images

I met twenty-two-year-old Barkhodan Balo at a Syrian Kurdish refugee settlement in northern Iraq. Balo took me on a walking tour of the three-hundred-person Moqebleh Camp, which consisted of dirt roads and concrete-block houses with plastic roofs. When it rained, she told me, “you hear every drip. In the winter it's very, very cold. In the summer, it's very, very hot.”1 Balo taught herself to speak English by watching TV and movies. “I love English, and I love to speak.” I asked her the name of her favorite movie star. “Jackie Chan!” she shouted with glee. Ah, the joys of globalization. A Syrian Kurdish refugee learns English from a native Chinese speaker more famous for his fighting skills than his diction.

Kurds make up an estimated 10 to 15 percent of Syria's 22.5 million people. The Kurdish language, culture, and historic territory make them a group distinct from Arabs, but they have become part of multinational Syrian society. Assad's government considers the Kurdish-dominated northeast of the country strategically important because it borders Turkey and Iraq. The Kurdish region is fertile, water is abundant, and it contains virtually all of the country's limited oil supplies. Government leaders feared Syrian Kurds secretly favored independence because Kurds in other countries have made that demand. All Syrian Kurdish parties currently reject separatism; however, they do demand greater rights as a distinct nationality within Syria.

To get more background on the Kurdish struggle, Balo and I walk over to her family's tent. She and her family migrated here after a Kurdish rebellion in 2004 in the city of Qamishli. Thousands of Kurds fled Syrian government repression after engaging in antigovernment protests.

Balo introduced me to her father, a political activist who was arrested in 2004, released, and then jailed again two years later. “He was tortured and brutally beaten,” said Balo. “After he got out, he came home and took off his shirt and showed his wounds. He said, ‘I want you never to forget the Syrian government deeds.’ I was thirteen years old. But like any Kurdish girl, I joined the Kurds in the demonstrations. In our country, when children are six or seven, children learn about our society. When I saw the wound on my father's back, I cried. I was so angry. If I caught any policeman or even any Arab, I would have killed him and drank his blood.”

Balo's animosity stemmed from government policy of bringing Syrian Arabs into the Kurdish region in an effort to dilute Kurdish influence. The government then incited those Arabs to attack Kurds. As she became older, Balo no longer blamed ordinary Arabs. “I know it's the government's fault,” she said. “They brought Arabs from other cities and gave them land owned by Kurds.” Kurds have long faced government discrimination in Syria. “After Syria had its independence from France,” said Balo, “the Arab governments haven't given Kurds any rights. They worried about the Kurds separating. They didn't give them half the rights of Arabs.”

At the time of the 2011 uprising, most Kurds opposed the Assad dictatorship but were also highly suspicious of the Arab rebels. Tens of thousands of Kurds fled Syria because of the fighting. By the middle of 2014, the Kurdish region had become a patchwork of areas controlled by the government, by extreme Islamists, and by Kurdish militias. To understand Kurdish attitudes toward the 2011 uprising, we must first understand some modern Kurdish history.

I met a Kurdish revolutionary for the first time at a Berkeley forum in the late 1970s. He wore traditional pantaloons, a loosely fitting jacket, a sash wrapped around his waist, and a twisted headscarf. He looked like a dashing rebel out of the previous century. Only later did I learn that Kurds proudly wear their traditional dress on special occasions, a practice that hasn't changed much over the years. I guess speaking to a bunch of Berkeley lefties constituted a “special occasion.” At the time I knew nothing about Kurds and sat in fascination as he described his people's long history.

Kurds trace their roots back nearly a thousand years as a nomadic people in the Middle East. Their language and customs are distinct from Arabs, although over time most adopted Islam. Today, by conservative estimate, 30 million Kurds live in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and former Soviet republics. They constitute one of the world's largest nationalities without a homeland.

The famous twelfth-century leader Saladin, who drove the Crusaders out of the Middle East, was a Kurd from Tikrit in Iraq. Indeed, the famous Crusader fortress in Syria known today as Krak des Chevaliers, conquered by Saladin, was originally called Hisn al-Akrad (Castle of the Kurds). After the Crusaders’ defeat, Kurdish military units settled in Damascus, creating what became known as the Kurdish Quarter of the city. Some Kurds maintained a strong warrior tradition, serving as loyal troops during Ottoman and French colonial rule. Others became anti-imperialist peshmerga fighters. Peshmerga is the general term for a fighting unit, which literally means “those who face death.”

