The first step is seizing territory, the second step is immobilizing the Kurdish guerilla forces by pushing them into isolated regions. Their aim is to confine the guerilla fighters and our people, those who hold the keys to the mountains, to the valleys. The strategy of claw-lock war holds the goal of locking up the Kurdish revolutionary struggle, be it in the prisons or the mountains.
The colonialist Turkish bourgeois state has launched a new grand-scale occupationist war against the Medya Defense Zones of South Kurdistan. The first steps were taken in the Dohuk Amediyê region on July 3. The Gîre Bahar resistance zone was hit 17 times by warplanes. Since July 10, the war has spread beyond the centers of the Medya Defense Zones to Zap and Metîna. Currently, the war is still ongoing and progressing to new stages.
The fascist Turkish president Erdoğan announced that his government has made detailed plans to end the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê — Kurdistan Workers’ Party), to be realized in 2024. He added that this liquidationist operation will begin in the Medya Defense Zones. The framework for the occupationist war, which has now commenced after long military, logistical and political preparations, was set last April with a series of economic and political agreements between the Turkish state’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and the Iraqi central government. Erdoğan, Fidan, MİT (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilâtı — National Intelligence Organization in Turkey) Director İbrahim Kalın, and Turkish army generals all visited Iraq and South Kurdistan. They signed both open and secret agreements with Iraqi Prime Minister Sudani on issues such as security, energy, transportation, trade, water and more. They went to the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan and made similar agreements with the KDP (Partiya Demokrata Kurdistanê — Democratic Party of Kurdistan; Bourgeois Kurdish party governing the autonomous Kurdistan Region, founded by the Barzanî clan) and Prime Minister Nêçîrvan Barzani, Deputy Prime Minister Mensur Barzanî, and representatives of the Peshmerga (military wing of the KDP). They concretely planned the colonialist Turkish state’s war of occupation in the defense zones.
The most important agreement and factor that preceded this political conjuncture is undoubtedly the Belt Road Project, which is of great strategic importance. This project also includes regional geopolitical goals such as the military offensive on the Medya Defense Zones, the end of the autonomy of Sinjar, the closure of the Maxmur camp and the liquidation of the PKK as a whole. It is clear that the most important goal of the agreement is the liquidation of the defense zones and, in the long term, the Federal Kurdistan. Following these agreements, the war rapidly became imminent. With the support of the Iraqi government and the cooperation of the KDP, the colonialist Turkish state made war preparations from the military bases it established in South Kurdistan on the Zap, Metîna and Amediyê lines towards the defense zones.
The occupying Turkish bourgeois state has completed the final military–logistical preparations of this phase of colonial war within the last two months. It has sent thousands of soldiers with hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and heavy weapons to South Kurdistan. It has continuously increased the military base areas there, built more than 80 military bases and new checkpoints in the Behdinan region, as well as on the main roads. This was undoubtedly part of the preparations. This first step, which aimed to cut off and restrict the relationship between the people of South Kurdistan and the Kurdish freedom movement, as well as inhibit the mobilization of the guerrillas, was followed by new ones.
The method of forcibly evacuating villages and entire regions, which was implemented frequently in North Kurdistan in the 1990s, has been put into comprehensive use in South Kurdistan. Previously used only in a limited way in the context of invasion, village evacuations are now being implemented for the first time in South Kurdistan on this scale. In the last two months alone, approximately 300 villages, including Assyrian villages, have been raided. Return permission is not being given to the displaced inhabitants. Furthermore, certain houses in these villages are being targeted and destroyed.
This last phase of the occupationist war is described as a final war for the Turkish army. The colonial war strategy – which was announced in September 2014 under the name of the Collapse Plan and was put into practice in a major way with the Suruç massacre on July 20 2015 – was defined in the form of two concepts of war. Occupying the Medya Defense Zones on South Kurdistan and establishing permanent military bases and settling there was conceptualized under the name of claw-lock. The first phase of the colonial war was executed according to the ??claw–plan, which aims to first claw and hold on to the Medya Defense Zones. Since 2015, many such attempts have been made in South Kurdistan. However, we know very well that the colonialist Turkish bourgeois state could not achieve the desired result from the this approach. Especially the defeat at the Gare landslide, as well as in Zap and Metîna in the winter of last year broke the claws of the colonial monster. The guerrilla did not allow the fascist war machine to pass. The regime broke all the rules of war to get its claws on the defense zones and defeat the guerrilla. It made constant use of chemical weapons and tactical nuclear bombs. It pushed its capacity to the limit. But all in vain!
