Joey Lawrence, a portrait photographer and war documentarian, discusses his 2015 trip to the Kurdistan region of Iraq and Syria, where he lived among the hospitable Kurdish people and photographed the men and women who are fighting against ISIS.
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Okay, good.
All right, introducing Joey Lawrence.
He is a portrait photographer, but more than that, he's a war photographer now, and he's done two documentary films.
I guess the latest is not out quite yet, but I've seen it.
It's called Kurdistan at First Light, Armed Struggle Against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
And in 2015, I guess starting in 2015, Joey went to Rojava, which is what they call independent, at least pseudo for now, independent Syrian Kurdistan there, and the YPG fighters.
And he made these films and took a lot of pictures, and you can find his website at joeyl.com.
A lot of great stuff there.
Welcome to the show, Joey.
How are you doing?
Hey, pleased to be with you, Scott.
And now, I guess the first one is available online, right?
Guerrilla fighters I have here, Guerrilla Fighters of Kurdistan, people, you can watch that on Vimeo.
Yeah, so yeah, that first video was a big experiment, and I had filmed myself behind the scenes while working on some photo projects, and all the mixed media sort of made that first video.
But the one I'm working on now, I guess, is a part two or that kind of style, but taken more seriously, and we're kind of polishing up the last steps on the new film now.
Yeah.
Well, it's very enlightening.
You know, maybe there's been a lot of good journalism out of Rojava, supposedly, so-called Rojava, but I sure haven't seen it.
But then again, who can keep up with all the different sides of this thing?
But in Syria and Kurdistan, in fact, let's start with that.
Can you explain to people, you know, more or less, where these YPG fighters fall in the scheme of things, as far as whose side they're on, or not necessarily allied with, but actually allied with, de facto allied with, and who all they're fighting?
Because it sure is a hell of a mess.
We're talking about the very northern part of, I guess, northeastern, mostly, part of Syria on the Turkish border, right?
Yeah, sure.
So I think Rojava, and as you say, it's a de facto autonomous zone that was declared.
I think it's actually one of the few places inside Syria that journalists or photographers like myself can actually work safely these days.
You know, we've had a lot of people go missing in Idlib province, you know, working with FSA groups or Al-Nusra groups and things like that.
So it's one of the very few kind of safe zones for us.
So the beginning, I mean, I think YPG, or now, as they call their coalition, SDF, Syrian Democratic Forces, is probably one of the most misunderstood groups in the entire Syrian civil war.
And that's saying a lot, because most groups are misunderstood.
But basically, after the Syrian army retreated from those areas in 2011, 2012, different small Kurdish groups started defending their own neighborhoods.
And they had little small groups, similar to how FSA works, where it's not a umbrella, unanimous coalition all working together, but they're just kind of people that are armed and fighting for their own houses.
At the same time, you had a lot of political dissidents that were associated with the PYD party also moved back to Syria to kind of do the same thing.
The regime had left, which had outlawed them.
And they started organizing things politically and getting guns on the black market, as well as PKK members who had been in Kandil, northern Iraq before, also started making their way home in the same way to defend their neighborhoods.
So there's a lot of Syrian Kurds that are part of the PKK that had armed training.
And they went back and they sort of brought a lot of their ideology and a lot of the things that they learned in Kandil with the PKK, and they started unifying all these small individual fighting factions into what is known as the YPG.
So that's sort of how it started.
In the beginning, there was also FSA groups fighting for authority there.
Things took a turn in places like Sarah Kanye, where we saw FSA fighting alongside Al Qaeda's franchise, Al Nusra alongside ISIS together against YPG.
And since that time, that early time fighting, they sort of unified and have become a very effective army, as well as the United States' most effective partner, at least against ISIS, who they'll use as an armed force against ISIS, but will definitely not honor any of their further political goals.
So that's a very short summary of how that movement sort of was influenced by PKK and organized by Ocalan thought, which is the Teb Dem office there.
Well, okay, so we'll get back to DoD in a second.
But let me ask you a little bit more about these guys.
They say that Ocalan, that's their leader who's imprisoned by the Turks right now, right?
They say that.
Well, that's the PKK's leader, but a source of ideological inspiration for a lot of Kurds and Arabs in the area.
