Al Assad Uses Kurds to Fan Regional Tensions
While the world’s gaze is riveted on President Bashar Al Assad’s life-and-death struggle with his domestic and foreign enemies, the Kurds have seized the opportunity to boost their own political agenda. In a dramatic development, Kurdish forces have in recent days seized five Kurdish-majority towns in northern Syria, which lie in a strip of territory along the Turkish border. The Syrian government has allowed them to do so by withdrawing its troops.
These events have aroused ancient fears in Turkey and Iraq, as well as quiet jubilation in Israel, which has long had a semi-clandestine relationship with the Kurds, and welcomes any development which might weaken or dismember Syria.
Kurdish politics is fiendishly complicated but, in the present context, several groups deserve special mention: The Democratic Union Party (PYD), formed in 2003 and led by Saleh Muslim Mohammad, is by far the strongest single Kurdish group in Syria. It is armed and disciplined, and has not hesitated to use force against rivals and opponents.
The Kurdish National Council (KNC), formed in October 2011, is a loose (largely unarmed) political alliance of 11 Syrian Kurdish parties or factions.
The Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) is a militant Kurdish organisation in Turkey, which has waged war against the Turkish state in the interests of Kurdish independence over the past several decades. Ankara considers the PKK a terrorist organisation and has regularly bombed its clandestine bases in the Qandil mountains of northern Iraq. The Syrian PYD is closely affiliated to the PKK, some would even say it is a political front for it.
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) rules a semi-independent Kurdish entity in northern Iraq, with a population of about five million. Arbil is its capital and its leader is President Masoud Barzani, first elected in 2005 and re-elected in 2009.
This Kurdish autonomous enclave was born out of the long wars which Iraq’s former president Saddam Hussain waged against the Kurds. In its present form, the KRG took shape after the first Gulf War of 1991, when the US protected the Kurds by setting up a no-fly zone in northern Iraq. The KRG was then consolidated when the US and Britain invaded Iraq in 2003, overthrew Saddam, and prepared the ground for the restructuring of Iraq as a federal state of separate Arab and Kurdish entities.