Historically, most Syrian Kurds lived in the northern provinces while some migrated to Damascus and Aleppo. During World War I, British officials promised independence to Kurds living under Ottoman rule. But as with similar promises made to Arabs and Jews, the British had no intention of giving up any of their colonial territory to fulfill the promise. In 1920 the Allies and the Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Sevres, which included maps of an autonomous Kurdish region of Turkey and called for a referendum on Kurdish independence within one year.2 The treaty was rejected by Kemal Ataturk and the newly empowered Turkish nationalists, however, and was never implemented (see chapter 3). In 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne replaced the Treaty of Sevres, and it ignored the Kurdish issue entirely. As a result, the Ottoman-era Kurdish region was divided up between Turkey, Britain, and France. Nearly a century later, the unfulfilled promises of the Treaty of Sevres remain a Kurdish rallying cry for those who feel the old story is being played out again by regional and international powers.

Leftist and nationalist Kurds joined the anti-French-colonial movement in Syria during the 1930s. They founded a party called Xoybun, which, loosely translated from Kurdish, means “independence.” In late 1931 and early 1932, Xoybun elected three parliamentary deputies in Syria's first election under a French-imposed constitution. The party eventually dissolved, and many members joined the Syrian Communist Party.

Political battles surged back and forth across the always-porous borders in the Kurdish regions. And, as the Berkeley Kurdish revolutionary reminded us, only one independent Kurdistan has ever existed. It was led by leftist revolutionaries at the end of World War II.

Reza Shah, Iran's dictator from 1925 to 1941, brutally suppressed the Kurds, who lived mostly in the far northwest of Iran. He had been brought to power by the British, but in 1941, he angered the allies by declaring Iran neutral during World War II. The allies labeled him pro-Nazi. In 1941 British troops entered Iran and occupied southern Iran while Soviet troops did the same in the north. Most Kurds welcomed the Soviet troops as liberators from the oppressive Shah.3

Local Kurds administered a quasi-independent government after the last of the Shah's officials left the Kurdish area in 1943. Kurds ruled the small city of Mahabad and surrounding areas. A judge named Qazi Muhammad allied with local merchants and tribal chiefs to set up a self-defense militia. With help from the Soviet soldiers, the area prospered economically—albeit under wartime conditions. In 1945, Kurds in the region formed the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), which was eventually headed by Qazi Muhammad. The KDP's main military leader was Mustafa Barzani, father of today's Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) president Masoud Barzani. The Soviet Union backed an independent Kurdistan as a check against British and American domination of Iran.

So with Soviet encouragement in 1945, Kurds declared the independent Kurdish People's Government, which became known as the Mahabad Republic. The new republic immediately set about making significant reforms without the repression associated with the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The new government opened a girls’ high school and passed laws for compulsory education and free education for the poor. It introduced Kurdish-language instruction for the first time.4

But by the end of 1946, Soviet policy shifted as the Soviet Union sought an accommodation with the government in Tehran. It withdrew troops from the Mahabad Republic, and without Soviet support, economic conditions worsened. The KDP also lost support as some merchants and tribal chiefs switched sides to support the central government. On December 15, 1946, Iran's troops occupied Mahabad and quashed the independent republic. Under the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah, son of the previous Shah, Iran banned instruction in Kurdish and closed the Kurdish media. Qazi Muhammad was convicted of treason and hanged. Mustafa Barzani fled to northern Iraq and eventually to the Soviet Union to live in exile until his return to the region in the 1950s. Today both Barzani and Qazi Muhammad are regarded as heroes in the struggle for Kurdish rights.

Modern-day Kurdish political parties trace their history, in part, to the KDP of 1945. Syrian Kurds established the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria (KDPS) in 1957. The KDPS called for peaceful struggle to achieve Kurdish rights within the Syrian state, but it was banned nonetheless, and its members were forced to work underground.5

The Baathists came to power in a 1963 military coup and maintained the same antagonistic view of the Kurds. The new regime proceeded with plans to create an Arab cordon (Hizam Arabi) some three hundred kilometers long and fifteen kilometers wide along the Turkish and Iraqi borders. The Baathists didn't trust the Kurdish population and started to settle Bedouin tribes there beginning in 1973.

