A recent analysis by Ezda Deniz Stara examines the historical roots of the Kurdish question in the Middle East and discusses why the region, and Syria in particular, have become a centre of war. She also discusses how the model proposed by imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan can show a way out of the wars and conflicts and towards self-determination for the different peoples there.
“The ideological and political struggle against disinformation is as important as the military resistance. We must not forget that we are facing special warfare in an unprecedented way. […] The Kurds have to deal with every moment and every phenomenon with a deeply strategic, long-term, in-depth and common Kurdish mind. Because what the Kurds have to lose or gain is their very selves,” argues political analyst Ezda Deniz Stara in a recent analysis for Özgür Politika, published on 16 January 2025.
In her analysis, Stara examines the historical roots of the Kurdish question in the Middle East and discusses why the Middle East, and Syria in particular, have become the centre of the Third World War, which she says is taking place because of the conflicting interests of the world powers in the Middle East.
Stara outlines how the model proposed by imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan can show a way out of the wars and conflicts in the region and towards self-determination for the different peoples living there, in the context of recent meetings with Öcalan and his perspectives for a peaceful solution to Turkey’s Kurdish question, which are currently under discussion in the country’s political circles.
Here is the full analysis, slightly edited for clarity:
World War I, which we can also call the war of partition of the Middle East, started with the Sèvres and Sykes Picot agreements, aimed at the establishment of Armenian, Greek and Kurdish states as well as Arab nation-states, and ended with the genocide of the Armenians and the Greeks and the Treaty of Lausanne. The Treaty of Lausanne divided the Kurds into four parts. More precisely, World War I had not really ended, it was suspended due to the new real conditions that emerged and World War I was resumed in different ways. World War III, so-called, is actually the contemporary version of World War I. We should ask ourselves the question, “Why did they make such a dramatic change and abandon Sèvres for the Treaty of Lausanne?” Without finding a real answer to this question, we cannot fully explain the current process we are going through.
Britain initially initiated the Lausanne process based on its plan for the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the partition of Anatolia. However, as a result of the negotiations between Turkish state officials and the US, US President Woodrow Wilson persuaded the UK to embrace a project of “a Turkish state in Anatolia”, and as a result of this, instead of the Sèvres plan, the UK drew up the “Homogeneous Turkish State” report and its “Report for the protection of imperial interests: Asiatic Turkey” dated 1915. This process was determined by the decision to establish the state of Israel in return for a smaller Turkish state. The plan was the key to the Lausanne Treaty, and the Turkish state authorities gave up the common republic and its common borders, which they had established with the Kurds at the congresses of Sivas and Erzurum, and agreed to the division of Kurdistan into four parts. Russia, too, took the Lausanne system as a means of addressing state security concerns, and as a result of its relations with Turkey and Iran, became a defacto party to the agreement. The Kurds’ lack of unity prevented them from seeing and overturning this plan, or complaining to the outside world, and forced them to look at things from the point of view of overcoming the worst aspects of their suffering. However, the Kurds’ lack of unity was not the main factor for the creators of [the Treaty of] Lausanne; it is important not to be overwhelmed by the “unity” explanation of the state powers, that used a treaty to bring to the Middle East a tribe that was scattered all over the world. What we should not forget or what we should take away from this is the fact that promising projects can change catastrophically in chaotic situations. In this sense, caution should be treated as a safety valve.
Guardianship states
World War III refers to a new plan to share out the world centered on the Middle East and the conflicts and new design based on it. In other words, it describes a style in which the East and the West radically contradict and clash with regard to the sharing-out, as they did during World War I and World War II, but in the form of guardianship states.
For both poles, Syria was the place where they could make or break the change, and in practice Syria became their headquarters, and this situation is likely to continue for some time yet.
A rupture is occurring!
Within this picture, the astonishing emergence of ISIS in the last 12 years and the subsequent Hamas attack of 7 October have been used [as a pretext] for taking to the field and settling in there in the shape of headquarters. It was Turkey that founded ISIS and Turkey was the country that provoked Hamas into the attack of 7 October. Care should be taken most importantly to bear in mind that it was through Turkey that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) prepared for regime change in Syria.
