The Syrian Kurds Are Winning!
Jonathan Steele
The New York Review of Books, December 3, 2015 Issue
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/03/syrian-kurds-are-winning/
Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War
by Michael M. Gunter
London: Hurst, 169 pp., $50.00 (distributed in the US by Oxford University
Press)
Kurdish fighters in the Women’s Protection Unit during their daily drills at
Shilan Camp, in the border region of Andivar, Rojava, Syria, summer 2015
Anyone searching for a sliver of light in the darkness of the Syrian
catastrophe has no better place to go than the country’s northeast. There
some 2.2 million Kurds have created a quasi state that is astonishingly
safe--and strangely unknown abroad. No barrel bombs are dropped by Bashar
al-Assad’s warplanes. No ISIS executioners enforce the wearing of the niqab.
No Turkish air strikes send civilians running, as Turkish attacks on Kurdish
militia bases do across the border in Iraq.
Safety is of course a relative concept. Car bombs and suicide attacks by
ISIS assassins regularly take lives in this predominantly Kurdish
250-mile-wide stretch of Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but
by the standards of the rest of the country it is quiet.
The 2.2 million Kurds make up a tenth of the Syrian population. During the
protests of 2011--the Arab Spring--they, like their Arab counterparts in
other Syrian cities, publicly demonstrated for reform in Qamishli, the
region’s largest city. But Assad was milder toward them than he was to other
protesters elsewhere. He gave citizenship to 300,000 stateless Kurds and in
July 2012 even withdrew most of his combat troops from the area on the
grounds that they were needed more urgently in the Syrian heartland of
Aleppo, Damascus, and the cities in between.
Kurdish militias known as the People’s Protection Units (YPG) quickly
organized the support of much of the Kurdish adult population under thirty
and took control of the region, which they divide into three "cantons" and
which they call Rojava (i.e., West, meaning western Kurdistan, from roj, the
Kurdish word for sun). The other Kurdish regions are in Turkey, Iran, and
Iraq.
Over the next three years the YPG trained and built a well-disciplined,
though lightly armed, military force and set up an efficient system of local
government. It is a measure of the Assads’ repression that, whereas in
Turkey bans on the Kurdish language were lifted in 1991, they were kept in
place for another two decades in Syria. As a result most adults in Rojava
speak better Arabic than Kurdish. Now in charge of their own statelet,
Kurdish leaders are reviving the use of the Kurdish language in schools and
on TV and radio stations.
The language, Kurmanji, belongs to the Indo-European family and is akin to
Farsi but distinct from Arabic or Turkish. Unlike Arabs and Turks but like
Iranians, Kurds celebrate the New Year, Newroz, on the first day of spring.
The Kurds are originally a mountain people, who emerged near Lake Van in
eastern Turkey. Their most famous warrior, Saladin, who captured Jerusalem
from the Crusaders, was active with his regiments along the Mediterranean in
the twelfth century. Many settled in Damascus and Aleppo.
Under the Ottoman Empire Kurdish identity was not threatened, and it was
natural that when the empire collapsed at the end of World War I Kurds hoped
to create an independent state. In the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 they were
promised a state by the British and other Western powers but Kemal Ataturk,
the Turkish leader, refused to implement the treaty and the Western powers
changed their line. Kurds were marginalized in Turkey. After several failed
rebellions in the 1920s thousands fled to Syria. There, under the French
mandate, Kurds were privileged over the Arab majority, particularly in
getting jobs in the army and police.
After Syria won its independence in 1946 the public projection of a separate
Kurdish culture was repressed by the new Arab rulers, even though other
minorities--Armenian, Assyrian, and Druze--were recognized. Syrian Kurds
were Arabized and influenced by the modernizing ideology of urban Syria.
Today they show few signs of their mountain origins or tribal affiliations.
Whereas older men in Iraqi Kurdistan often wear sirwal--baggy trousers held
up by a cummerbund--the costume is rarely seen in Rojava.
But the dream of having a state of their own has never faded. With around 32
million people worldwide, they are the largest ethnic group without one.