One Kurd told investigators for Human Rights Watch, “The government built them [Arabs] homes for free, gave them weapons, seeds, and fertilizer, and created agricultural banks that provided loans. From 1973 to 1975, forty-one villages were created in this strip…. The idea was to separate Turkish and Syrian Kurds, and to force Kurds in the area to move away to the cities.”6 Hafez al-Assad ended the resettlement program in 1975 but never returned Kurdish land or provided reimbursement for confiscated property. Over the next decades, he pursued an opportunistic policy toward the Kurds, continuing domestic suppression while supporting Kurds from other countries when it suited his foreign policy.

Over a period of thirty years Assad became a major player in the Arab fight against Israel, exerted control over Lebanon, and allied with Iran against Iraq. Even without a major army or economic clout, Assad created strategic alliances to promote Syrian power. He turned a lightweight country into a major contender for regional influence. Assad was a clever fighter, punching well above his weight. And his policy toward the Kurds was just one more jab.

The Syrian Baath Party was engaged in a vicious political fight with Iraqi Baathists, who had come to power in a 1968 coup. The main dispute centered on who would lead the Baathist movement: Iraq or Syria. Saddam Hussein helped engineer the Iraqi coup, and he became Iraq's president in 1979. So Assad decided to make an alliance of convenience with leftist and nationalist Kurdish groups to defeat the Iraqi Baathists.

By 1979, Assad formalized relations with the two main Iraqi Kurdish parties: the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), led by Jalal Talabani (later president of Iraq), and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), headed by Masoud Barzani (later president of Iraq's Kurdish Regional Government). The parties considered themselves on the left, with the KDP ideologically lining up with Moscow and the PUK aligning with Maoist China. They both opposed Saddam Hussein, and Assad allowed them to set up offices in Qamishli near the Iraqi border. Assad also allowed the Turkish-based Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan or PKK) to operate in Syria. The PKK has a long and controversial history.

Abdullah Ocalan and a group of student radicals founded the PKK on November 27, 1978, in the Kurdish region of eastern Turkey. Ocalan, a former political-science student, was a fiery leader who inspired complete obedience in his followers. Today PKK supporters hold high a poster showing a handsome Ocalan with slicked-back gray hair and a huge brush mustache. But few know what he really looks like since he's been held in a Turkish prison since 1999. The PKK began as a nationalist and revolutionary socialist group that believed in armed struggle. It was part of a 1970s surge of Middle Eastern nationalist groups adopting aspects of Marxism only to change their ideologies in later years.

In that era, the US-backed military regime in Turkey engaged in harsh repression against Kurds, refused to recognize them as a nationality, prohibited education in the Kurdish language, and banned Kurdish-language media. The Turkish military imposed martial law in Kurdish areas, which wasn't lifted until 2002. As of 2010 the army's counterinsurgency campaign killed some 35,000 civilians, imprisoned 119,000 Kurds, and disappeared another 17,000.7 The PKK established a reputation for fighting military repression and gained some popular support.

The PKK originally called for the formation of an independent, socialist state to include the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. It recruited large numbers of women and promoted some to leadership positions. In my almost-thirty years of reporting from the region, I have met few women leaders in any government or opposition party. So the active participation of women is no small accomplishment. I met some of the PKK women while reporting a story for Mother Jones in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.8

The journey began at the seedy Ashti Hotel in Sulaymaniyah. The Ashti looked like something out of a Graham Greene novel. Its smoke-filled lobby served as a meeting place for obscure diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, and spies. Men sat around, staring at glasses of strong tea. Every now and again they'd pour a bit of tea into their saucers, let it cool, and slurp it down. From the Ashti we made arrangements to visit a PKK guerrilla camp in the nearby Qandil mountains. We rode in a four-wheel-drive vehicle as we climbed the mountainside. Green and brown scrub brush covered the land as a chilly wind caused me to button my coat. After one particular death-defying curve in the road, a large, fertile valley opened up. Herds of goats and an occasional gaggle of ducks crossed the road. I knew we had entered PKK-controlled area when I saw two young women wearing PKK uniforms of green pants and shirts with the traditional twisted Kurdish headscarf.

