Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The fall of the al-Assad regime in Syria has broached again the issue of the largely Kurdish Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) and its relationship to the new government. Many Kurds are fearful for their future, as Euronews reports.
The officers of the new government have said various things. BBC Monitoring reports that on December 14, the new minister of defense, Col. Hasan al-Hamada, said on Telegram that the new Syria would not enjoy security until it terminated the “separatist schemes” of what he termed the “PKK” (Kurdistan Workers Party or Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan), which he said held sway over the east of the country. The PKK began as a Marxist separatist faction in the late 1970s and is still viewed as a terrorist organization by the US, Turkey and some European countries.
Since the PKK is based in Iraq and Turkey’s eastern Anatolia, al-Hamada was likely instead referring to the YPG or People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel) in northeastern Syria, the paramilitary for AANES, which denies any relationship to the more radical PKK. His words were ominous for the Kurdish regions, and reflected the desires of the patron of the ruling faction in the new Syria, Turkey, which wants to see the YPG disarmed.
In contrast, the leader of the new government, Ahmad al-Shara (nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani), has been more conciliatory. BBC Monitoring reports his remarks this weekend to Istanbul-based Syria TV, which is Qatari-owned. He made a distinction between the “Kurdish community” and the “PKK organization.”
On Sunday on a Syrian Telegram channel, al-Shara said that Kurds are a fundamental component of the coming Syria. He added, “The Kurds are a part of the homeland, and were exposed to tremendous injustice, as we were. With the fading of the regime, it may be that the injustice that befell them will fade as well.” He stressed the importance of “justice and equality for all,” such as would ensure “new regulations and a new history in Syria.”
The sweep of HTS forces from Idlib to Aleppo had caused the displacement of some Kurds in the Afrin region. Al-Shara pledged, “We will seek to return our people there to their villages and regions.” If he is sincere and has the power to make this happen, it would be a significant development and would cross his Turkish patrons, who want to break up the band of Kurdish habitation along the Syrian-Turkish border in the north.
Al-Shara’s remarkable statements on Sunday were hailed by the Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, head of that country’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which rules the Kurdistan Regional Government or super-province of northern Iraq.
Barzani said, “We have seen a statement by Ahmed al-Sharaa about the Kurdish people in Syria, in which he described the Kurdish people as part of the homeland and a partner in the future of Syria.” He added that “this vision of the Kurds and of the future of Syria is a source of joy and is welcome to us, and we hope that it will be the beginning of a correction of the course of history and of ending the wrong and unfair actions that were taken against the Kurdish people in Syria.”
Barzani continued that “such a perspective represents a starting point that paves the way for building a strong Syria; and the Kurds, Arabs and all other components of Syria must seize this opportunity to participate together in building a stable, free and democratic Syria.”
Barzani’s reaction is important for a number of reasons. Kurds in Iraq have had their own experience in reintegrating into a largely Arab country after the fall of a Baath regime, and have found ways to be influential in Baghdad while keeping some semi-autonomy. They are sometimes portrayed as the Quebec of Iraq.
Additionally, if the HTS were to move aggressively against the Syrian Kurds, Barzani could push back militarily. Both the KRG military force, the Peshmerga, and the thousands of PKK fighters hiding out in Iraq’s Qandil mountains could make a lot of trouble for the new Syria if it moves aggressively against the Kurds, as new Defense Minister al-Hamada seems to have envisioned. Further, Iraqi Kurds have influence in Baghdad, where Shiite leaders view al-Shara and his colleagues as little better than ISIL.
Moreover, the European Union, individual European countries and the US are watching the HTS-led government carefully to see if it takes the route of human rights, before they will consider lifting sanctions on Syria. The country desperately needs sanctions relief, and avoiding the Arab nationalist mistakes of the past with regard to the Kurds may be one of the prices Damascus has to pay. It won’t make Turkey happy, but Turkey itself would vastly benefit from a lifting of Syrian sanctions, since otherwise Ankara will have to carry the Syrian economy itself and Turkish firms could face sanctions for investing there.
The autonomous Kurdish AANES is for the most part civilly administered by the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat), which follows the left-wing cooperativist philosophy of Brooklyn thinker Murray Bookchin. It rules over roughly 2.4 million of Syria’s 24 million people.
As noted, the paramilitary of the Democratic Union Party is the YPG or People’s Protection Units. They form the core of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which have been backed by the US Department of Defense and which played the major role in defeating the ISIL (ISIS, Daesh) terrorist group that briefly ruled parts of Syria and Iraq 2014-2018. US special operations troops embedded among them.
In 2019, President Donald J. Trump was widely blamed for giving Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the green light to invade the Kurdish regions of northern Syria and to establish a military buffer zone, which led to the displacement of tens of thousands of Kurds and the deaths of SDF fighters who had saved America’s bacon in the fight against ISIL.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces kicked the Baath Party of Bashar al-Assad out of the northeast in 2011 and in recent times had an uneasy truce with it, as long as it respected their semi-autonomy. Arab nationalist Syria had never known what to do with the country’s Kurds, who are not Arabs, and had stripped them of citizenship in 1963.
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