There is an old Kurdish saying that goes, “The Kurds have no friends but the mountains.”

When Turkey bombed a couple ISIS positions in Syria, some heralded it as a game changer. Our regional NATO ally was getting off the fence against our enemy...or so it seemed.
Instead it was a feint, as Turkey has gone after what they consider their real enemy - the Kurds. Consider what happened last Saturday.

That's 159 attacks against the Kurds vs. Zero against ISIS.
Yesterday Turkey escalated the attacks against the Kurds again.
Turkey has also arrested ISIS supporters within its borders in a huge crackdown, but the "vast majority" of the arrests were leftists and Kurds.

And on Tuesday, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for a crackdown on the People’s Democratic Party, a Kurdish-leftist political party that gained seats in parliament for the first time last month.

Turkish talk about a "safe zone" along the Syrian border is actually aimed against Kurds, not ISIS, according to Pro-Kurdish HDP party chairman Selahattin Demirtas.

"We have committed no unforgivable crimes. Our only crime was winning 13 percent of vote," Demirtas told party members in parliament.

In fact, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan came out and said that "the PKK would be the main focus of attacks.” Erdoğan has now declared that a number of HDP deputies will be tried on charges of supporting terrorism.
The WSJ sums up the situation thusly.

Turkey’s military activity against Islamic State does not stem from sudden realizations about threats from ISIS but appears designed to elicit international support for its fight against the Kurds.

Just one day before Turkey started bombing Iraqi Kurdistan, Defense secretary Ash Carter met with Kurdish leaders in Irbil and said the Kurdish armed forces, known as the peshmerga, were “the model of what we are trying to achieve”. Defense Department spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren recently referred to Kurdish forces as “capable and willing ground forces.”
The Kurds are universally considered to be the most effective fighting force on the ground in the struggle against ISIS. Any attack against them is counter-productive in this war.

So what was Washington's response to the Turkish attacks?

Now, those leaders turn a blind eye, or even worse give an active nod, to attacks on Northern Iraqi Kurds by the Turkish air force.
Heroes one minute; fair game for massacre the next. In the long list of Western betrayals of former allies overseas, this one feels especially grotesque.

Defenders of this policy are quick to point out that Turkey has so far only attacked PKK positions, a recognized terrorist group.

But it’s way more complicated than that. The PKK has close links with the YPG, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units in Syria, who have been among the bravest battlers against Isil.

The PKK has basically been the tip-of-the-spear for the Kurds against ISIS. Many of those Kurds arrested in Turkey were preparing to fight ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
While western political leaders talk a good game about how ISIS is an ‘imminent threat to every interest we have’, and how their bombing missions are pushing them back, they have stopped short of actually risking western lives. The dirty job of actually fighting, shooting and dying, the things that requires cojones, has been mostly left to the Kurds.

Largely without assistance, the Kurds have regained roughly 25% of the territory that ISIS once had in Iraq.
The recent gains by Syrian Kurds against ISIS has been even more dramatic and meaningful. In fact, it was the recent Syrian Kurd victory against ISIS at Tel Abyad that caused Turkey to start fearing the Kurds. This crucial victory cut off the ISIS HQ at Raqqa from its supply chain in Turkey.

The Obama Administration has actively blocked coalition allies like Britain from supplying weapons to Syrian Kurds.
This has been significant because the Kurds are desperately short of arms and ammunition.
In the wake of the Turkish bombing, the administration has promised "not to foresake" the Syria Kurds, but that they had to actually say this speaks volumes about the policy shift.

A few months ago the U.S. led a raid in northern Syria against the Islamic State's "chief financial officer". The resulting cache of documents was enlightening.

Documents and flash drives seized during the Sayyaf raid reportedly revealed links "so clear" and "undeniable" between Turkey and ISIS "that they could end up having profound policy implications for the relationship between us and Ankara," senior Western official familiar with the captured intelligence told the Guardian.
NATO member Turkey has long been accused by experts, Kurds, and even Joe Biden of enabling ISIS by turning a blind eye to the vast smuggling networks of weapons and fighters during the ongoing Syrian war.
In November, a former ISIS member told Newsweek that the group was essentially given free rein by Turkey's army.

This is the sort of "ally" that we have chosen to betray the Kurds for. It wouldn't be the first time an American president has gone down this road.

The fire art of betraying the Kurds

'Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.'
- Henry Kissinger, 1975

In 1972, Henry Kissinger, working as Nixon's security adviser, visited the Shah in Tehran. They both agreed to organizing a Kurdish insurrection against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

The Kurdish leader, Mustafa Barzani, believed implicitly in Kissinger's guarantee, and he even gave his patron three rugs and a gold and pearl necklace as gifts when Kissinger got married.

For two years the Kurdish rebellion raged. Then the Shah and Saddam patched things up politically and settled their border dispute.
American and Israeli arms and supplies that were being shipped through the Iranian border were suddenly cut off. Barzani wrote to Kissinger, "Your Excellency, the United States has a moral and political responsibility to our people." Kissinger did not reply.
The Kurds were slaughtered by Saddam's forces. 600 Kurdish villages were burned. 200,000 Kurds were displaced.

Twelve years later Saddam's forces were crushing another Kurdish rebellion, this time it was much larger and more bloody. One of the most heinous act during this campaign was Saddam's use of poisonous gas against civilians.

Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S. intelligence officers, show (1) that Iraq carried out the attack on Halabja, and (2) that the United States, fully aware it was Iraq, accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a fierce war, of being partly responsible for the attack. The State Department instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame...
The deliberate American prevarication on Halabja was the logical, although probably undesired, outcome of a pronounced six-year tilt toward Iraq, seen as a bulwark against the perceived threat posed by Iran's zealous brand of politicized Islam.

By this point you would think that the Kurds would have stopped trusting the United States. However, in 1991, when President H.W. Bush called for the people of Iraq “to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside,” the Kurds complied.

For some reason the Kurds thought that Washington wouldn't let Saddam slaughter them again, and even asked for support from the allied forces to push onto Baghdad. They were wrong.
Around 1.5 million Kurds fled Saddam's forces to Iran and Turkey. The sight of so much suffering on the TV caused Bush to change policies and establish a no-fly zone over northern Iraq. This led to de facto autonomy for the Iraq Kurds, a reality that exists today.

Which brings us to the present. When the United States started bombing ISIS nearly a year ago, Time ran a headline with the title of Kurds Welcome U.S. Help in Iraq, But Remember History of Betrayal. This was only days after the bombs started falling.
The United States is not the only nation to betray the Kurds, nor will it be the last nation to betray them. It's just the most recent.