Taking advantage of the fighting between their fellow Arab Syrians; Kurdish political groups unilaterally declared an “autonomous federation” of Kurdish districts in the north of the country on March 18.
The meeting for the declaration of federation was organised by Syria’s Democratic Union Party (known by its Kurdish acronym PYD) and elected a committee of 31 members to oversee the implementation of federalism within six months.
PYD leader Salih Muslim declared that the new region would be based “on demography”: in other words, an ethnic enclave. The newly-declared federal region would cover approximately 10 per cent of the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic, including more than three-quarters of the country’s borders with Turkey.
At the start of the Syrian revolution in 2011, a sizeable part of Syrian Kurds joined the largely peaceful uprising against the regime of President Bashar Al Assad. Other Kurdish groups took advantage of the state of anarchy and sought to realise their national ambitions. Amongst these groups was the PYD, an offshoot of the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which established the People’s Assembly of West Kurdistan as early as December 2011.
The PYD was quick to set up military units (including the People’s Protection Units, known by the Kurdish acronym YPJ), which can today count on an estimated total force of 50,000 fighters.
Since 2012, these forces took control of most of the areas in the far north-east of Syria which the regime had previously evacuated. Soon afterwards, PYD-led authorities declared self-rule in three districts: Ayn Al Arab/Kobani, in the north east of Aleppo; Afrin in the north west of Aleppo; and Al Jazeera in the far north-east of the country.
Seeking to build a local force to stop and roll back the expansion of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) in Syria, PYD forces attracted the attention of the United States.
Daesh had by then captured the entire territory between the city of Raqqa in northern Syria and Mosul in Iraq. American support allowed PYD-aligned forces to hold off a three-month barrage by Daesh in Kobani, and to eventually push it out of the city by early 2015. Taking advantage of US support and the war against Daesh, PYD forces expanded, taking over districts in which there were no historical Kurdish claims, or even “demographic” presence for the Kurds.
Yet, this territorial expansion would allow for geographical contiguity of areas under PYD control, thus making the declaration of the autonomous cantons more feasible.
Scattered in disparate pockets
Unlike their fellow Kurds in neighbouring Iraq, Syrian Kurds are scattered across disparate pockets in the country, wherein the majority of them had poured into the north-east of the country after the 1925 failed Kurdish rebellion in Turkey. Post-independence Syrian governments had always taken a cautious approach in recognising these migrants as full Syrian citizens. Hence, the 1962 census rescinded Syrian nationality from 25,000 Kurds, out of a total population then of 110,000. Over time, the remaining population of Syrian Kurds continued to grow, with population centres forming around three geographically disparate communities along the Syrian-Turkish frontier: Kobani, Afrin and Al Jazeera.
Syrian Kurds’ dreams of independence have always been hindered hence not only by the presence of a strong central government in Damascus and the opposition of regional powers (Turkey, Iran, and Iraq) but also by the presence of a wide belt of Arab populations between the two cantons to the east of the Euphrates (Kobani and Al Jazeera) and the third Kurdish-controlled canton, centred in Afrin to the west of the river.
The US-led war against Daesh may have presented the Kurds with a golden opportunity to achieve their long-awaited nationalist vision of a territorially contiguous enclave in the north of Syria. Yet, if the Kurds are to have their way, then they will have to overcome two fundamental challenges.
The first is the densely populated Arab regions within the Kurds’ own sought-after homeland. Given the unbearable costs of an ethnic cleansing of Arabs from northern Syria, it seems unlikely that the PYD will be able to achieve it.
A second obstacle to the PYD ambitions is the opposition of the majority of Syrians, both regime and opposition, to any attempts at division of the country.
Thus, the PYD could find itself setting off a prolonged Arab-Kurdish war which could outlive even the present conflict. Support from both the United States and Russia might be good enough reason for the Kurds to continue to pursue their ambitions. Yet the Kurds must not forget that their nationalist movement had been in the past supported by global powers who were only too quick to abandon it as soon as it was expedient to do so.
In other words, the confluence of Russian and American interests, which results in supporting the Kurds for the sake of fighting Daesh, is not something to take for granted. Only democracy and the equality of citizenship for all of the peoples of Syria can guarantee the Kurds their just rights in a future Syria.
Dr Marwan Kabalan is a Syrian academic and writer.