The Kurdish guerrilla, with its its war line of dedicated self-sacrifice and creative revolutionary style, left the colonialist helpless and defeated. The guerrilla demonstrated strength and ability that brought down the drones and all other military technological assets of the colonialist Turkish army. In this relentless war process, the guerrilla improved its tactical and technical capacity in terms of quality. It developed its own air weapons and vehicles.
On Newroz 2024, PKK Executive Committee member Murat Karayılan announced that they had developed a weapon that would break the drone system superiority of the Turkish bourgeois state. In the past years, the colonialist Turkish state reduced its own military losses with the aerial combat vehicles of the type UAV-UCAV. It inflicted heavy losses on the freedom movement with treacherous political assassinations. This new war tactic reached a turning point with the air weapons developed by the HPG (Hêzên Parastina Gel — People’s Defense Units; Armed wing of the PKK). Guerrilla warfare also reached a new strategic, tactical and technical dimension.
From the beginning, the colonialist Turkish bourgeois army could not achieve the desired result in the Medya Defense Zones despite its strategic superiority in the air. And while it maintains this superiority in air combat vehicles today, the HPG’s capacity to wage successful war during the harsh winter season, as well as its development of tools that bring down the drones, have forced the colonial army to return to the classical combined air-land approach. It followed a strategy that advanced from the land and aimed at occupying regions and areas. This approach, in which air and land forces are used together, has been put into practice as the second phase of the claw-lock concept.
The last phase of the colonialist occupation war is being described by the Turkish army as a “final war”. The first step is seizing territory, the second step is immobilizing the Kuridsh guerilla by pushing them into isolated regions. Their aim is to confine the guerilla fighters and our people, those who hold the keys to the mountains, to the valleys. The claw-lock strategy holds the goal of locking up the Kurdish revolutionary struggle, be it in the prisons or the mountains.
The betrayal of the KDP plays a very critical role in the new war of occupation of the colonialist Turkish bourgeois army. The KDP is doing everything to eliminate the Medya Defense Zones through military occupation by collaborating with the Turkish bourgeois state. Collaborator Barzanî has been working together with the colonialist Turkish state for decades, advocating enthusiastically for the elimination of the PKK. He provides road construction, logistics and all kinds of needs for it to be based in South Kurdistan and voluntarily carries out intelligence activities against the PKK. He orders ambushes and massacres on guerrilla forces. The collaborator KDP oligarchy is neck-deep in a bloody crime of betrayal in the name of the fundamental policy of uprooting the PKK from South Kurdistan.
The Medya Defense Zones are the center and most advanced outpost of the Kurdish liberation movement and our oppressed peoples, the revolution and war. It is one of the strategic headquarters of the united revolutionary movement of our peoples. These are the free areas of the guerrilla, the apple of the eye of our united revolution. In this context, the Medya Defense Zones and the Rojava revolution represent the most advanced organization and revolutionary achievements of the Kurdish freedom movement on two different levels. It is precisely because of this reality that it is constantly targeted by the colonialists of the region and world reactionaries.
It is precisely because of this that our working-left movement must adopt an anti-colonialist and anti-chauvinist frontline position against the occupation war on South Kurdistan. It must rise up and raise its voice against the colonial unjust war led by the fascist Erdoğan. It must display a clear and frontal attitude and action against the neo-Ottomanist and expansionist colonial occupation war of the collaborationist Turkish bourgeoisie. Our entire working-left movement is once again faced with the task and test of confronting and fighting chauvinism. Undoubtedly, socialists will walk on the line of political agitation and actual legitimate struggle against Turkish chauvinism. It must take on a pioneering role to organize a practice of independent and united struggle once again, in a creative manner. Socialists in Turkey and North Kurdistan and internationalist alike will have to take action to raise the consciousness and action of the peoples for united struggle against the fascist regime. It will strive with all its might to carry political action and agitation to the broadest working and oppressed segments with the slogans “No to colonialist occupation war”, “Turkish Republic get out of South Kurdistan”, “Equality for the peoples, freedom for Kurdistan”.
*Editorial article of the 176th issue of the ATILIM newspaper, Voice of the Working Class and the Oppressed, dated July 19.