So just because you hang the photo of Ocalan up doesn't necessarily make you a PKK member.
Gotcha.
And you're saying that the YPG, really, if you ask them, they would say that they're pals with, cousins with the PKK, but not necessarily under them.
Yeah.
So over my three trips, I had sort of gone back and forth and I've really looked into this matter because that's what a lot of opposition to YPG says.
They're nothing more than a front group for the PKK.
And I think that the truth is, it's a lot more complicated than that.
It's an armed group whose original commanders were from PKK because they had that experience.
And it's not like they're Turkish Kurds, Syrian Kurds or whatever.
They're just Kurds from Kurdistan that went back home.
And they see Ocalan as a sense of ideological inspiration and a way of resisting, a path to resist.
So he's famous there, not necessarily because this YPG fighters have the same sort of warrior monk like mindset as the PKK, but just because he's one of the Kurds that organized to fight back.
So they all kind of hang that photo there.
Well, now, it's said that they, I don't know, on both sides of the border or what, but more or less that the PKK, well, and I guess I hear this said about the fighters of Rojava too, that they had abandoned Marxism.
They're no longer communists.
And now they follow Murray Bookchin, who is, I guess, some kind of anarcho-syndicalist from Brooklyn or something like that.
Right?
Can you talk about that?
Yeah, his daughter, Debbie Bookchin, is a friend of mine, actually.
So this is also what's really kind of unknown about Kurds or Kurds who follow Ocalan thought is that there were huge reformations inside of the group and the way that they describe their ideology is changing, is more evolving.
So I think the biggest thing is after Ocalan got arrested, he started writing updates from prison.
And basically what Ocalan was saying was, you guys need to stop fighting for an independent Kurdish state, meaning an ethnic based state, because we'll become just as bad as the oppressors around us, such as Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, those regimes.
Instead, what we ought to be fighting for is autonomous zones.
It doesn't matter if they exist inside existing countries.
It doesn't matter as long as we have our rights.
And that's a very, very basic explanation of what they call democratic confederalism, which is a small grassroots hodgepodge of every different community working from the ground all the way up.
So that's what that's what the Rojava Kurds follow, as well as the different Arab tribes and groups that find themselves living alongside Kurds and being also influenced by that movement.
So it's it's not necessarily that YPG is PKK, but they're all kind of following that that that that same Ocalan, Murray Bookchin thought.
So they're definitely not Marxist.
They're not communist.
It's just their ideas are so wacky and weird and unheard of that people have a lot of hard time understanding it.
All right.
And now this is totally just a side point.
But as long as we're on ethnicity, I was curious about this, if you could tell me because you interview this young man who is a Yazidi, who he and his family had fled just ahead of the Islamic State onslaught back in 2014 there.
We talked about he was an ethnically Kurdish member of this Yazidi religious sect.
And I wondered whether all the Yazidis are Kurdish or there are Arab Yazidis, too, or how does that work?
Do you know?
That's a great question.
And I'm not saying it matters at all.
I'm just curious.
Yeah, I was curious about that, too.
And it depends who you ask.
Some Yazidi people feel that they are ethnically Kurdish and and have the same ethnic background.
And they would see Yazidi as their religion, whereas some Yazidis think that Yazidi is is the ethnic group by itself.
And they say Yazidis are Yazidi.
It's what we believe.
It's also who we are.
So I think you have to look further in the sense of how does a minority group inside of Iraq or inside Syria actually function?
Is they usually have to bow down to the to the ethnic group that's dominant around them.
So that might explain what happened with Yazidi speaking Kurdish.
But I think that you could get to the bottom of it with some DNA tests or things like that.
But the bottom line is, just as you said, it doesn't really matter.
Yeah.
When you even have this old man ranting that, hey, this is a melting pot around here and we've all gotten along for thousands of years, so leave us alone, which was, you know, interesting to see that, you know, because people like to say, actually, that, well, you know how it is over there.
Religious wars unending for thousands of years.
But yeah, only if 2003 is a thousand years ago.
Yeah.
What that what that guy's ranting about is in that particular area, which is in Hull, city called Hull, Kurds and Arabs did have lived peacefully beside each other for a long time.
The Arab group he's referring to is Shomer.
All right.