Retaining this aspiration is the key factor that has kept Kurds tough and
self-reliant through decades of repression in the four countries where they
are numerous. After Iraq, where Kurds have enjoyed autonomy in the north
since 1991, and Turkey, where the militant PKK has been fighting for Kurdish
autonomy since 1984, the Kurds of Syria saw their first real opportunity for
change as late as 2011. At all levels of Syrian Kurdish society there is now
a strong desire to reverse the last half-century of assimilationist
pressures and revive their cultural heritage, particularly the Kurdish
language and literature and the celebration of Newroz with Kurdish music and
dancing. Syrian Kurds put greater store on national identity than organized
religion. Most Kurdish clerics are Sufis of the Sunni branch of Islam and,
in contrast to the Syrian Arab opposition to Assad, none of the dozen
Kurdish political parties in Syria is Islamist.
In spite of the huge attention given to Syria’s war by international media,
no foreign diplomats or businesspeople and only a handful of reporters have
made the trip to Rojava. The first, albeit brief, coverage came in September
of last year, from across the Turkish border. That was after ISIS fighters
swept north from Raqqa, the headquarters of their newly declared caliphate,
and launched a surprise attack on the Kurdish canton of Kobane. They
captured dozens of Kurdish villages, executed scores of people who didn’t
have time to escape, and moved toward the large town of Kobane, which sits
on Syria’s border with Turkey.
The Kurdish YPG forces resisted as best they could with the help of seasoned
guerrillas from the PKK. After desperate pleas for help from the YPG as well
as from Washington’s allies in the Kurdish Regional Government in northern
Iraq, the US started bombing ISIS positions on the approaches to Kobane.
Several dozen Kurdish fighters from Iraq--called peshmerga--also joined the
fighting. In spite of the US air strikes the ISIS advance continued and by
October its militants were inside the town of Kobane as they poured
reinforcements from Raqqa into the battle.
This was the first sustained engagement between US airpower and ISIS, and
reporters from across the world who were camped just inside Turkey filmed
ISIS artillery strikes and the much larger plumes of smoke caused by US
bombs and missiles. With most of Kobane’s civilian population fleeing into
Turkey, cameras also broadcast the first pictures of vast streams of Kurdish
Syrian refugees escaping northward, a harbinger of the broader flight of
refugees was to come a year later. Meanwhile, Turkish tanks and armored
personnel carriers patrolled the Kobane border within a few hundred yards of
the battle and did nothing to help.
Gradually, the Kurdish fighters prevailed and in January of this year ISIS
withdrew, though it took another three months to drive them out of the
villages south of Kobane. As many as a thousand ISIS fighters were thought
to have died. The YPG had shown it was the most successful group of fighters
with whom the US could ally in Syria and open cooperation now exists. There
was a second crucial lesson: using airpower makes little sense without an
infantry force, preferably of local people, to follow up on the bombing.
In July of this year the YPG, again with the aid of US airpower, drove ISIS
out of Tal Abyad, another town on the border with Turkey. This meant ISIS
had lost two of the three crossing points from Turkey through which it could
bring foreign volunteers, finance, and weaponry to strengthen the jihad.
Idriss Nassan, the Kurdish spokesperson of the Kobane canton, told me that
the YPG now plans to liberate the last ISIS border-crossing point into
Turkey at the town of Jarabulus. The YPG are dug in on the east bank of the
Euphrates and it will be difficult to move forward. But success would be a
strategic blow to ISIS, severely limiting its power. It would also upset
Turkey, which fears a further strengthening of the statelet that the Kurds
have set up along more than half of the Syrian--Turkish border. If the Kurds
were to take control of the area from Jarabulus to Azaz, they could link the
cantons of Jazira and Kobane with Rojava’s third canton, the enclave of
Afrin, which is largely populated by Kurds, creating a Kurdish zone along
almost the entire length of Syria’s northern border. Since the Turks are now
taking a hard line toward the Kurdish PKK within their own borders, they are
anxious to prevent a strong new Kurdish entity emerging in Syria.
The Turks have said they want a no-fly zone, policed by Turkish and US
warplanes, to be established in the very area from Jarabulus to Azaz that
the Kurds want to take from ISIS and other jihadis. Turkish officials in
Ankara claim that the no-fly scheme would block the Syrian air force and
create a haven for Syrian civilians escaping Assad’s attacks. The Kurds see
the scheme as a device to permit the Turks to bomb any YPG fighters who
enter the area.
The US seems to have seen through Turkey’s ruse and refuses to support the
no-fly zone idea. Much now depends on whether the US will back a YPG advance
to Jarabulus with air strikes. Asked if the US has given the YPG a green
light, Nassan, speaking for the Kobane canton, was upbeat. "Sipan Hamo, the
YPG commander, has said we’re going to liberate Jarabulus and, when he says
this, he’s coordinated with the US because we’re part of its international
coalition," he said.
