Nashville Kurds: ‘What Did We Do to Deserve This?’ – Nashville Scene

Members of the United States’ largest Kurdish community question Trump’s decision to pull out of Syria

A mural at the Mazi International Market in Nashville’s so-called Little Kurdistan depicts life in KurdistanPhoto: Eric EnglandIt’s not the first time the United States has abandoned its Kurdish allies.

Ahead of the first Gulf War, the U.S. continued to support Saddam Hussein as he conducted a genocide of Iraqi Kurds. Those attacks, which left somewhere between 50,000 and 180,000 Kurds dead — and the later American withdrawal from Iraq — in part led to a mass movement of refugees. Many of those refugees ended up in Nashville, now home to the largest Kurdish population in the United States. (In recent years, the Trump administration has sought to deport some of those same Kurdish refugees.)

Thus, some of those local Kurds were not stunned by Trump’s Sunday announcement that American troops would withdraw from northeast Syria, where they have served alongside Kurds and others fighting the Islamic State. “Disappointed but not surprised,” says Pel Doski, who was born in 1996 when her parents were refugees in Guam.

Doski recently returned from a Fulbright fellowship and is now in graduate school.

“It’s a cycle of genocides and betrayals,” she says. “I think we’re going to have another large refugee crisis, but because of our current administration and their stance on refugees, I think it will be worse.”

In September, the Trump administration announced major cuts to the number of refugees allowed in the country.

Mustafa Elmas, who works on artificial intelligence for a local health care company, says he took the week off work after hearing of the withdrawal.

“I told them I can’t work because my family is in danger,” he says. “I don’t know what to do.”

Though most Nashville Kurds hail from the Iraqi part of Kurdistan, Elmas comes from Turkey. He still has family near the Turkish-Syrian border.

“They are very concerned,” Elmas says. “They don’t know what’s going to happen. What did we do to deserve this? More than 11,000 Kurdish women and men sacrificed their lives in order to protect this world, in order to make sure it’s a peaceful world.”

In addition to Kurdish casualties in the fight against ISIS, Kurdish forces continue to detain thousands of extremists captured on the battlefield. Trump’s tactical decision drew the condemnation of even the president’s fiercest backers, like Tennessee Republicans Marsha Blackburn and Mark Green. Green, a veteran, said he was “disappointed” and that the withdrawal “betrays our Kurdish allies and will only create more instability in the region.” Blackburn said, “We ought not to give ISIS any room to regain territory.”

With Turkish forces already heading toward conflict with the Kurdish-led coalition in Syria, local Kurds worry that the American withdrawal could lead to more ethnic violence, this time at the direction of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“We’ve realized that America is not going to help us regain independence, but throwing us to the wolves like this is really unnecessary,” says Dilman Yasin, a data analyst at a local health care company.

Yasin’s family arrived in Nashville after years in a Turkish refugee camp. Gharib Silivaney, a real estate broker, spent nine years in a Turkish refugee camp before ending up in Nashville.

“They defeated ISIS not for the Kurds alone,” says Silivaney. “They defeated ISIS for the world. More than 10,000 Kurds died on the front lines to defeat ISIS, and the U.S. promised us protection, only to pull out and feed us to the wolves, who are the Turks. … How can you do this to anybody? They fought your war, now you just betray them.”

“The U.S. just gave the green light to Turkey to commit genocide,” adds Elmas.