It would have escaped my attention if I had not followed the Twitter accounts of two terrorism experts. One from T\u00fcrkiye, Nihat Ali \u00d6zcan of the think tank\u00a0TEPAV, and the other from the US, Bruce Hoffman from Georgetown University. Both drew attention to the fact that The Washington Post, in the caption of the photo used in the article it published on its second page on January 28, wrote that US Special Forces were providing military training to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party (PKK)- by its own name, not as the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), PYD or YPG.
\nThe Washington Post article is not about Syria, ISIS, or the PKK. Its title is \u201cWomen in Special Forces Face Obstacles Despite Order for Full Integration\u201d. The article describes the sexual discrimination and harassment female soldiers and officers face in the US Special Forces. The article uses the photo you see above, apparently taken in Syria last September, with the following caption: \u201cUS forces providing military training to the PKK, Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party in September. Women in elite U.S. military units still face obstacles despite an order years ago to integrate Special Forces.\u201d
\nTerrorism scholars alerted
\nBruce Hoffman wrote the following on his Twitter account:
\n\u2022 \u201cLook at the caption of this photo on p. 2 of today\u2019s WaPo. Does US SOF really \u201cprovide military training\u201d to the\u2002PKK\u2013a group listed as a foreign terrorist\u00a0organization by the US State Dept since 1997??? I think\/hope that it is the Kurdish forces in the YPG or SDF.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nihat Ali \u00d6zcan retweeted a tweet by another security expert, Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute, who quoted Hoffman. Doran wrote the following:
\n\u2022 \u201cThe Washington Post committed a \u201cKinsley gaffe\u201d \u2014 it stated a truth about the\u00a0YPG (namely, that it is the PKK) which the paper, in deference to American officials, would normally prefer to hide.\u201d
\nYou may call it a Freudian slip; in Turkish, we say a \u201cslip of the tongue\u201d, or more colloquially \u201cAllah made you say it\u201d.
\nPerhaps because of this warning from prominent security scholars, the newspaper\u00a0did not use the same photo\u00a0in the Joe Davidson bylined story\u2019s internet edition; they used an aerial photo of the Pentagon.
\nSDF is a US Special Forces invention
\nIn September-October 2014, US President Barack Obama decided to cooperate with the PYD, the Syrian branch of the PKK, and its armed forces, the YPG, against ISIS in Syria, rather than with its NATO ally T\u00fcrkiye, after\u00a0a bitter disagreement\u00a0with Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, who had just been elected President in August.
\nThere was a serious problem: The US declared the PKK a terrorist organization in 1997, during the Bill Clinton administration. The PKK was established in 1978 by Abdullah \u00d6calan as a Marxist-Leninist armed organization aimed at carving an independent Kurdish state out of territories of T\u00fcrkiye, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, claiming more than 60 thousand lives so far. It was a joint CIA-M\u0130T (Turkish National Intelligence Organization) operation that led to the capture of \u00d6calan in the Greek Embassy in Kenya in 1999 and brought him to T\u00fcrkiye where he is serving his life sentence. In the US intelligence reports presented to Congress, it was\u2002openly written and discussed\u00a0that the PYD and YPG were the Syrian branches of the PKK. The Pentagon could not get money from Congress to cooperate with the PKK and its affiliates, which the State Department and the CIA considered terrorists.
\nBrett McGurk, Obama\u2019s coordinator for the fight against ISIS, and Raymond Thomas, the Special Forces commander, came up with a daring idea. They called YPG people and\u2002told them to change their names. \u201cThe next day they showed up with the name Syrian Democratic Forces,\u201d Thomas said years later at the Aspen Forum, \u201cand they added the word \u2018democratic\u2019.\u201d
\nPKK and SDF are affiliated
\nIt is also interesting that US officials are still repeating the policy of separating the PYD\/YPG from the PKK. This clearly does not affect Ankara, or the PKK based in the Kandil Mountains in Iraq. But it clearly resonates in European democracies, from Germany to Sweden, where PKK lobbies are influential, and provides material against objections of Ankara as \u201cWe are against the PKK, but YPG and SDF are different\u201d rhetoric.
\nSweden\u2019s problems today regarding its NATO application, which was made from fear of Russia, show this. A fascist politician\u2019s\u00a0burning of a copy of Muslim\u2019s Holly Book\u00a0of Koran came on top of this, but Sweden\u2019s decision to put its NATO application in the fridge has also something to do with its fear of the possibility of the PKK stirring up trouble in Sweden than the threat of Russia. They, too, are trying to cling to the \u201cPKK is one thing, YPG, SDF is another\u201d narrative against Turkey, which has no real-life equivalent.<\/p>\n
Will The Washington Post\u2019s \u201cKinsley gaffe\u201d that PKK militants were provided military training by US Special Forces lead to a change in the US policy in Syria which is one of its problems with its relations with T\u00fcrkiye? There is not enough data to claim this, but it can be said that the US will not be able to continue its Syria policy for a long time and will decide to withdraw from Syria at some point, just as it withdrew from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n