The Kurdish Minority and the Future of Syria
The Kurdish minority in Syria comprises nearly 3 million people, about 12% of the population, the largest ethnic minority in the fragmented country. Yet, much of the literature relating to the Kurds in Syria refers to them as the “silent minority,” “the newly-discovered minority,” “the forgotten people,” terms which somehow tend to downgrade their significance in the political history of the country, as well its future in it.
It never was right to belittle the role of the Kurds, much less so now. The Syrian Kurds are divided into two distinctly different groups. One comprises Kurds long settled in some of Syria’s urban centers, such as Aleppo, Damascus and Hama. Throughout the years they became an inseparable part of the Arab-Sunni majority in these places.
However, the bulk of the Kurdish community lives in north-east Syria, the Jazeera region, with Deir-al-Zor, Qamishli and Hasache as its main towns which had never been connected to the traditional centers of Syrian life. These areas were annexed to Syria as a result of imperial agreements after World War I, with their inhabitants being artificially cut off from their ethnic and tribal brethren in Iraq and Turkey.
Kurds and the Syrian state
The Kurds have always been a thorn in the side of the Syrian state, living in an area always deemed of vital strategic importance by the governments in Damascus. None more so than by the Ba’ath regime in power since 1963, which decided to resolve the Kurdish problem by a policy of forced Arabization of the Jazeera. The prominent Kurdish historian, Ismet Cheriff Vanly, called this “the final solution” of the Syrian Kurds.
The policy failed to change the demographic balance in north-east Syria, so the Ba’athists deprived many Kurds of their Syrian citizenship. The systematic policy of neglect and oppression caused a sharp deterioration in the economic conditions in the Jazeera. And even though, as of the 1980s, the region was an exporter of oil, revenues of derived therefrom were channeled to Damascus, rather than being invested locally.
Another result was the radicalization of the Kurdish population, which in the mid-1980s and in 2004 rose up violently against the regime, only to be put down by the use of brute force. It is significant to note that the Kurdish resisters did not get any help from other opposition groups in Syria, and were left to their own fate.