In reality, they [the international powers] gave unprecedented support to Turkey by allowing the invasion of South Kurdistan, Efrîn [Afrin], Serêkaniyê [Ras al-Ayn] and Girê Spî [Tell Abyad]. Moreover, they gave Turkey a strategic military role in the wars in Libya and Montenegro. This is because Turkey’s military deployment in Libya, Montenegro and Kurdistan is in line with NATO’s long-term aim to contain the Shiite Crescent. However, we also see that there has been a rupture between Turkey, the NATO states and Israel in the last two years. The rupture is related to the so-called IMEC [India – Middle East – Europe Economic Corridor] and the David Corridor [connecting Israel to Iraq] projects.
An agreement was reached at the G20 summit in India in 2023 on a rail and port network to connect the Middle East to Europe. As an alternative to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, this economic corridor, jointly announced by the leaders of the US, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, France, Germany, Italy and the European Union, will connect India to the Middle East. Europe covers Asia and the Middle East with this agreement. Turkey was not included in the project and objected with the statement “The most suitable route for East-West traffic should pass through Turkey”. Then, with Russian-Iranian support, it quickly established the “Development Road Project [connecting Asia wirth Europe through Turkey]” and the Ankara-Baghdad agreement. However, the real breakdown is related to Turkey’s failure to get exactly what it wanted in the David Corridor project.
David Corridor Project
The David Corridor is the name of the project that aims to encircle the Shiite Crescent and Israel’s security-transportation-commercial expansion along the Lebanon-Jordan-Syria line, including Rojava [Kurdish-led North and East Syria], to Iraq and Iran. The Middle East is a region where states are established by metaphysical methods. The Jews are a nation that has gone further and established the nation as well as the state by metaphysical methods. For this reason, they strategically plan for a thousand years with the short-term consciousness of one year. So, the name David is a very specially chosen one for the corridor project. The prophet David was a musician, a shepherd and a commoner, famous for his skill in hunting with a slingshot. David becomes a hero when he kills the Arab emir Goliath, the enemy of the Jews, in battle. He is the father of the prophet Solomon, he was given the book (Zabur [Dawud]) after the Torah, he united the Israelites, conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital, and his methods of worship were those that had the greatest influence on Islam. The prophet David has deep meaning for the Jews; he is an image that shows that the oppressors who terrorise them are very weak, and that even teenagers can defeat them when God wants them dead. Because God put the death of the tyrant dictator in David’s hands when he was still a teenager. Such an Israelite mind is the metaphysical subtext of the David Corridor Project.
Turkish corridor, not David corridor
The realisation of the David Corridor Project, which has long been on the agenda, kicked in immediately with the regime change in Syria. In other words, Israel has started the process of direct military expansion. Although this is a process that has developed as a result of a joint strategy between Turkey and Israel, relative contradictions have arisen between them since Turkey’s demands for the occupation of Rojava and South Kurdistan [the Kurdish-majority regions of Syria], and genocide of the Kurds have not been fully approved. They actually met Turkey’s demands with their plan to pull the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to the east of the Euphrates, the victory in Aleppo and the occupation of Manbij (Minbîc), but they do not want to lose the Kurds completely due to the resistance of the Kurds and the SDF, the influence of the Kurds of the North [Turkish Kurdistan] and Rojhilat [Iranian Kurdistan] on the future, and the imminent Iranian war. Turkey’s intention to commit genocide in Rojava [North and East Syria] and annex South Kurdistan [Iraqi Kurdistan] via Kirkuk and Mosul is completely unacceptable to Israel for this reason: that if this were the situation, it would be the Turkish corridor rather than the David corridor that would come into being.
The first and second Lausanne…
Israel’s genocide in Gaza after the Hamas attack of 7 October, its military expansion into Lebanon and Syria and its strategic relations and agreements with Sunni Arab states are a declaration of a new empire in the Middle East. The powers that accepted the dismemberment of Kurdistan and the establishment of the new Turkish state in return for the establishment of Israel in Lausanne a hundred years ago, have now intervened in Syria through the process of a new Lausanne agreement and the acceptance of Israel’s empire in the Middle East. For Turkey, this means loss of power and the transfer of its strategic role in the Middle East, where it has been NATO’s guardian for a hundred years, to Israel. This is the reason for the contradictions Turkey is experiencing in the designs in which it participated in agreement with Israel, because it is having difficulty in realising the occupation [in northern Syria] in the form it wants for the Kurdish genocide. Relatively, Russia and Iran have lost at this stage, but in the long term they will re-enter the field with new balances of power. It is always necessary to calculate the depth of the forces of the status quo. And in the long term, Turkey will establish a new strategic balance with these forces with the intent of Kurdish genocide.