And now so let's talk about the Syrian Democratic Forces here.
You say they're working with the Americans.
That's well reported that at the very least, what they're holding laser designators for the U.S. Air Force.
Oh, yeah.
We ran into some in the countryside of Raqqa.
So Americans started air support for YPG in the famous Battle of Kobani.
I'm sure you're very aware of that.
And since then, they've sort of rolled out more and more support in terms of air, just just air support.
At this point, they don't even really give SDF any heavy weapons such as those laser guided tow missiles or wire guided missiles.
Instead, they'll embed special forces among the SDF.
And there's very, very few of them.
There's not enough to really make a huge difference on the battlefield except for the power of air power.
So there are small groups that are among them on the front line and they're taking out suicide cars and also calling in airstrikes directly, because if an SDF member calls in an airstrike using one of their iPad systems, well, tablet systems, it probably has to go through a certain filter of command to get vetted before that airplane can strike.
But I would imagine if a special force forces member calls it in, the airplane can immediately do it.
So I think that's sort of been their limited role thus far.
But the the group that I saw was, you know, heavily reliant on the SDF forces and they are coordinating and they seem like, you know, one one group within a huge cluster of subgroups.
Mm hmm.
Well, now.
So when you run into the Americans there, I know you ran into a couple of them, one of them a Texan.
Those guys weren't Delta.
They were just volunteers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So in my film, you see like just a crazy vigilante guy from from Texas.
And those are indeed volunteers of the YPG, which is a very big difference from American special forces.
In fact, just after we left the countryside of Raqqa, the Turkish airplanes actually bombarded a SDF position near Manbij and killed some American YPG volunteers.
And really, it was yeah, it was misreported originally that they were special forces members.
But they were just volunteers.
So because of that, there was no press outcry or, you know, everyone was silent about it.
But I really think that the SDF probably biggest strategic goal with keeping the special forces there is, yeah, they're totally helpful calling it airstrikes.
But really, it's a sort of garlic to keep away the vampire.
That is the Turkish AKP that wants to bombard them inside Syria, right, who attack bases that aren't even on the front lines countering them.
So the Turks have entered in into Syria with Euphrates Shield campaign, and they have front lines that face SDF.
That American volunteer, as well as 11 others were killed at a SDF base, which wasn't even on the front line.
Yeah.
Well, now, and so can you tell us how recent is your information of what is the status of that that fight between the now invading Turkish army?
And I guess they said their goal was to make sure to keep the YPG east of the Euphrates River.
Is that it?
Or they're still fighting?
You just said they they bombed this base that was far from the front.
Is this an ongoing thing?
Yeah, I think right now, what you can see is the Turkish government AKP party using their military to poke holes into the SDF and do these kind of attacks and then just put their ear to the ground and see what the outcry is, see what the Americans say, say what the see what the international community says.
And then if it's silent, they just poke again.
So they started with artillery shelling.
And I remember being at the edge of the Euphrates River, looking over Jarabulus, and I was with an FSA group called Euphrates Jarabulus Brigades.
They're an FSA group, Free Syrian Army Rebel Group that fights alongside YPG.
And we were looking at Jarabulus, which was ISIS held.
And every time that that FSA group alongside YPG went to cross the river, the shells would come from the Turkish side on SDF versus just leaving ISIS there for a long time.
Now, that same commander, his name is Al-Chatter.
He comes from a very influential family inside Jarabulus.
And the idea was, is if the SDF took that ISIS held city along the Turkish border, that this influential guy could leave the FSA group there in charge of security.
Now, as soon as they announced the operation that they were going to do on offensive on Jarabulus, he was mysteriously assassinated.
And then not more than 48 hours later, the Turks alongside FSA groups started to enter Jarabulus themselves in their own operation.
So these sort of curiosities really point to a larger issue, which is that the Turks' goal has sort of evolved from regime change inside Syria to just merely stopping Kurdish ambitions along their border.
So I think in the most recent cases today, you can see them wanting to clear that pocket, which is around Al-Bab and Manbij.
So I think looking forward, I think for now, they're just sort of poking holes here and there.
And one day they could probably try to take Manbij city, which is west of the Euphrates River.
And what's the Turks' relationship with Al-Nusra at this point, do you know?
