AKCAKALE, Turkey — After
receiving a crush of 13,000 Syrian refugees in less than a week, Turkey
on Saturday closed a key border crossing to Syria and complained that a
combined U.S.-Kurdish offensive against the Islamic State was driving
Arabs and Turkmens out of Syria.
With Kurdish forces reported
closing on Islamic State-controlled Tal Abyad, the Syrian town across
from Akcakale, Turkey, the apparently successful offensive against the
extremists has laid bare the clash of interests that has vexed the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State in Syria.

On
Thursday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in one of first
public appearances since his party lost its majority in parliamentary
elections, accused “the West” of killing Arabs and Turkmens in Syria,
and replacing them with Kurdish militia affiliated with the banned
Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK by its initials in Kurdish.
“The West, which has shot Arabs and Turkmens, is unfortunately placing the PYD and PKK in lieu of them,” Erdogan said.
The PYD, or Democratic Union Party, is a Syrian Kurdish political party affiliated with the PKK, which has been declared a terrorist group by both Turkey and the United States. The PYD’s armed wing, the People’s Protection Unit, or YPG,
is credited, along with an intensive U.S. bombing campaign, with
holding off the Islamic State at Kobani after a four-month siege.
Arabs
and Turkmen who’ve fled Syria use more caustic terms to condemn the
Kurdish offensive, which also is backed by U.S. airstrikes. They charge
that YPG militias have stolen their homes and livestock, burned their
personal documents and claimed the land as theirs.
“They forced
us from our village and said to us ‘this is Rojava’,” the term the YPG
uses to describe a swath of territory it claims across northern Syria,
said Jomah Ahmed, 35, a member of the al Baggara tribe. He arrived from
the village of al Fwaida with dozens of members of his extended family
before Turkey closed the border.
“They said ‘Go to the al Badiya
desert, go to Tadmur, where you belong’.” Tadmur, captured last month by
the Islamic State, is more than 100 miles to the southeast of Tal
Abyad.
Tal Abyad won fame in recent months as one of the most
important crossing between Turkey and the Islamic State, which is also
referred to as ISIL and ISIS.
It
was at Tal Abyad that Hayat Boumedienne, the wife of the shooter who
killed four Jews in a Paris grocery in January, disappeared after
fleeing France. It was also the place where the Islamic State delivered 46 Turkish diplomats and three Iraqi employees that its fighters had taken hostage during the capture of Mosul in Iraq a year ago.
Akcakale
(pronounced ak-CHAK-ah-lee) and the surrounding area has become a key
transit point for those seeking to join the Islamic State, despite claims by Turkish officials that they are trying to stanch the flow.
But
the push on Tal Abyad by Kurdish forces with U.S. assistance is
exacerbating long held ethnic resentments. Kurdish residents of northern
Syria have long accused the government in Damascus of taking their land
to accommodate Arab settlers. As long as two years ago, Kurdish activists who took power when the government of President Bashar Assad withdrew vowed to push the Arabs out.
Non-Kurdish
Syrians say that campaign is now under way. They say that the Kurds are
trying to create an autonomous state in northern Syria and that the
United States is helping.
“They told us ‘We have been here
20,000 years. You came only recently from the desert. Go back to your
desert,’ ” said Ibrahim al Khider, an Arab prince who leads a tribe of
16,000 in Deir el Zour province.
Equally bitter, Tarik Sulo, the
spokesman for the Syrian Turkmen community in northern Syria, said the
U.S. bombing support and the YPG ground forces “are changing the
demography of the area in an ethnic cleansing.” He said Turkmen, an
ethnic Turkish minority in Syria, “are losing lands where they have been
living for centuries.”
The YPG captured two Turkmen villages on
Thursday out of 20 with a total populaton of more than 40,000. On
Saturday, its forces were reported to have advanced to the outskirts of
Tal Abyad.
During in interview in Ankara, Sulo showed a McClatchy
special correspondent a photograph now circulating on social media that
shows uniformed YPG fighters forcing an Arab captive to kiss the YPG
flag.