In mid-October, US aircraft dropped ammunition and weapons for the Kurds and
their allies from local Arab and Turkmen tribes. It was a significant
escalation of US military aid, and a few days later Turkey’s Prime Minister
Ahmet Davutoglu announced that Turkey had struck the YPG twice. He was not
specific but the attacks appeared to be from machine guns firing across the
border. There were no reports of casualties, and the attacks seemed designed
as a political message. Davutoglu said Turkey had told Russia and the US
that YPG forces would not be permitted to proceed beyond the Euphrates. In
an apparent rebuke to the Turkish prime minister, John Kerry told a
Washington audience on October 28: "We’re...enhancing our air campaign in
order to help drive Da’esh [ISIS], which once dominated the Syria--Turkey
border, out of the last seventy-mile stretch that it controls." Two days
later, Obama announced he was ordering up to fifty US special forces into
Rojava to help the YPG and allied local militias to fight ISIS.
Nassan’s office is in the western sector of Kobane, in one of the few public
buildings that remain intact. Elsewhere the streets are lined with ruins,
looking like pancakes of concrete, crushed by US bombs and missiles.
Civilian casualties were minimal since most people had fled as soon as ISIS
appeared.
Kobane and the surrounding canton with its 380 villages had a pre-war
population of 300,000, but by the time of the ISIS attack it had swollen to
500,000 thanks to an influx of Arabs, Armenians, Turkmen, and Kurds fleeing
from other Syrian cities. Some 150,000 have already returned, according to
Nassan, though it was impossible to verify his figure. The town’s bazaar is
busy and the streets are full of women and children. Families are back.
The Kobane refugees escaping ISIS included Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old
toddler whose lifeless body, face-down on a Turkish beach, provoked a
worldwide wave of sympathy for Syria’s refugees this summer. Few news
reports mentioned that he was a Kurd and some Syrian opposition sources used
his plight to claim, falsely, that his parents were taking him and his older
brother to escape Assad’s barrel bombs, not ISIS.
The child’s remains, along with those of his brother and mother, are buried
under gray marble slabs in Kobane’s cemetery beside small evergreen trees
planted in old tins that used to contain cooking oil. His father, Abdullah,
got special permission from the Turkish authorities to bring his family’s
bodies across the border, but no such allowance was given to the dozens of
foreign journalists who accompanied him from Bodrum. Nor does Turkey allow
international aid workers to cross into Kobane for reconstruction and the
clearing of unexploded bombs and shells. In order to circumvent this harsh
embargo, they have to use the only route available for visiting the region,
which goes via a flat-bottom boat or a ride on a narrow pontoon bridge
across the Tigris from Iraqi Kurdistan, followed by a long day’s drive on
potholed roads.
Since its withdrawal from Kobane, ISIS has changed tactics. It uses suicide
bombings and hit-and-run attacks, which are less liable to be targeted by US
air strikes than large groups of fighters and armored vehicles. Shortly
before dawn one night in June a group of ISIS fighters slipped into Kobane,
wearing YPG uniforms to avoid detection. They shot and killed nearly two
hundred civilians before taking refuge in a city-center school. It took
several days to push them out.
Syrian Kurdish militia leaders pride themselves on being not only a secular
guerrilla force with no religious ideology but an army with gender equality,
with women in combat on the front line. Fidan Zinar, who took command of the
YPJ (Women’s Protection Units) in Kobane a week before the ISIS raid in
June, told me that she used to be a housewife in a small Syrian town. She
joined the YPJ three years ago, "first of all to defend myself, then my
culture, my language, my people, and our homeland." A veteran of several
clashes with ISIS, she said:
In some operations we work as a separate women’s unit, sometimes we are with
male units. We can’t say we’re confident that ISIS won’t come back again.
They still have agents and sleeper cells here, and there are gaps in our
defenses. But they can’t make an all-out attack; [they can] only penetrate
in small groups or use car bombs.
In Kobane’s military hospital I met a young woman with her left arm in a
bandage. Asmin Siterk had been wounded in a battle at the end of July to
drive ISIS fighters out of Sarrin, a town on the Euphrates some fifty miles
south of Kobane. "We were in a mixed group of soldiers," she told me.