Well right now, I think the Turks have actually backstabbed Al-Nusra, but it doesn't make up for years and years of collaboration that Turkey had with ISIS, Al-Nusra, Ra'ar al-Sham, all of these groups.
Turkey supplied weapons to, supplied intelligence to, supplied just basic raw materials for building through their border.
Now it's very interesting because Al-Nusra is one of the few groups that is, I think in my mind, is probably starting to not to listen to Turkey's orders.
Every time you see Turkey wanting to move FSA groups away from Aleppo through Idlib province, through Turkish soil, incurred into Rojava territory, Al-Nusra didn't want to go along with it because they said that it's not in spirit of the revolution because the Turks are just trying to use FSA as a proxy force for their own goals inside Syria.
So I think when Al-Nusra condemned many things, but that it was probably the last backstab.
So what happened was Turkey moved a lot of FSA and a lot of groups connected to Ra'ar al-Sham out of Aleppo city and they left Nusra there to basically get pummeled by the regime.
And we saw the outcome of that with the regime taking Aleppo city.
So I think relations with Al-Nusra and Turkey right now are probably pretty bad, but it's not because Turkey doesn't find them effective.
It's more because they probably can't get away with the same things that they got away with in the past in terms of supporting them because of the international community.
And I think the Syrian government as well as the Russians are really taking advantage of Turkey's stupidity and they know that Turkey can control these groups and I think that they'll ultimately backstab Turkey, although they're all being buddy-buddy now.
I think what the Russians are trying to do is turn the Ra'ar al-Sham alliance groups against the Al-Nusra groups and just have a lot of infighting to divide and conquer their enemy.
So I think that's what's going on personally.
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Well, you know, it seems like the Syrian army taking East Aleppo away from Al-Nusra, killing them, pummeling them, as you said, or pushing them out, seems like kind of a big deal.
But then again, they are insurgents.
They should have turned to fled anyway.
As you said, you know, some of the other jihadists did with Turkish help.
But so, I mean, it still seems to be an important question of just how bad of a loss did they suffer in terms of manpower?
I mean, obviously, it's a big chunk of territory, but maybe they just went somewhere else or, you know, what percentage of their force did they lose there, do you think?
Well, they're all in Idlib province now.
So that's going to be the next sort of jihadi cesspool that the Russians and the regime are going to have to have to look at.
But I mean, I was also I'm sure that you felt the same way about this, Scott, but a lot of the reporting here in the West on Aleppo was totally hysterical and totally wrong.
And they sort of lumped all these groups together when the reality on the ground is a lot more complicated.
And it was a weird thing to see the West cheering on Al Qaeda to win against the Syrian regime.
And if you look now, I mean, even Deir ez-Zor, what's happening like just yesterday, is that the regime has a small pocket inside of Deir ez-Zor city.
There's 80 to 100,000 Syrian people that are besieged by ISIS.
It's pretty much the exact same thing as Aleppo, except the roles have been reversed.
And we don't see any international media really talking about the tragedy right now that's happening in Deir ez-Zor.
It's almost as if some Syrian lives matter more than other Syrian lives, depending on whether it's an American backed project or not.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then even then, everybody, as you say, they got their knives out.
I mean, at the end of the day, you know, we have DoD guys running around with the YPG.
But who thinks we're really going to pick Rojava over Turkey, you know?
Well, there's a really interesting soft rep article by Jack Murphy, he's a friend of mine.
And he talked to some of his friends who are embedded with Euphrates Shield, with the Turks.
And they have very interesting things to say about them wanting, they feel like they're going to be fighting these jihadis that they're training now alongside the Turks in the future.
And they're really, really upset about it, actually.
So yeah, there's, I mean, there's special forces embedded with Euphrates Shield with the Turks or special forces embedded with SDF.
At this point, I think the Americans' main goal is just getting rid of ISIS, which is, you know, short sighted, but you know, should, should, does the American government really have an interest in this conflict at this point, outside of just, you know, tackling extremism?
I don't really think so.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so we got to skip Mosul just for time and everything.
But I guess it's safe to say that it may be it's safe to say, I don't know, Danny Davis would dispute, it seems mostly safe to say that the Islamic State's days are numbered in Mosul, that some combination of the Shiite Iraqi army and militias and the Kurdish Peshmerga there are going to either kill them or push them west back toward Syria.
