With local elections and another contest against his electoral nemesis, the leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), just around the corner, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is wasting no time rallying the country around a common cause: destroying Rojava. “A strategic alliance with the US can only be possible if we wipe out terrorists from the north of Syria,” Erdoğan declared in December. “We have done so in Afrin and in Shengal. We have buried them in the trenches they had dug and we will continue to do so. If they don’t leave, we will make them disappear because their existence disturbs us.”

Erdoğan is itching to wage war across the border, against the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the enclave commonly known as Rojava. The revolutionary region’s political program shares many similarities with the HDP’s electoral platform in Turkey, which promotes egalitarianism, peace, and radical democracy.

As for the messages that Erdoğan is telegraphing to the public, they are threefold. Domestically, to the Turkish nationalists and his coalition partner, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Erdogan sells the old war against the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a militant Kurdish group). He does so by flattening all distinctions between the PKK and its civic sister in Syria, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which leads a pluralist coalition in Rojava. To the ISIS-crazed global media, Erdoğan is selling the security discourse of the “war on terror” by promising to create an ISIS-free “safe zone” right through Rojava, which also buys him favor with the European Union’s anti-refugee membership.