MESOPOTAMIA NEWS : Will the PKK use drones very soon ? – By Michael Rubin September 20, 2018 | Washington Examiner
Get ready: The Kurds might soon use drones against TurkeyIn 2013, after months of secret negotiations between imprisoned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan and Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s representatives, Turkey and the PKK agreed to a cease-fire, one condition of which was the departure of PKK fighters from Turkey. As part of that agreement, many entered Syria where they augmented the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the most successful indigenous force first in the fight against the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front and then in the battle against the Islamic State.
Indeed, it was U.S. recognition that the YPG were fighting against ISIS while Turkey was passively if not actively supporting ISIS that led the Obama administration to start partnering with the YPG over the objections of Turkey.
Within Syrian territory the YPG controlled and administered, it established a relatively peaceful region which tolerated religious and ethnic diversity. True, both the PKK in Turkey and the YPG in Syria promote a personality cult around Ocalan and can be politically intolerant of other groups, but that is a problem throughout the region. In terms of both tolerance and personality cult, what occurs in the Syrian Kurdish regions is perhaps less severe than that which exists in Turkey today.
For Erdogan and a long line of Turkish politicians before him, however, the Kurds remain a useful foil to distract from their own failings. So long as Erdogan thought he could cultivate Kurdish votes, he was willing to deal with Kurdish groups. But when he saw that many Kurds put ethnic identity above Islamism and refused to support his Justice and Development Party (AKP), he turned on them with a vengeance.
In January, Turkish forces invaded Afrin, a Syrian border district controlled by the YPG. Ostensibly, the reason was counterterrorism. This was nonsense, however, as Turkish authorities could not name a single terrorist incident originating in Afrin: Turkey’s real policy was ethnic cleansing. Turkish forces killed hundreds if not thousands of Kurdish civilians, looted their property, and allowed radical Islamist militias to replace the YPG in the region. Since the consolidation of Turkish control over Afrin, Erdogan has signaled his intention to take his anti-Kurdish ethnic cleansing campaign further, including east of the Euphrates River where U.S. forces continue to partner with Syrian Kurds.
Turkey is also using unmanned aerial vehicles to target Kurdish leaders. Last month, a Turkish drone killed İsmail Ozden, a PKK leader spearheading protection of the Yezidi community in Sinjar as the religious minority recovers from ISIS ( and Turkish) persecution.
The question Erdogan specifically and Turkey more broadly seem unprepared to consider, however, is not whether but how soon it will be before those whom Turkey attacks with unmanned aerial vehicles use the same technology.
Disclaimer: To address the question as an analyst is not to advocate for such action, even if the Turkish government and state media conflate the two.
The reality is that UAV technology is proliferating rapidly. And the history of the PKK is that it has always found foreign sponsors to help it wage its insurgency. Despite the conspiracies that exist as to U.S. or Israeli support for the PKK, there is a reason why the group almost exclusively uses Russian weapons today. As states maneuver for power in the region, almost any one of Turkey’s neighbors might calculate it to be in their interest to share UAVs with the Kurds, if the YPG is not able to cobble together crude drones on its own. For the PKK or its various offshoots to use drones against Turkey would in many ways be easier than Turkish targeting of PKK fighters in the mountains of Iraq or villages of Syria for the simple reason that both Turkish bases inside Turkey and government offices are large and stationary (Erdogan’s new palace, for example, is 30-times the size of the White House). And it makes strategic sense given the overwhelming firepower and numbers the Turkish army has brought to bear on both Kurdish towns and fighters.
Simply put, Turkey may believe it has a qualitative military edge over the Kurds but it would be foolish for Ankara to assume that such an advantage is perpetual. The dawn of PKK and YPG drones may be sooner than Turkey realizes.