But so...
Yeah, I think that explains Deir ez-Zor right now, actually, I think there's a lot of, you know, Iraqi tribal forces who are under the umbrella of ISIS that left Mosul and are now fighting in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor.
And I think that that's probably why we saw the offensive kickoff there is probably some of the more skilled units from Mosul leaving and wanting Deir ez-Zor as their next easy victory against the regime, because it seems that the world has abandoned the Syrians there.
Right.
In other words, America will back the Shiite backed armies fighting in Iraq, but not in Syria.
They'll have, in fact, we, the American Air Force actually bombed a Syrian military position outside of Deir ez-Zor to the advantage of the Islamic State in what was supposed to be a big accident a couple of months ago.
That's right.
But also, after Mosul, I mean, we have, you know, Hashd al-Shaabi, which is holding land behind the Iraqi army, but in the Mosul offensive.
The Shiite militias.
Well, they are Shiite militias, but there's also Sunni brigades of Hashd al-Shaabi.
It's another complication that's really confusing.
But let's say irregular forces that are not the Iraqi army.
I mean, I knew they had Sunni tribal militias.
I just didn't realize that they put them under the same umbrella in that sense.
But of course, as you're saying, it's all just terminology and categories on the part of the observer.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And if you look at those guys have also talked about going into Syria after Iraq and helping the Syrian government as well.
If you look at what's going on around Tal Afar, there's a direct corridor, Hashd al-Shaabi corridor that's fighting in Tal Afar.
And if they can take that place, it basically means that they can get into Syria from the Rojava way and work alongside those guys.
Whereas right now, the only way into Rojava from that side is under the control of Peshmerga above Shangal.
So I think after Mosul, the sort of glue that held all these different forces together as a common enemy being ISIS is gone.
And we're going to see some, you know, huge challenges between these groups, man.
You know, it's amazing.
I don't know if anybody's going to take the lesson from this or they're just going to have to stick with them anyway.
It seems like al-Qaeda has done nothing but get the Iraqi Sunnis in trouble since 2003.
And they just really have repeated Iraq War II all over again.
The last time around, they lost Baghdad.
And then now this time around, they're helping Iraqi Shiastan expand its borders west.
I guess we don't really know how far, but it seems like there are major distortions of power on the ground here that are all to the benefit of the Shiites, the Iranians, their Iraqi army, and at the expense of the Sunni population.
So I don't know how many times they're going to repeat this, but...
They poison everything.
I mean, even in 2011, a lot of people say, people like to have my viewpoint, are regime apologists or Assad lovers or blah, blah, blah.
The thing is, is in 2011, Syrian people had real outcries against the authoritarian, tyrannical Assad regime.
They had real things to say, but the thing is, is the extremists hijacked that noble cause and turned it into an armed struggle, which I would say if you talk to any FSA group, or let's not say any, but most of the FSA groups that are fighting alongside al-Qaeda do not resemble, in terms of mindset, what those protesters were calling for in 2011.
And if they are, they're so small or so powerless that they're silent, unfortunately.
All right.
So now, how is it that you even got into Raqqa?
I promised some people that I went with that I wouldn't say.
Oh, okay.
Well, that's fair.
And then, so how long were you there, and tell me everything you learned.
Okay.
Yeah.
If there's an idea on your mind of how you went, it's a little bit more of how I went.
It's a little bit more crazy than that.
Rojava's under embargo from all the countries that surround it.
So you can, you know, you can put it together in your head how I went there.
I'm thinking skydiving, right?
I remember years ago, there was that guy who paraglided into rebel-held territory in Syria from the Golan Heights.
Oh, really?
That's funny.
I miss that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was a weird, obscure article.
But anyway, so this was my third trip to the northern, northeast part of Syria.
And at this trip, I could really only spend about 10 days in the countryside of Raqqa.
Anything more than that is unbelievably dangerous for many, many reasons.
Previous trips, I've been, you know, to Syria for 40 days and things like this.
So this was definitely my shortest trip.
So I was embedded with Rojda Fallat, which is the general commander of all the operations inside Raqqa.
And at the time I was there, they were fighting for a city called Tal Saman.