"Several men were wounded as well as me. There were six martyrs in our
group, two women and four men."
On the drive back east there was further evidence of women’s military
contributions. Women in combat fatigues shared the job of examining drivers’
credentials at the numerous checkpoints. Photographs of "martyrs"--troops
killed in battle--were displayed at every military post, and a good number
were women. In Qamishli, Amina Ossi, the deputy minister for foreign
relations in the YPG canton of Jazira, estimated the number of YPG and YPJ
fighters as 50,000 and the number of martyrs in the last three years as
three thousand. Half of each category were women, she said.
It was on the way to Amina’s office that I came across an initially baffling
sight. A statue of Hafez al-Assad, the former Syrian president and founder
of the Assad dynasty, stood unmolested at a city-center roundabout. Nearby
two photographs of his son, Bashar, were on display in the front windows of
Syrianair. While Kurds fly their own red, green, and yellow flag throughout
the region, the Syrian national flag was hoisted above a lane of concrete
blocks leading to the entrance of a small garrison.
Here is one of the complexities of the Syrian war. The regime retains
control of roughly one tenth of Qamishli, plus the local airport and the
connecting road as well as the Arab part of the town of Hasakah, some fifty
miles to the south. This symbolic toehold allows it to claim that it still
controls the capitals of all Syrian provinces except Raqqa, which is held by
ISIS, and Idlib, which is held by other extreme Islamists, including Jabhat
al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham. In return the Kurds benefit by having Damascus
continuing to pay the salaries of the Kurdish region’s teachers, hospital
doctors, and other public-sector workers. Civil aircraft under control of
the Assad regime still fly regularly from Qamishli to Damascus and Lattakia.
For students enrolled there and for businessmen this provides a useful link,
since overground travel has become too dangerous.
Rojava contains some of the most fertile land in Syria, planted with wheat,
cotton, and vegetables. It also has oil, although the "nodding donkeys"--the
pumps that pull it out of the ground--stand idle now for lack of investment
and maintenance. But most basic goods, as well as medicines in the Kurdish
region’s pharmacies, are brought from Damascus on trucks that pass through
ISIS territory. This is another of Syria’s complexities. ISIS leaders prefer
to tax the drivers rather than block them and put the Kurdish region under
siege, which could provoke more armed conflict with the Kurds.
Some activists in anti-Assad opposition groups claim that the Assad regime’s
presence in Qamishli shows that the Kurds are collaborators. The point is
vigorously rejected by Kurdish officials, who say they have two enemies,
ISIS and Turkey, that pose a more immediate threat than Assad. ISIS fighters
continue to attack them wherever they can. Turkey is a looming presence that
might send its troops or aircraft across the border at any time. "War is a
matter of strategy and tactics. You can’t fight on too many fronts," Lawand
Rojava, a YPG commander in Hasakah, told me.
The [Assad] regime has aircraft and uses barrel bombs. Why should we risk
our people’s lives by attacking the regime’s base here, just to prove to the
world that we are not allies of the regime? We have to think about the
interests of the people. The regime also thinks strategically. We have had
many clashes with the regime but they’re not attacking us now.
Hasakah came under assault from ISIS as recently as June. The ISIS fighters
infiltrated the Arab part of town and attacked the regime’s forces. Syrian
government aircraft responded, but the YPG held back. Only when ISIS moved
into the Kurdish districts did the YPG call in US air strikes. Under the
combined weight of YPG ground troops and US airpower ISIS was eventually
pushed back but the YPG and YPJ lost fifty people, according to Lawand
Rojava. He was not complimentary about the Syrian army’s performance. "There
are," he said, "various militias fighting with the [Syrian] regime. Some are
Baathist. Others are from local Arab tribes. There are also the National
Defense Forces"--a volunteer militia that Assad created two years ago to
supplement the dwindling supply of conscripts. Using the Arabic acronym Da’esh
for ISIS, he went on: "When Da’esh came into Hasakah, many regime units
switched to Da’esh’s side. There are also many Da’esh spies within the
regime."
As with the ISIS counterattack after retreating from Kobane, ISIS showed
that it still has the mobility to cause casualties and terror in Hasakah. A
week before my visit to the town an ISIS team in a car full of explosives
blew themselves up at a checkpoint outside the front of Lawand Rojava’s
headquarters, killing three soldiers. Two days earlier a suicide bomber
killed twenty civilians at another checkpoint, and in a separate incident a
bomber killed forty-three civilians in a crowded shopping street. Kurdish
journalists in Qamishli were unaware of the atrocities, an apparent sign
that the Kurdish authorities try to restrict bad news.