The process is that of the 2nd Lausanne, and in this chaotic process, it is conceivable that any possibility may become the only option. The “Kurdish Trap” set by the Lausanne Treaty has created so many complex power balances and parameters that the international powers can at any time choose the option that is less costly for them. In other words, they can agree with the Turks on genocide. Despite certain contradictions, Turkey is a NATO state, and in the new era, it may even be willing to submit to Israel in all matters and risk open war against Iran in exchange for the exclusion of the Kurds. In other words, it can persuade the international powers to more actively support the plan, based in Hewler [Erbil] and limited by Qamişlo [Qamishli], to liquidate the SDF and replace it with the ENKS [Kurdish National Council of Syria] peshmerga [fighters]. And this is the plan that has been realised so far. It was the SDF’s resistance in Tishreen (Tişrîn) that thwarted the plan. Most importantly, in the current chaos, while each power builds its own project on the denial of the existence of others, the solution of the democratic nation, democratic confederalism and women’s liberation is rising as the only project that responds to this change. While the 1st Lausanne was the founding treaty of the nation-states, the 2nd Lausanne is developing federative structures according to the transcendence of nation-states and their needs. For this reason, the 50-year Kurdish struggle for freedom is the most prepared for this change, and they are the most energised people. The power that the Kurds represent, the basic objective power they have gained, is the paradigm of the leader [the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan] and the social modernity of the new time.
War and negotiation
The leader’s meeting with the [shuttle] delegation in this [negotiation] process, his inviting of the Turkish state to the axis of democratic solution and initiation of the discussion of the solution within Turkey require us to re-evaluate the history of the Middle East, the history of Kurdistan and the reality of the “Kurdish Trap”, which is equated with the Lausanne treaty, in great depth. The leader positions the Kurds strategically within these new developments and possibilities. “Freedom” and “Security” must be established in such a way that they support each other. There is a great danger that the world and the regional states, which have been using the Kurdish question in every way for a century, will re-instrumentalise the Kurds, reduce them to a tactical element, make them hostile to their environment and make them abandon it. Both nationally and regionally, the leader built the strategy on the basis of reducing the numbers of enemies of the Kurds, making them a strategic power and developing their own solution. In other words, he built freedom with constant security. It is not possible for a nation that cannot develop its own solution to become a strategic power and avoid being used. The leader’s ability to untangle the knotted and locked places in history has brought the Kurds to today’s level. We are in a period when war and negotiations must accompany each other. In this sense, the Kurdish people have to bring to life the dialectic of war and struggle and talks with the leader, in a highly competent manner within the relationship of freedom and security.
History turns the wrong way
The strategic intelligence and tactical creativity of the leader is well known by the enemy. So having put dangerous disinformation into action, he has also shown how he will evaluate the process. The participation of all sectors in this disinformation provides important data about the process. Disinformation is developing in a way to serve the plan we explained above in the form of genocide and the liquidation of the SDF, and its replacement with collaborators. For this reason, the ideological and political struggle against disinformation is as important as the military resistance. We must not forget that we are facing unprecedented special warfare. The multiplication of possibilities and parties and the strengthening of the hand with multiple policies against imposed unilateralism and single choice is also a requirement of international politics. And the Kurds have to deal with every moment and every phenomenon with a deeply strategic, long-term, in-depth and common Kurdish mind. Because what the Kurds have to lose or gain is their very selves. The most important victory of this process is that the Kurds have attained the power of “Strategic Reason”, of which the leader has often spoken, and proved their maturity. We are eternally grateful to our martyrs and to our leader for breaking the wheel of history that turned the wrong way for the Kurds, and placing the Kurdish wheel on the path of history, moving forward into the future.
This article written by Ezgi Stara Deniz was originally published by Medyanews.