And Tal Saman is in, you know, it's a small city village just north of Raqqa between Ain Issa and Raqqa.
And it's a kind of an access point because there's fighters that are fighting north to south down on Raqqa, but there's also other units that are coming in alongside the Euphrates River, as well as Al-Sanadid forces, which is a Shomer Arab group coming from the east side.
So what they're trying to do is they're trying to isolate Raqqa.
They're not trying to take the city itself right now, but they're just trying to surround it and using the Euphrates as sort of a natural barrier.
So anyway, with that overview, I was with Rojda.
You know, we saw some fighting, you know, Kurds, Arabs fighting alongside one another.
FSA groups that were originally from Raqqa that had fought the regime there and then got kicked out by al-Nusra into the countryside.
Later Raqqa was taken by ISIS and they describe, you know, no unity among the groups and people changing their flags overnight to the ISIS flag.
People pledging allegiance to ISIS because they have more money and them not wanting to participating in fighting.
They expect that when they fight inside the actual city of Raqqa, they'll find a lot of the same guys that were originally FSA members that they had fought alongside that pledged allegiance to ISIS.
So the whole thing is very interesting.
In terms of the fighting itself, it's spread out over, you know, vast expanses of land.
And that also describes why they've been moving so fast.
These are just really small, like hamlets and farm villages.
And the front line is very, very kinetic.
It's constantly moving and shaping.
They haven't really had time to dig in.
So as soon as a new village is taken, they move in a bulldozer and build a temporary wall and then they just kind of keep going.
And overall, I think right now they're facing definite resistance from ISIS, but they're going to face the true enemy once they get to the gates of Raqqa, the city itself.
So now what's life like for the average civilian living under Islamic State rule in Raqqa?
It's just a war zone or it's a totalitarian state or what's going on?
Well, I actually talked to some people because when we were there, residents moved back to Al-Hisha, which is a small city in the countryside of Raqqa.
And basically they had lived under Islamic State's rule since the beginning, since they first took it.
And I think at that time, a lot of them just saw ISIS as, you know, quote unquote Sunni rebels.
And people really were unaware of the monstrosity or what that group would actually represent.
And I think a lot of them welcomed them not knowing, meaning like your average civilian.
Obviously there are political things in place behind the scenes in higher levels, but I think your average civilian just saw them as any other rebel group.
And then eventually their brutality rolled out and they wanted them gone.
And I asked some of the local people about this, you know, like the leader of this operation is a spokeswoman, half of the force are women, you know, how do you feel about this?
Because a lot of the people in that area, a little bit more traditional, let's say.
And I think the overwhelming consensus is we don't care who liberates us.
We just want ISIS gone.
We don't care if it's a man or a woman.
We just kind of want to go back to our lives.
So I think there's some people that don't want SDF coming into those areas.
They want your more traditional, you know, FSA groups taking those areas.
But in terms of practicality, I think those people are just really, really happy to see ISIS gone and the atrocities gone, you know.
Hey, you know, that raises an important question too that I had not thought of.
There have been some reports of the Kurdish groups cleansing the Arabs of the cities that they've taken, that they've supposedly, you know, liberated from the Islamic State, but instead started moving in civilians of their own into the former's houses and that kind of thing.
Well, I can actually speak on this because I've been to the places where they say there is ethnic cleansing and I can say that it's not true.
So here's actually the reality of what happens.
And this is a good question to follow up on Al-Hisha, the place I was describing when we saw hundreds of Arabs moving back home.
So at this time, SDF is a very confident force, meaning they have huge numbers, a lot of weapons, a lot of allies and coalition support.
So at this time, when they take a place like Al-Hisha, three days later, the civilians were moving back.
That means that your average civilian is very, very close to the front line of Raqqa.
Okay.
Now, a group like in the past, YPG, in early 2015, they would do similar offensives such as on Tel Hamas.
That's one place where they were accused of doing ethnic cleansing.
And they would take a city like Tel Hamas, which is a majority Arab city, and they wouldn't let anyone move back, Kurd or Arab.
So not just ethnically cleansing Arabs, but they wouldn't let anyone back into the city just because it was so close to the front line.
And the reason for that was because ISIS is notorious for infiltration and also paying off a lot of those tribal leaders.
