That sentiment — that the United States sold out the Kurds — is not completely off-base. I arrived in Brussels on Jan. 25 to attend the European Parliament’s annual conference on the Kurds, organized by its leftist party bloc, which includes Nobel laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Shirin Ebadi of Iran and Jose Ramos-Horta of East Timor, as well as controversial American scholar Noam Chomsky.
I was a speaker on a panel with Selahattin Demirtas, Turkey’s popular pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) chairman, and Peter Galbraith, a former American ambassador considered a close friend of the Kurds because of the role he played in the struggles of Iraqi Kurds.
PYD leader Salih Muslim was on the list of speakers for the second day of that conference. But when I arrived in Brussels, I was told Muslim had left for Geneva at the invitation of UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura. He would be back the next day and then would travel again to Geneva for the Geneva III talks, which were set for Jan. 29.
Thanks to my Kurdish sources, who were in constant communication with Muslim, I learned that Galbraith had come to Brussels from Geneva, where he also had met with American officials working on the Geneva III talks. He had been told that the United States was keen on seeing the PYD at the table during the talks.
On Jan. 26, before Muslim was back in Brussels, the news broke: De Mistura had issued invitation letters to the Arab members of the Syrian Democratic Council like Manna. It was assumed that Muslim would be returning to Brussels with his invitation letter in his bag.
Instead, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, who was in Strasbourg, Germany, said Turkey would boycott the Geneva talks if the PYD was involved.
Some hours earlier, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, had said Turkey objected to the PYD’s involvement because it is a terrorist organization, but would not object if it was included in the Syrian government’s delegation.
Galbraith was texting with Muslim, who informed him that de Mistura had not issued an official invitation to the PYD.
Manna announced that if their Kurdish allies would not be at the talks, the other members of the Syrian Democratic Council would not be participating, either.
The Kurdish sources in Brussels who were in constant contact with Muslim told me the morning of Jan. 27 that they had just spoken to Muslim, who was at that moment in a meeting with the Americans and that the PYD representation was still pending. He said everything would be clear by noon.
By evening, word came from Washington. US State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner declared that the PYD will not be invited to Geneva.
