The second-order effects of the Ukraine war are many, but the one which is among the more significant is how Turkey has leveraged the West’s desire to ramp up its deterrence capabilities by intensifying the crackdown on Kurdish nationalists. Ankara’s opposition to fast-tracking Sweden and Fin- land joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) needs to be seen in this context, as it simultaneously increases the military and political pressure on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the insurgent group which has fought the Turkish state for five decades to secure greater rights for Turkey’s Kurds. According to West Asia expert Ranj Aladdin, the PKK enjoyed a rapid ascension with the onset of the Syrian civil war and Washington’s 2014 decision to partner with its sister organisation to defeat the Islamic State group (IS). The Kurdish question has been a major component of Turkey’s relationship with the European Union and the USA for decades.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has, of course, initiated several military campaigns in Syria’s northeast to suppress the autonomous enclave of the PKK’s sister organization, the Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG), formed during the civil war. Aladdin points out that Turkey may well be blocking the Nato accession applications of Sweden and Finland pend- ing Western backing for its policy of suppressing the Kurdish insurgency. President Erdogan is also thought to be trying to secure other concessions from the West including the lifting of embargoes on Turkey’s defence industry as the price for his support of Nato’s Nordic expansion plans.
Ankara’s opposition to Swedish and Finnish accession to Nato is officially based on both countries’ refusal to extradite PKK members and followers of Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen, placing the Kurdish question front and centre in the West-Turkey relationship. But is the EU-USA combine willing to sacrifice both the Kurds and the fight against IS as it recalibrates its security interests in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? After all, the former allows the West to clip Turkey’s wings as its alleged human rights abuses against the Kurdish minority are routinely highlighted, and the latter’s ideology is an existentialist threat to the Western world. Turkey’s conflict with the PKK has for long played spoilsport in its relationship with Europe and America and the geopolitical flux in West Asia after the 2011 uprisings in the Arab world had already complicated matters. Now, the second-order effects of the Ukraine conflict are also in the mix. What that means for the Kurds is that the hope generated after the 2013 peace process between Turkey and the PKK ~ which was anyway wearing thin following the rise of the YPG in Syria ~ is now firmly a thing of the past.
Ankara, which is already drawing closer to Russia as demonstrated by its purchase of Russian air defence systems, is thought to have conveyed clearly to its Western interlocutors that its security concerns are paramount. Defeating the Kurds remains central to that agenda. It is for the West to decide how to reinforce its deterrence by acting via Nato both in the (Nordic) north and the (Turkish) south of the Euro-pean continent.