Regarding Recent Statement on Syria and ‘Saving the Kurds’
February 9, 2026
Lindsey Graham -US Senator
211 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Graham,
I read your January 27, 2026 statement on X with great concern. Your claim that “the Kurds are under threat from the new Syrian government aligned with Turkey” and your announced intent to introduce “crippling sanctions” through a “Save the Kurds Act” constitutes not only a misreading of the regional reality but, more troublingly, a reversal of your own previously stated national security concerns.
First, your framing collapses a diverse people into a single militant faction. There are more than 15 million Kurdish citizens living in neighboring states who serve as parliamentarians, ministers, governors, diplomats, judges, academics, and business leaders. If these governments were engaged in a campaign against Kurds as a people, they would not have sheltered half a million Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein in 1991 nor hosted millions of Syrian refugees, including tens of thousands of Syrian Kurds, since 2012. The omission of intra-Kurdish plurality is astonishing. Nechirvan Barzani, President of the Kurdistan Regional Government, has publicly defined the PKK as a “headache” and demanded their expulsion from Kurdish territory in Iraq. Abdullah Keddo of the Syrian Kurdish National Council has warned that PKK-linked groups must be expelled from Kurdish-majority towns in Syria. Kurdish rejection of PKK authoritarianism is not peripheral — it is central.
Second, your romanticization of the YPG/PYD also ignores hard legal and intelligence facts. Interpol, FATF, and UN agencies have documented PKK-linked networks involved in narcotics trafficking, forced conscription, human smuggling, extortion, and arms procurement. No sovereign state including our own would tolerate an armed separatist formation operating on its borders financed through transnational organized crime.
Your narrative also erases the chronology. The collapse of the 2013–2015 peace process did not occur in a vacuum. It was the PKK that unilaterally broke the ceasefire, declared “autonomous zones,” dug urban trenches, and launched urban insurgencies from Cizre to Sur. No Western democracy would permit an armed non-state actor to carve municipal fiefdoms under the banner of cultural rights.
You are also aware of the U.S. role in muddying this conflict. Under the cover of counter-ISIS operations, Washington rebranded the PKK’s Syrian affiliates (YPG/PYD) as the “SDF.” Senior American officials have since admitted the obvious. Then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the PKK an “enduring threat.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed that the SDF maintains structural ties to the PKK. Ambassador James Jeffrey openly described the SDF as a national security problem for our NATO ally. President Donald Trump went further: “Kurds are not angels. The PKK… is probably worse at terror and more of a terrorist threat in many ways than ISIS.”
Senator Graham, respectfully you once recognized this. During hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee, you questioned Secretary Carter and General Dunford about U.S. cooperation with the PKK/YPG in Syria and Iraq, highlighting their acts of terror and the thousands of civilian lives lost. You warned against entanglements with designated terrorist entities. Today, you are proposing sanctions on governments combating the very groups you once warned about. One is left to ask: when did the policy change, and why?
Meanwhile, the new Syrian government under President Ahmad al-Sharaa has granted Kurds full citizenship, legalized Kurdish education, recognized Newroz as a holiday, and enacted anti-discrimination laws. These reforms undermine the separatist thesis and remove the humanitarian alibi Western commentators often rely upon.
Iraq’s Kurdish Parliament has repeatedly expressed gratitude for cross-border support against ISIS between 2014–2017 and credited regional integration for their economic development. Kurdish leaders have never claimed that their survival depends on an armed Marxist separatist formation only certain Washington think tanks have.
Senator, no one is attacking Kurds. Counter-terror operations target groups like the PKK/YPG/PYD that exploit instability to advance extremist goals. Conflating Kurds with separatist militants is an insult to Kurdish citizens who reject authoritarianism.
America’s reputation will not suffer by ceasing to fund non-state militias. It will suffer by appearing to legislate on behalf of a terrorist organization. If you are so committed to their protection, one wonders whether your constituents in South Carolina would welcome their relocation, protection, and financing at home.
At a time of economic strain, American taxpayers deserve investments in American communities not another open-ended proxy commitment to groups that U.S. officials themselves have labeled as terrorists.
Respectfully,
Ibrahim Kurtulus
Community Activist
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