The situation on the other front of the Afrin war

There is no need to deliberate at length as to the outcome of the joint operation launched last Friday against Afrin by the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) and their allies, the Free Syrian Army. Any observer who is sufficiently aware of the massively disproportionate force confronting the YPG in Afrin and capable of reading a map can predict that the TAF will win in military terms. Afrin is a tiny region besieged by the TAF on all sides except the south-east. There is absolutely no strategic depth that affords the YPG any defensive advantage. Afrin’s relatively rough terrain does not afford an important advantage to the YPG. Even if the YPG is presumed to have the will to fight, it is impossible for these lightly armed elements to stand ground against the TAF’s far superior firepower. They will thus confront the war in built-up areas and try to keep it as far away as possible.
This prediction means we need to think about the war’s other front.
The name of this front is “public relations.”
There are two fields: domestic and foreign.
Domestically, things are relatively trouble-free for Ankara. They control the media, anyway. There is no environment of free debate over the Afrin operation. Under such conditions, the rulership’s propaganda instruments will function effectively. The rulership will in some way procure the hoped-for benefit from the Afrin operation in terms of its own political calendar.
The “foreign front” on the public relations’ front is world public opinion, exceptionally problematic for Turkey.
Two factors sit on the scales.
The first factor is the perception of Turkey that has worsened in disastrous proportions in recent years. Above all, the image of those in government has taken a big hit. As to the reasons, these are known: Turkey’s retreat at astonishing speed from democracy, freedoms, the rule of law and secularism, and dash towards religious authoritarianism.
The upshot of this is that Turkey has lost its soft power. Hence, Ankara lacks the capacity to ensure that world public opinion thinks and opines like it.
It conducts its policies, if there are any, with hard power.
The factor on the other tray of the scales is the PYD/YPG.
Both its roots and ideology, and the organic ties between it and the PKK, merit its description as being the “PKK’s extension in Syria.”
It was thus an inevitable consequence of the hard stance that Ankara adopted politically vis a vis the PKK issue as of mid-2015 that the turn would come of the “extension in Syria” when conditions dictated.
A further aim of this operation is to eliminate a perceived potential threat from the “PKK’s extension” in Afrin before it springs into action. The logic is simple: the hard thing, though, is to convince the world that Afrin posed a clear and imminent threat to Turkey prior to the operation.
Ankara was more advantageously positioned on the public relations front of “Euphrates Shield” because at that time the main element that was being fought was the globally cursed Islamic State.
In Afrin, the TAF and its allies are not, however, confronting Islamic State, but the Kurdish PYD/YPG organisation. Let me reiterate as to the difference: the PKK is present on the US and EU’s list of terrorist organisations, but the PYD/YPG is not. In fact, in the war against Islamic State in Syria, the US’s ally on paper was not the PKK, but the PYD/YPG under the umbrella of the Syrian Democratic Forces.
The PYD/YPG in Afrin and the PYD/YPG in the region stretching from the east of the Euphrates to the Iraqi border were to all extents and purposes the same organisation, but were subject to two different geopolitical realities. The PYD/YPG in Afrin was in the Russian’s playing field and the other was under US patronage. Indeed, four days prior to the Afrin operation, it was stated in a comment made by a Pentagon spokesperson to the Anadolu Agency that they did not see the YPG in Afrin as a member of the anti-Islamic State coalition, did not support them and had established no relations with this element.
However, on 20 January after the operation had commenced, the headline of a report on the New York Times’ website contradicted this Pentagon pronouncement.
The headline read: “72 Turkish jets bomb US-backed Kurdish militias.”
All of a sudden, the unrelated YPG in Afrin became “US-backed Kurdish militias.”
If this attitude does not remain restricted to a single report and turns into a position, this could lead to the perception taking root in the world that Turkey is staging a military operation against Kurdish militias who are US allies in the war against Islamic State.
More significantly, Afrin is a region with a majority Kurdish population.
As the death toll amid conflict in built-up areas increases, so the blame game will hot up. Ankara will accuse the YPG of using civilians as shields and the YPG will hold Ankara responsible for the civilian deaths.
Additionally, a Kurdish refugee problem which is calling out for measures to be taken now is waiting at the doorstep.
As the TAF’s success will come with ending the war with the lowest possible number of casualties, it will prolong the operation and, the more it does so, the harder things will get on the “public relations front”.
One day after the Afrin operation commenced, France’s convening an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council in view of this is just one harbinger of the impending difficulties.