While waiting for an interview, I chatted with the PKK women as we huddled around a wood stove. They were confident and talkative, saying that almost 50 percent of PKK members are female.9 Other sources report the number may be closer to 40 percent, but in either case, the numbers are impressive. The PKK claims there are no sexual relations among unmarried guerrillas, a fiction maintained to comfort the parents of girls going off to fight in the mountains.

The women boasted of attacking the Turkish military and police. But they said they didn't intentionally target civilians. The PKK does kill civilians working with the government, however, as well as Kurds they consider collaborators. Turkey, Britain, and the United States label the PKK as a terrorist organization. Other Kurdish parties have many criticisms of the PKK, but they make a distinction between terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and nationalist groups engaged in armed struggle such as the PKK. In Syria the PKK-aligned party protected the local population from extremist rebels. “The majority [of Kurds] believe that despite the PKK's practices, they're a better option than Jihadists and al-Qaeda,” said Hozan Ibrahim, a leader of the Local Coordinating Committees now living in exile.

During the 1990s, Syria allowed PKK militants to live in Damascus and receive military training in the mountains surrounding the Beka Valley of Lebanon, then controlled by Syria. The Syrian-PKK cooperation was a marriage of convenience. Assad wanted to pressure Turkey to negotiate the return of the Hatay region (see chapter 3). He also opposed Turkey's close alliance with Israel and the United States. The PKK used Syria to launch military attacks on Turkey.

By 1998, the Turkish government had become fed up with the cross-border raids and Syrian intransigence. The Turkish military massed troops along the border and threatened to attack Syria. One newspaper headline read, “We will soon say shalom to the Israelis in the Golan Heights,” meaning Turkish troops would advance all the way to Syria's border with Israel.10 So Hafez al-Assad, ever the strategic boxer, made one of his famous pivots. In October 1998 Syria signed the Adana Agreement with Turkey, declaring the PKK a terrorist organization and prohibiting its activities inside Syria.

Ocalan was forced to flee Damascus, and in 1999 he was captured in Kenya with help from the CIA. Taken to Turkey, he was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison. He's been serving time in isolation at the Imrali island prison ever since. Ocalan's arrest capped a series of major PKK defeats in the 1990s. In response, the PKK sought accommodation with the Turkish government and moved to the Right politically, abandoning Marxism and calling for Kurdish autonomy, not independence.11

In the early 2000s the PKK formed separate political parties for each of the countries where it operated. The Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat (PYD), or Democratic Union Party, was formed in 2003 as the Syrian offshoot, led by Saleh Muslim, a chemical engineer. The PYD argued that it is an independent party with only ideological ties to the PKK; critics said the two parties are controlled by the same PKK leadership.

The PYD has developed a reputation for sectarianism, putting its own interests ahead of the broader Kurdish movement. The Kurdish National Council, the umbrella Kurdish opposition group, “has accused the PYD of attacking Kurdish demonstrators [and] kidnapping members of other Kurdish opposition parties,” according to a report by the Carnegie Middle East Center.12 The PYD has also been accused of assassinating leaders of other Kurdish parties.13

The PYD also shared the PKK's cult worship of Ocalan. Supporters kept his picture in their homes, chanted his name at demonstrations, and wore his image on T-shirts. A PYD leader calling himself “Can Med” told me, “The leader Abdullah Ocalan gave us a solution for all the issues. He defined the way to solve our issues.”14 However, the PYD and its armed militias presented a disciplined, secular force in a region beset with religious extremism and chaos. The party gained popular support in northern Syria as the best among the bad alternatives.

These days, the Turkish and Syrian governments condemn the PKK and PYD as terrorists and blame them for lack of progress in achieving Kurdish rights. But long before the PKK was founded, the Syrian government oppressed its Kurdish population.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Turkish government cracked down on Kurdish activists. The repression forced some Kurds from Turkey to flee to Syria. The military rulers of Syria, even before the Assad family came to power, didn't trust the Kurds. In 1962 the government conducted a special census in the predominantly Kurdish province of Jazira. The government denied citizenship to an estimated 120,000 Kurds, claiming they were born in Turkey or Iraq.15 That constituted some 20 percent of Kurds living in Syria at the time. Successive generations born in Syria didn't receive citizenship either because their parents weren't listed as citizens.