The Syrian Opposition Coalition, the exile grouping the
United States once recognized as the leading anti-Assad political force,
also has accused the YPG of “violations against civilians” in Syria’s
Hasaka province. It said these included systematic displacement of
civilians, compulsory military service for young residents, and
kidnapping civilians “to spread terror among the population.”
The
criticism by Arabs, Turkmens and the Syrian opposition points to the
tactical nature of the U.S.-directed offensive in Syria. The U.S. has
rejected working with moderate anti-Assad rebels and has begun training
Syrians for a new force whose principal mission would be confronting the
Islamic State.
In the meantime, it has found the YPG to be a willing partner whose success in fighting off the Islamic State at Kobani has become a model of sorts for combat operations in northeastern Syria.
But
the U.S.-YPG alliance has triggered harsh criticism from those who say
it shows little regard for the politics and history of the region or the
sensitivities of NATO ally Turkey, which objected last year when the United States dropped weapons and ammunition to YPG fighters at Kobani.
It
also has led to allegations that, with no U.S. troops on the ground to
monitor developments, the YPG, which has its own political agenda, has
been using the offensive to push an anti-Arab campaign. Local
residents have accused the YPG of intentionally misleading American
commanders about conditions at the Syrian town of Bir Mahalli in late
April. A U.S. airstrike there may have killed more than 50 civilians, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
The U.S. Central Command is looking into the allegations that the U.S. is unintentionally furthering ethnic cleansing.
“As
a matter of course, we neither condone any form of ethnic cleansing nor
would we willingly support any such activity,” Air Force Col. Patrick
Ryder, a Centcom spokesman, said Friday. “But we take any such
allegations seriously and will look into them.”
He said
U.S. and other airstrikes in Syria are intended to help operations in
Iraq. He called them “shaping operations, meant to degrade ISIL’s
resources and effectiveness, limit their freedom of maneuver and buy
Iraqi forces additional time and space to regenerate their combat
capability.”
Shrfan Darwish, a YPG spokesman in Kobani,
denied that the militia was conducting “ethnic cleansing.” He said Kurds
in Kobani gave a warm reception to Arabs who’d fled Tal Abyad after the
Islamic State captured the town a year ago.
Serdar Mullah
Darwish, a Kurdish journalist in Hasaka province who is not related to
Shrfan, told McClatchy that Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State
had been joined by some moderate rebels and some Arab tribal forces.
But
he said most residents had left the area because of the fighting and
implied that Arabs who stayed in Tal Abyad had supported the Islamic
State.
“When Kurds fled the city in the summer of 2013, no one
said this was the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds, despite the fact that
all the fighters in the Islamic State were Arabs,” he said.
But refugees who’ve fled to mainly Arab Akcakale just across the border from Tal Abyad tell a different story.
Ahmed,
the al Baggara tribal member from al Fwaida, said Kurdish forces
arrested and beat him for two days and invited him to join them in the
battle against the Islamic State. When he refused, they expelled him and
his family from his village.
But the Salman al Fayyad family, a
14-member extended family, was allowed to stay when they agreed to join
the YPG, he said. If the border were open, tens of thousands more would
leave, said Abdulhamid al Jasem, 25, Ahmed’s cousin.
The situation
is made more complex by the acknowledgment that some residents took
part in Islamic State activities when their villages were captured.
“Many
of our sons got involved with the Islamic State,” said Abu Khaled, 63,
who arrived at Akcakale with his five sons and several dozen
grandchildren. “Some joined Quran sessions, and others took up weapons.”
A
top rebel military official said that if the YPG expulsions continue –
some estimates put the number at 40,000 in Hasaka alone – they will
become a recruiting tool for Islamic State.
“Until now we don’t
know what the coalition wants. Does it intend to fight ISIS or empower
ISIS?” said Gen. Ahmed Berri, the deputy chief of staff of moderate
rebel forces, using an alternative name of the Islamic State.

McClatchy
special correspondent Alhamadee reported from Akcakale, Gutman, from
Istanbul. Special correspondent Duygu Guvenc reported from Ankara.