So when YPG was getting started and they weren't such a confident force, they would basically evacuate those areas.
So think of that from those Arabs perspective, a Kurdish force came, fought ISIS and moved them.
They would definitely feel forcibly displaced.
But in my opinion, it wasn't a matter of ethnic cleansing.
It was just moving any civilian away from the front line.
So this time on my recent trip in Raqqa was actually the first time that we'd be driving down the road close to the fighting and see like a shepherd with sheep or people actually actively farming inside of their village.
And it doesn't mean that they don't have paranoia now.
I mean, a lot of the SDF forces, there'd be vehicles that sort of drive up to the bases.
All the radios would go off like, who is this?
Who is this?
Check.
But I think that they're certainly doing things a lot better than before.
But really, the ethnic cleansing claims come from them just being a sort of ragtag force and operating the only effective way they could in that environment.
But you're saying, you're saying that's temporary and that's over and they did let everybody come back.
Yes.
In Tel Hammes, everyone moved back there.
And I believe it was almost a year after it was liberated, people started moving back.
But of course they, they let people move back.
I mean, you, they, they, they have a functional society there and they're not going to do it without being inclusive of all ethnic groups and in especially Arabs.
So those claims of ethnic cleansing, um, they're totally untrue, uh, but there's a certain reality with the way that this war has been fought there, uh, where I could certainly see how that was interpreted, uh, by the, by those researchers.
I understand what you're saying there.
Okay.
So now, uh, here's something I meant to ask you too, when we were talking about, uh, JSOC or SOCOM or whichever all support for, uh, the YPG, uh, and their cooperation with the U S air force.
What about, uh, their backing by the Russians or are they not supported by Russia at the same time?
No, there was, there was claims that, uh, YPG working in the Afrin Canton, which is in the far East.
It's not, it's not connected, um, uh, yet to the SDF, uh, East of the Euphrates river.
There were some claims that Russian jets, um, had, uh, attacked a few of the FSA positions that, um, the YPG was fighting around Azaz in that area.
Um, I haven't seen any real evidence, but it certainly would not surprise me, um, if the Russians were indirectly supporting them because although YPG and the Assad regime have very different end goals and do not see politically eye to eye, one thing that they do have in common is they do not want to see the country fall into the hands of jihadist.
So, um, I think now that there's a sort of beneficial new neutrality among them.
And like I said, it wouldn't surprise me if the Russians help them with, uh, air power.
I just think that that would probably hinder whatever agreement they have with the Americans.
So at this point, I don't think it's an open thing.
Well, in, uh, one of these films you show, uh, the Kurdish fighters sitting around watching TV and the news about when the, uh, Turks shot down the Russian jet and it flew for 14 seconds over a tiny little peninsula of Turkish territory in Assyria there and how they said, see, the Turks are on the side of the Islamic state there.
So we can certainly see, you know, um, and then, and I want to elaborate on the, or ask you to elaborate on, uh, what you say about, you know, the, obviously the, the YPG are opposed to al-Nusra or the Islamic state.
They're clearly fighting the Islamic state and, and have fought al-Nusra.
I don't know if that, you know, how preoccupied they've been with that as al-Nusra has been focused more on the state itself, I guess.
But, um, you know, I've read before where, uh, the Syrian Kurds have said, you know, yeah, sort of what you just said.
Yeah, we don't feel that great about Assad, but we certainly don't want to see him lose in the war he's in.
But this is really a temporary position.
They have a real problem, uh, if the Syrian state defeats the jihadists with the help of the Russians and, and whoever else is, uh, Iran and Hezbollah and whoever else is helping them, and if they can redraw their Syrian border and create a monopoly state in Syria again, Rojava, independent autonomous Rojava is, uh, surely a big, uh, flaw in that program or a big, uh, uh, obstacle they're going to have to figure out how to overcome, which I guess they could just negotiate, you know, some kind of independent statehood sort of a thing.
Uh, and federalism, but seems more likely they're going to shoot each other over it.
And then of course, as you've been saying, the Turks are involved, uh, throughout, uh, did they talk about this, what they think the future of their relationship with the Assad government would be, uh, once they're done with the war against the jihadists, presuming they win it?
Yeah, they do.
