HASAKA, Syria — Green drapes were drawn against the sun, cloaking the room where members of a Syrian Kurdish militia huddled around walkie-talkies, assiduously taking down GPS coordinates.
Talal Raman, a 36-year-old Kurdish fighter, worked on a Samsung tablet, annotating a Google Earth map marked with the positions of the deserted apartment buildings and crumbling villas where his colleagues were battling ISIL fighters south of this northern Syrian town. He pinpointed in yellow the positions where his men were hunkered behind a wall, and highlighted in red the coordinates of a building next to a mosque where ISIL fighters had taken cover.
“Our comrades can see the enemy moving at the GPS address I just sent you,” he wrote in Arabic to a handler hundreds of miles away in a U.S. military operations room. Then he waited for the U.S. warplanes to scream in.
The strike that ensued soon after blasted a crater at exactly the coordinates provided by the Kurdish fighter. It left a ring of bodies, including one of an ISIL fighter who died slumped over his AK-47. An urgent message came in from the coalition war room: “Please confirm our comrades are OK?”
The tight coordination of U.S. air power with the militia, known as the YPG, from the Kurdish initials for People’s Protection Units, has dealt the ISIL its most significant setbacks across an enormous strip of northern Syria near the Turkish border in recent months.
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Now, the U.S. air campaign is poised to expand, aided by a deal with Turkey to allow U.S. aircraft to fly bombing missions from bases closer to the border.
Yet at a time when the militia, Americans’ most effective ally in Syria, would otherwise be celebrating the increased help, its members are sounding a note of worry. That is because Turkey is making some moves of its own. Until last month, Turkey had resisted calls to do more to support the fight against the ISIL, mindful that it might further Kurdish ambitions to eventually carve out an independent state. The Kurds, who number roughly 30 million and are spread out over Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, have been described as the world’s largest ethnic group without a homeland.
So even as Turkey agreed to join the fight against ISIL, it immediately began bombarding the mountain camps of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, an insurgent group in Turkey and Iraq that is allied with the YPG.
The Turkish deal with the United States sets up an “ISIS-free” bombardment zone along a 60-mile strip of the border region that features another exclusion: It is also explicitly a zone free of the Kurdish militia, at Turkey’s request, even as the Kurds had begun advancing toward the area to start battling ISIL there.
Despite cooperating with U.S. forces for months, the Syrian Kurds are now starting to worry that their success might not outweigh Turkey’s importance to the United States.
“There is only one group that has consistently and effectively battled ISIS in Syria, and that is the YPG,” said Redur Khalil, a spokesman for the militia who says it has grown to include 35,000 soldiers, roughly 11 years after its start as a self-defense force in a single town.
“Opening another front in the region – as Turkey has by attacking the PKK – will make the forces fighting (ISIL) weaker,” he said, “which in turn makes (ISIL) stronger.”
Cale Salih, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and the author of numerous articles on Kurdish affairs, summed up the unease over the deal with Turkey this way: “If it comes at the price of the relationship with one of the few effective partners on the ground in Syria, it doesn’t seem to make sense.”
U.S. officials have always had to step carefully when cooperating with the Kurdish militia in Syria because of its links to the PKK, which is widely listed as a terrorist group. U.S. officials have acknowledged cooperating with the militia in general terms. In an emailed response to questions, however, the Pentagon would not confirm whether the militia was calling in airstrike coordinates, saying only that it was working with Syrian Kurds as well as other groups.
The United States and members of the militia take pains to note that it is not the same group as the outlawed PKK. But on the ground in northern Syria, the connective tissue is hard to miss. Framed portraits of Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the PKK and champion of Kurdish autonomy, can be seen hanging in the offices and headquarters of the YPG militia. Fighters wear pins bearing his image. In Hasaka, ISIL fighters who are captured on the battlefield end up on gurneys in a hospital adorned with a wall-size portrait of Ocalan, who has been imprisoned since 1999.
“It’s a nonsensical situation where you have PKK fighters who are called ‘terrorists’ if they happen to be on the Iraq or Turkey side of the border,” Salih said. “Yet if the same fighter crosses into Syria, he is now ‘working with the coalition in the battle against the Islamic State.’”
There is growing evidence that large numbers of these fighters are directly joining the fight in Syria, too. Bulent Aliriza, director of the Turkey Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, estimates that thousands have crossed from Turkey to join the Kurdish militia in Syria in fighting ISIL, making the distinction between the two groups even more vague.
As it has captured territory from ISIL, the Kurdish militia has rapidly expanded its territory in northern Syria by more than a third, now controlling more than 11,000 square miles – a ribbon of land roughly the size of Maryland. Across the border, Turkish officials have watched the Kurds’ gains with unease. And the growing cooperation between the United States and the militia has only heightened Turkish concerns, Aliriza said.