In Remelan, a small Syrian town close to the border of Iraq and Turkey, I
went to see Saleh Muslim, the copresident of the Democratic Union Party
(PYD), the largest Syrian Kurdish party, who is in effect the region’s
political leader. The YPG militias are the PYD’s armed wing. As Michael
Gunter describes in Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War, the
PYD began in 2003 as the Syrian branch of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’
Party. (Though completed before ISIS’s emergence and the start of US
bombing, the book is an admirably lucid survey of the Syrian Kurds’ history
and prospects.) Hafez al-Assad had given the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan
sanctuary in Syria in 1979. The move was partly to have a bargaining chip in
dealings with Turkey but also, in Gunter’s words, "in return for...keeping
the lid on Syria’s Kurds.... Assad allowed Syrian Kurds to join the PKK in
lieu of serving in the Syrian army."
This modus vivendi lasted until 1998 when Turkey threatened to go to war
unless Syria expelled the PKK. Assad gave way and sent Ocalan and his
fighters out of the country. Most of Ocalan’s guerrillas moved to northern
Iraq. Ocalan himself sought refuge in various countries, eventually flying
to Kenya, where he was captured in 1999 in a joint US-Turkish operation. He
has been in a Turkish prison ever since.
Saleh Muslim, a native of Kobane, was in a Syrian prison for a time as an
activist after the PYD took part in anti-regime demonstrations in Qamishli
in 2004. On release he made his way to a PKK camp in the Qandil mountains of
Iraqi Kurdistan, and returned to Syria in April 2011 just as the new wave of
anti-regime protests got underway.
The United States and the European Union designate the PKK as a terrorist
group but they have been careful not to do the same with the PYD. Saleh
Muslim meets regularly with US diplomats and was invited to meet Turkish
officials in Istanbul in July 2013, when he assured them that the PYD was
not seeking independence from Syria for Rojava.
Saleh Muslim’s soft-spoken manner and modest demeanor belie the steel and
determination that have helped him turn the PYD into an unexpectedly
powerful political and military force. While supporting Assad’s replacement
by a national unity government, he has no doubt that the immediate threat
comes from ISIS, and that foreign governments need to give priority to ISIS
in defining their objectives in Syria. Asked if the Assad regime was close
to being toppled by ISIS, he told me: "If it collapses because of the
Salafis [i.e., ISIS], it would be a disaster for everyone. If it collapses
by agreement with other forces, it would be all right."
He argued that there should be talks between the regime and the non-Islamist
forces such as the Kurds with the aim of reaching a political deal, since
neither side could eliminate the other, but there was no prospect of
negotiating with ISIS, since they did not believe in compromise. "For Da’esh
and people with their mentality you cannot think of any way of ending them
except via military force.... We wouldn’t feel safe in our homes as long as
there is one Da’esh person left alive. They are an enemy of humanity."
Muslim was speaking to me when the Russian military build-up in Lattakia was
underway but before the Russian air strikes started and Assad met with
Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Saleh Muslim has regular contacts with Russian
diplomats, as he has with Americans, and said he had been assured by senior
Russian officials on a visit to Moscow in September that Russia would not
bring ground troops to fight in Syria. "We and our allies among the Arabs
have said many times we don’t agree to have foreign armies in Syria, or any
invasion by any side. If the Russians break through on this, it means a kind
of invasion and our people won’t agree to it."
He favored coordination between the US and Russian air forces. As long as it
was not designed exclusively to support the Assad regime, he saw no reason
why the US should not coordinate with the Syrian army and provide air cover
if it launched ground offensives against ISIS since defeating ISIS, in his
view, took priority over replacing Assad’s regime.
He foresaw the day when the Syrian Kurdish militias could close the last
ISIS crossing point from Turkey at Jarabulus. The YPG could then even move
on ISIS’s capital in Raqqa "with the help of others."
The PYD’s relationship with the other main Kurdish parties in the region is
complicated. It denies having organic links to the PKK in Turkey, though it
reveres the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan. His picture is
prominently displayed in public offices and at military checkpoints, even
sometimes on badges on soldiers’ shoulders, and he is referred to as "Apo"
(Uncle).
