Erdogan has knocked on every door and worn every alliance in his feverish quest to eliminate the Kurdish movement. Over the past decade, his focus has been on fighting the Autonomous Administration and the People's Protection Units (YPG), later shifting his attention to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the international coalition, led by the United States.

He climbed the walls of history, seeking former enemies to form circumstantial and contradictory alliances—drawing close to Russia, Turkey's historical foe since the Tsarist era, through the Soviet Union and the Cold War, to the conflicts in the Caucasus and the Chechen issue. Politically, he also extended himself toward Iran, overlooking a deeply rooted sectarian rivalry dating back to the Safavid-Ottoman conflict and the covert Sunni-Shiite war. In both cases, Erdogan overlooked all historical conflicts and their ugliness, simply to form a front against the U.S.-Kurdish alliance.

He relentlessly attacked the American presence east of the Euphrates, insulted it in his speeches, then crawled back pleading for silence over his dark intentions toward the Kurds. Still, Washington responded with little more than cautious diplomatic statements, except for a firmer stance during the early Biden administration.

He held over twenty conferences between Astana and Sochi, outwardly about Syria, but always aimed at countering the Kurdish presence and its alliance with the U.S. He supported extremist groups—from ISIS to what’s known as the “Syrian National Army”—and opened the doors to mercenaries and jihadists from across the Islamic world to fight the SDF and the Autonomous Administration. He urged most of them to forget about fighting the criminal regime in Damascus, even conceding to Iran and the Syrian regime in exchange for their commitment to fighting the Kurds. Despite all these efforts, he failed to achieve his goals, constantly preparing alternative plans.

Erdogan repeatedly showed loyalty to the U.S., exploiting every diplomatic tool and lobbying channel available to him, but to no avail. He accepted Israeli and American conditions by rehabilitating Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, aiming to make it the spearhead against the Iranian presence. This group succeeded in toppling the regime and expelling Iranian militias from parts of Syria.

This success emboldened Turkey to push its proxies to attack the SDF. However, when it realized this could lead to losing those same tools—and the Syrian Interim Government along with them—it shifted strategies. Turkey then attempted to persuade Washington to abandon the Autonomous Administration in favor of al-Jolani's government. One tactic included pressuring U.S. Ambassador to Ankara and special envoy to Syria and Lebanon, Thomas Barak, hoping that the collapse of the Autonomous Administration and merging the SDF into the regime's army would strip American presence in eastern Syria of legitimacy, pave the way for U.S. withdrawal, and thereby eliminate the Kurdish cause in Syria. This would allow Turkey to control the entire country—militarily, economically, and politically—while preventing the Kurdish issue from reverberating within its own borders.

The subsequent American-Turkish calm was not without context—it stemmed from complex underlying dynamics understood by most political observers. Israel and the U.S. were waiting for Iran and its militias to be weakened to a point where they would lose influence. Turkey understood this equation well and thus found itself compelled to abandon its hostile rhetoric and return to a long-avoided formula: recognizing the Kurds as a people and sitting with their representatives as an undeniable political reality—even if this came under the guise of "victory over terrorism." In practice, however, Erdogan accepted much more: from dialogue between the President and a jailed Kurdish leader to undisclosed understandings that will inevitably surface sooner or later.

Were it not for the deep-rooted racism within the structure of the Turkish state—and Erdogan’s fear of a street steeped in anti-Kurdish sentiment—Turkey could have saved itself a century of violence and destruction. Erdogan knows well that the cost of fighting the Kurds, if invested in peace and reconciliation, would have placed Turkey among the world’s most advanced nations—civilizationally, economically, and socially. Today, Turkey is hesitantly inching toward that truth, reluctantly accepting dialogue with a people long deprived of even uttering the name of their homeland: Kurdistan.

If the intentions of the Justice and Development Party are sincere—and if it avoids its usual deceptions—and the Kurdish people are granted their national rights, even in the form of a federal system enshrined in the Turkish constitution and approved by parliament, Turkey could become a model state. It could tap into Kurdish potential and Kurdistan’s resources to build a homeland that everyone would wish to live in. If not, its fate may mirror that of other Middle Eastern states—fragmentation and collapse—under the weight of geopolitical changes that the Erdogan government and Turkish nationalist parties understand well and are racing to preempt, even if through half-acknowledgments and half-partnerships with a truth they long denied.

If Turkey does not reconcile with its Kurdish reality, it will collapse under the very walls it built to deny them. A state that fears its own history and the name “Kurdistan” has no place on tomorrow’s maps. These changes will swallow it, just as they have swallowed greater powers before—and history will record that the stubbornness of denial brought down a new empire before it was even born.

 Dr. Mahmoud Abbas