That cooperation took off last October, when ISIL almost overran the border town of Kobani, cutting off a unit of Kurdish fighters. A senior Syrian Kurdish official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence details, said he had traveled to Erbil, in northern Iraq, in October to meet with U.S. military commanders. After much negotiation, he said, the Americans agreed to airdrop 27 pallets of weapons and ammunition, supplied by Kurdish officials in neighboring Iraq.
YPG fighters provided the Americans with GPS coordinates of a site in Syria, and approximately 20 metric tons of supplies floated down before dawn on Oct. 19. “And it started from there,” said the official, who explained how that first exchange evolved to include coordination of airstrikes, allowing the militia to take back Kobani, followed by victories in Tal Abyad and, in recent days, most of the province of Hasaka.
All the political complications are troubling to Raman, the radio operator who spends his days behind the green drapes sending in airstrike coordinates. His tools include nothing more than a walkie-talkie, a Samsung tablet and a cellphone, on which he has a screen saver of Ocalan’s face.
He sees himself as a partner of the Western pilots flying warplanes overhead – just as he sees the PKK as his militia’s partner in the fight against ISIL. “If the Turks bomb the PKK, they’re in effect helping (ISIL),” he said.
Here in northern Syria, the battle against ISIL looks like this: Units of YPG fighters driving pickup trucks and minivans flying the group’s yellow banner amass at the front, which is fluid and in some places is leaping forward by as much as 1 mile every day. The Kurds’ uniforms feature Marpat digital patterns, a type of camouflage pioneered by the U.S. Marines, reproduced in a factory here using local cotton and sewn by Kurdish tailors, officials said.
Each fighter is assigned to a platoon of about 30 members. In keeping with Ocalan’s philosophy of gender parity, women are present in large numbers on the battlefield, and portraits of female martyrs adorn almost as many billboards and lamp posts as those of their male colleagues.
It was a female commander who led the battle that unfolded inside a group of empty apartment blocks in the town of Hasaka last week. Black pools of melted plastic and tar lined the road to the area, marking where ISIL suicide bombers had detonated their belts. At a nearby traffic circle, a crane operator was trying to lift an old Soviet-designed T-55 tank recently recovered from ISIL fighters.
If the Turks bomb the PKK, they’re in effect helping (ISIL)
The road turned to dirt, passing abandoned multistory buildings, their walls a Swiss-cheese pattern of holes left by machine-gun fire. Several streets in, a mosque with a green dome shared a wall with a building from which a unit of YPG fighters began taking heavy fire.
Just after 10 p.m. on July 30, a Kurdish fighter radioed the coordinates of the building to Raman. According to the log of the exchange, a few minutes passed before the fighter called again to say he had sight of a group of ISIL fighters.
In his relay station, Raman and his partner jotted down the coordinates: 36 degrees, 28 minutes, 23 seconds north latitude; 40 degrees, 44 minutes, 58 seconds east longitude. They noted the location on a digital map on their tablet computers, as well as in a spiral notebook, decorated with a picture of a smiling baby.
Then they sent the grid via chat to their handlers in the U.S. operations room.
At 10:12 p.m., the coalition sent a message asking for confirmation that the Kurdish militia was still taking fire from the location. Raman answered that it was, before asking: “Is there a fighter jet overhead?”
“Yes, and they’re preparing to strike,” his counterpart replied.
At 10:23, the operations room sent a Google Earth map, showing a large, yellow circle approximately 100 metres to the north of the ISIL target. The official instructed Raman to tell his men to retreat to the circle. “Make sure our comrades are in the yellow, OK?” the official wrote in Arabic.
At 10:34, he stressed: “Can you confirm that they’re inside the yellow? Because the pilot is waiting.”
The countdown began at 10:38 p.m., immediately after Kurdish fighters radioed Raman to say that their colleagues were in the safe zone.
“3 min.,” said the first message from the coalition.
“1 min.”
“30 sec.”
Then: “Strike,” and a request to confirm that Kurds nearby had not been hurt.
Just after midnight, he received one last message saying that the coalition’s aircraft had counted nine bodies.
Later the next day, when New York Times journalists went to the scene of the blast, the mosque was still partly standing, though with part of its dome missing. The GPS coordinates of the strike site exactly matched what Raman sent to the coalition war room. A spokesman for the coalition declined to identify the specific coordinates, saying only that coalition planes had conducted seven airstrikes that day on ISIL targets near Hasaka.
The bodies of the ISIL fighters lay around the 8-foot-deep crater. There were nine in all, some wedged under slabs of concrete. One wore a camouflage vest. Another died within reach of his rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
Bullet casings littered the ground like confetti.
Anne Barnard contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.