The PYD’s links to the ruling parties in Iraqi Kurdistan are polite but
cool, partly for ideological reasons since the PYD is left-wing and the
Iraqi parties are center-right but mainly because the PYD insists on
monopolizing decision-making in their own region. A recent meeting between
Saleh Muslim and the Iraqi Kurdish president, Masoud Barzani, which was
organized and attended by Brett McGurk, the US special envoy to the
anti-ISIS coalition, was aimed at getting Muslim to agree that a few
thousand US-trained peshmerga in Iraq who owe loyalty to smaller Syrian
Kurdish parties would be allowed to cross from Iraq and join the struggle.
Muslim insisted that they come under YPG command and the meeting failed.
The PYD is facing criticism from some supporters. There is war weariness and
anxiety over the long periods of military service for young men and women. I
found people grumbling over a new decree that puts under government control
properties left empty by those who have fled abroad. Officials insist that
this is not expropriation but a measure designed to assess the scale of
vacant buildings and rehouse people who have abandoned vulnerable villages
for the safety of the main towns. If the owners return, they will get their
houses back.
In his book, Gunter points out that the Assads maintained an artificial Arab
Belt (al-Hizam al-Arabi) along the Turkish border by settling Arabs in new
villages there with the aim of separating Syria’s Kurds from the Kurds of
southern Turkey. Arab and Turkmen refugees, now in Turkey, have recently
claimed that the Pyd is engaging in ethnic cleansing, forced deportation,
and demolition of houses. Some of these charges have been taken up by
Amnesty International. PYD officials deny that they are destroying the Arab
Belt. They say that some villages had to be abandoned for security reasons
because their inhabitants sympathized with ISIS fighters when they
infiltrated it; when ISIS left, the Arabs and Turkmen voluntarily fled for
fear of being suspected by the Kurds of having helped ISIS and harboring
"sleeper cells."
What is Rojava’s future? Militarily, it seems relatively secure. ISIS has
suffered much at the YPG’s hands over the last year and is unlikely to want
to repeat the experience of confronting them, although ISIS will fight to
retain Jarabulus, its last crossing point to Turkey. Besides, ISIS’s
long-term ambition is not focused on the Kurds but on Arab regions, whether
in Syria, Iraq, or beyond those two countries, in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Turkey is the joker in the deck. The peace talks between Turkey and the PKK
broke down this summer and Turkey resumed its air strikes on PKK bases. I
asked Saleh Muslim if he was afraid of a Turkish military intervention at
some point. After all, Rojava is a long and thin slice of land on Turkey’s
borders that is only lightly defended by 50,000 Kurdish militia troops. "Two
years ago I was most afraid of a Turkish intervention, but Turkey is not so
free to do that now," he replied, apparently confident that Washington’s
alliance with the YPG in the struggle against ISIS has limited Turkey’s
options.
Like most Kurds in Rojava--and I heard the same from Iraqi Kurdish officials
in Erbil--Saleh Muslim believes that Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s
recent attacks on the PKK were designed to win Turkish nationalist support
for his party in the parliamentary elections on November 1. If that was
Erdogan’s strategy, it worked handsomely. The opposition Nationalist Action
Party (MHP) lost forty of its eighty seats and Erdogan’s Justice and
Development Party (AKP) surged to an outright majority in parliament after a
campaign in which it insisted that it alone could give Turkey stability and
security. The question now is whether Erdogan continues his attacks on the
PKK and, by extension, the Syrian Kurds, or resumes the peace process with
the PKK.
Whatever Erdogan decides, there appears to be no chance that Rojava will
ever go back under Arab control as fully as it was before 2011. Before the
Geneva talks in 2014, the last occasion when the UN brokered negotiations
between the Syrian government and its opponents, the Syrian Kurds insisted
on coming as a separate delegation and refused to join the opposition
coalition when they were told they had to join with others. After almost
five years of war Syria is fragmented, and it is unclear whether Damascus
will ever be restored as a powerful seat of central government. The best
that can be expected is a devolved federal system, either by a formal
constitutional change or merely de facto.
Rule from Damascus may be replaced by competing rulers or warlords in
different cities. Whoever they are, whether Islamist or secular, no set of
Arab rulers will easily be accepted again by Syria’s Kurds. Their language
is being revived. They run their own education system and have an authentic
local media. They have tasted the benefits of autonomy and will resist any
attempt to have all this extinguished.