And I, I think that, uh, to answer your question, it's not one person telling me this, but it's more of a collection of various conversations that I've had with people.
I mean, I think if, if their relationship with America is militarily only, and the only, uh, thing that America wants to do is use them as ground troops in an air campaign against ISIS, you can imagine when ISIS is gone, do the Americans abandon, uh, the YPG?
I think they will because, um, it, again, it's just a military project.
They have never honored one goal of Rojava.
So with that in mind, it means that the Syrian Kurds or the leadership is going to have to make some kind of, uh, reparations or outreach to the future Syrian government.
Now, I think what's happening is that everybody's waiting to kind of see what happens next, because although Assad says publicly, we're going to retake every single inch of Syria with the Syrian Arab army, we all know that that is literally impossible.
Um, and especially a force like SDF, which I think are probably even better fighters than the Syrian Arab army, not as well equipped and they don't have as strong allies, uh, politically, but for the Syrian Arab army to declare war on SDF, I don't really think that's ever going to happen.
I think there's going to be minor clashes over checkpoints, especially in Qamishlo where the regime has a presence in the airport.
But, um, I think that some sort of political settlement will come, um, post jihadi conflict.
It just, which regime, um, are the Syrian Kurds actually going to be negotiating with?
Is it going to be, you know, the figurehead portrait of Assad?
I think that the Russians are probably keeping Assad there, uh, to at least keep the state together, uh, during this crisis.
But I think the Russians are intelligent enough to know that the future of Syria can probably not be held together, uh, without some sort of a coalition government that they build.
So I think that SDF might be that in the future, but at this point, it's probably too early to tell.
Well, I guess, you know, a real question is just how much autonomy did they have before the war broke out?
And just how much are they willing to maybe give up in terms of having a federation with Damascus?
Well, they had zero before the war.
I mean, Ocalan, uh, the PKK's leader had an interesting relationship with Hafez al-Assad, who allowed the PKK to stage inside Syria to attack his enemy, Turkey, or at least to use them as a bargaining chip.
Um, but in terms of autonomy before the war, I mean, the most popular, uh, political party, the PYD was outlawed by the regime and the regime used to assassinate their members.
And that's why a lot of them fled.
So when the war broke out and the regime retreated and those PYD members or PKK fighters, uh, came back because they could, um, they saw all those groups, FSA groups, Arar al-Sham, al-Nusra, ISIS, as just sort of a Turkish conspiracy.
And they saw the regime as the same people that threw them out.
So for them, that's why they chose that sort of third path.
We're not on board with the revolution because obviously these are proxies controlled by Turkey, our enemy, but we also cannot get on board with the Assad regime who has historically repressed us and also massacred us as Kurds.
Man, what a mess.
All right.
So now, um, I think you said in your email that you'd recently been to Jordan.
And, uh, so that made me wonder whether, you know, if the CIA and the military are still training these guys there, uh, or whether that project has finally been called off at this point or what?
I was not in Jordan.
Oh, well, I don't know where I read that.
Oh, maybe that was in, uh, I thought maybe, uh, Daniel had said that.
There's the, there's, there's the Southern front, which used to be controlled by Jordan.
It's the FSA, uh, hodgepodge along the Jordanian border.
Um, but I don't know what their relationship is now that the regime, uh, has sort of been on the uptake, at least against the rebels in Aleppo.
Um, I think that the Jordanians might abandon that project as soon as, as quick as it started, but that's yet to be seen what happens with the Southern front at now there, there's not really any hot areas there that are openly fighting the regime.
All right.
Well, uh, listen, I guess I better let you go, but I really appreciate your time on the show.
I learned a lot, Joey.
Yeah, my pleasure.
It's, uh, nice to speak with you, Scott.
All right.
So that is Joey Lawrence and you can find his, uh, movie, his first one here, guerrilla fighters of Kurdistan on Vimeo.
And he's got a new one coming out called Kurdistan at first light, armed struggle against the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria.
And then, uh, check out his website, joeyl.com.
And he has all his photos and, uh, all his, uh, of the PKK or the YPG fighters and all the rest of his work there too at joeyl.com.
That's the Scott Horton show.
Thanks everybody for listening and, uh, check out the archives at scotthorton.org at libertarianinstitute.org and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton show.
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