesday.

Kurds say this move unified the Kurdish-controlled regions in northern Syria, currently divided into three administrative parts, creating a federal region they called “Rojava in Northern Syria,” and may be the first step toward a Kurdish federal system within the country. Rojava is a Kurdish word that refers to the three distinct enclaves under Kurdish control in northern Syria: Jazira, Kobani and Afrin.

Details of how the federal system would govern itself, or to what extent it would answer to Damascus, haven’t been determined, Mr. Nassan said.

The Kurds said they would next seek international recognition for the federal region, and try to gain military support from the U.S. for a campaign that would clear the Turkish border area controlled by Islamic State and opposition rebels to connect Afrin to the rest of the Kurdish-controlled area.

Turkey has repeatedly said it opposes anything that could lead to the creation of a Kurdish state or autonomy along its Turkish-Syrian border, as it remains engaged in a three-decade-long armed conflict with its own Kurdish separatists, and has recently shelled Kurdish militant targets in northern Syria.

Syrian Kurds themselves are divided—while the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party, known by its initials PYD, dominates Kurdish politics, it faces considerable opposition from other parties within the region.

The PYD, which Turkey views as a terrorist organization, was excluded from peace talks at the behest of the Turkish government, which fears an increase in its autonomy could inspire Turkish Kurds to push for more for themselves.

Syrian Kurds have long seen themselves as distinct from greater Syria, but have enjoyed an unprecedented level of autonomy after Syrian government troops began withdrawing from the region in 2012.

Large numbers of Arab residents populate the regions Kurds designate as their own. Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish fighters are widely considered among the most effective paramilitary groups fighting Islamic State in the region, but human-rights groups have accused them of preventing Arabs from returning to liberated areas.

Mr. Nassan said the declared federal region would include several Arab villages that were recently retaken from Islamic State.

Write to Matt Bradley at matt.bradley@wsj.com, Ayla Albayrak at ayla.albayrak@wsj.com and Dana Ballout at dana.ballout@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

An earlier version of this article said Idris Nassan is a member of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party, or PYD. Mr. Nassan is a Kurdish politician but he isn’t currently a member of that party.