The order that the West claims to have built on moral, humanitarian, and humanistic values has collapsed in recent days in Aleppo and northern Syria.
This is not chaos or an unforeseeable crisis. It is a deliberate moral capitulation.
In Aleppo and the surrounding Kurdish neighborhoods, the Kurds have been abandoned. Loneliness here is not a feeling but the result of political decisions. It is the conscious choice to remain silent even though the world sees what is happening.
Hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees have been driven from their homes in the neighborhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh in Aleppo and from the surrounding villages, but that is not the end of the matter. Houses, fields, and shops have been plundered. The memory and livelihood of an entire people are being distributed like spoils of war. This is not a random consequence of war. It is organized robbery presented as legitimate.
That millions of people hear nothing of this reality exposes Western media in their claim to impartiality. For this silence does not arise from ignorance. It is a deliberate, selective blindness. What is happening to the Kurds in the streets of Aleppo, Afrin, Manbij, and in the villages of northern Syria is either downplayed, dismissed as unimportant, or deliberately concealed.
Trump and EU flatter extremists
Western politicians like to talk about human rights and humanism. At the same time, they bear direct responsibility for policies that betray precisely these values. During the Trump era, relationships with extremist groups are sold as strategy out of pure self-interest.
The European Union announced it would send €620 million in aid to Syria while Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo were under heavy attack and hundreds of thousands of Kurds were being driven from their homes. At the same time, EU leadership allowed itself to be received in the palaces of radical Islamist rulers and negotiated with the very forces co-responsible for the displacement of the Kurds.
These funds flow into structures that indirectly serve precisely that jihadist mentality responsible for the oppression of the Kurds. European taxpayers are thus unwittingly financing the displacement of a people who paid the highest price for Western values.
This is not an oversight. This is moral bankruptcy expressed in numbers and concealed in diplomatic niceties.
Plain speaking is now required: A people has sacrificed tens of thousands of its sons and daughters to defend Western values. This people has a right to be heard.
The Kurds have paid the highest price for secularism, women’s rights, peaceful coexistence, and democracy. And it is precisely those who describe these values as universal who are abandoning them today in the ruins of Aleppo and the refugee camps of northern Syria.
The Kurdish fighters who took on ISIS protected not only their region. They stopped a global threat. The blood spilled in Kobane, Raqqa, and Deir ez-Zor was spilled for the security of the entire world. And today, this sacrifice is being hushed up for strategic reasons, while the people who survived these battles are being driven from their homes in Aleppo.
What is being done to the Kurds today in Aleppo and the Kurdish areas of northern Syria does not concern just one city. It is a threat to all Kurds in Syria. From Afrin to Aleppo to Qamishli, the noose is tightening ever more closely. And the world watches and remains silent.
Double standards
I speak to all those who took to the streets because of Gaza: Why does the same conscience remain silent when Kurds are being expelled in the streets of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh? According to what moral logic can the systematic persecution of a people be ignored?
If humanity is truly to be a shared value, then pain must also be shared. Why do the same eyes that shed tears for Gaza not weep for Aleppo? This double standard shows how fragile so-called universal values truly are.
The picture becomes even clearer now. While Turkish security forces and ministers shout cries of victory over the conquest of Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo and scream new threats against the remaining Kurdish areas into the world, the Kurds weep on the escape routes from Aleppo. They weep not only because they are exposed to barbaric attacks. They weep because they have been deliberately abandoned. They have become victims of a Western policy that has betrayed its own moral principles out of self-interest.
While looters break down the doors of Kurdish houses in Aleppo, while nationalist propaganda celebrates the expulsion from Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh as a triumph, the world hides behind algorithms and silences its conscience.
West must wake up
This is not a call to choose a side. This is a wake-up call to the conscience of all those people in the West who claim to still believe in humanistic values.
For silence today is no longer a neutral position. Those who remain silent today in the face of the images from Aleppo make themselves accomplices to an oppression drowned out by cries of victory. Those who remain silent today will stand tomorrow as witnesses to shame.
History will certainly ask: While an entire people was being driven from Aleppo and the Kurdish areas of northern Syria toward annihilation, which interests were more important to you than your morals? While a secular, democratic society that fought for women’s rights was being destroyed in the streets of Aleppo, what strategic calculations did you follow? Where exactly did your universal values end when you bowed in the palaces of radical Islamist rulers?
The tragedy of the Kurds in Aleppo and northern Syria marks the point at which humanity’s moral compass has broken. And this compass can only be repaired through one thing: honest confrontation with the truth.
Silence is no longer an option. Conscience brooks no delay.
The writer is a Kurdish exiled journalist, political analyst, and Middle East observer focusing on Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Kurdish affairs. a.mardin@icloud.com