Noncitizen Kurds remained in limbo. They couldn't obtain passports, be hired for government jobs, officially open businesses, or receive government-subsidized higher education and healthcare. The government confiscated the land of unregistered Kurds and gave it to Arabs. The problem festered for almost fifty years. Some 80 percent of Kurds lived below the Syrian poverty line as of 2007.16

I interviewed Bashar al-Assad before the uprising and asked why many Kurds still had no citizenship rights. He claimed it was simply a technical problem of sorting out who was Syrian and who was Turkish. I pressed him by pointing out that since many Kurds criticized his rule, wasn't the dispute political? “We don't have political problems,” he claimed. “Who is Syrian is Syrian.”17

In reality Assad didn't want to resolve the citizenship issue without exacting concessions from Kurdish leaders who periodically criticized his government. By 2011 the number of Syrian Kurds without citizenship grew to an estimated 300,000. Fearing Kurdish support for the uprising, Assad shifted course on April 7, 2011. He suddenly granted citizenship to about 250,000 Kurds. The exact numbers remain in dispute.18 The reform was popular among Kurds, and Assad bought some much-needed time. But Kurds disliked his government, in no small part because of how he handled the 2004 Kurdish rebellion.

On March 8, 2004, Iraq adopted the Transitional Administrative Law, which formally recognized a semi-independent Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Syrian Kurds celebrated what they considered a tremendous victory for Kurds throughout the region. That national pride expressed itself at a local soccer match. On March 12 the mostly Kurdish hometown soccer team from Qamishli played a match against the mostly Arab team from the city of Deir Ezzor. Riding around in buses before the match, Deir Ezzor fans held up portraits of Saddam Hussein and chanted insults against Kurdish leaders. Kurdish fans shouted slogans supporting George W. Bush.19 Fights broke out between the two camps, and the security forces sided with the Deir Ezzor fans.

The police killed six people on the first day. Refugee camp resident Balo said, “The next day when they went to bury them, there was conflict between the police and the people. The uprising started there.”20 Soon there were running battles in the streets. By the end of March, forty-three people were killed, hundreds wounded, and some 2,500 individuals arrested.21 It was the worst anti-Kurd repression in modern Syrian history up to that time. Thousands fled across the border to Iraqi Kurdistan, where many still live today. Their children and grandchildren learn about the Kurdish struggle and the evil Bashar al-Assad. “We know after this regime in Syria falls,” said Balo, “we are going to work for our rights, and we are going to free our Kurdistan.”

Freeing Kurdistan—whatever form that might take—won't be easy. The Syrian government, ultraconservative Arab rebels, and Kurdish groups all want to control the oil fields in the Kurdish region. Before the civil war and 2011 Western economic embargo, Syria produced 370,000 barrels per day, accounting for only 0.4 percent of total world output.22 The country is a small-time player internationally, but control of the fields is vital for any new Syrian government.

The Assads brought Syrian Arabs to live in the predominantly Kurdish area, so the population is now mixed. But the Syrian government and some rebels fear that an empowered Kurdish minority would seek control of oil production as happened in neighboring Iraq. The Iraqi Kurds have asserted the right to sign independent exploration, drilling, and distribution contracts with Western oil companies, despite strong objections from the central government in Baghdad.

Iraq, like Syria, has a state-owned oil company. The Baghdad government negotiated service contracts with foreign companies, who earn a fee for drilling and distributing the oil. That gives the foreign companies about one dollar per barrel. The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), on the other hand, signed production contracts in which oil companies own a percentage of the production and earn three to five dollars per barrel.23 Looking to the future, US and Western oil companies would be pleased if they could cut a similar deal with a Syrian Kurdistan.

That's a hypothetical dispute, however, because Western sanctions halted all Syrian-government oil production starting in late 2011. The Syrian army withdrew from much of the area. Local tribes, extreme Islamist groups, and the PYD competed for control of the unprotected oil wells. Locals set up open-air refineries by boiling the oil and then extracting diesel and heating oil. Explosions periodically rock the area, and huge plumes of toxic, black smoke pollute the air.24 While control of oil sets the backdrop for the struggle, the issue of Kurdish separatism always comes to the forefront.

For the first three years of the uprising, Syrian Kurdish groups rejected separatism and called for greater rights within the Syrian state. By mid-2014, conditions were rapidly changing in the region. The extremist group ISIS captured swaths of territory in Iraq. The Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq sent peshmerga and intelligence agencies into the Iraqi city of Kirkuk and took control of the city away from Baghdad authorities. Iraqi Kurds had long claimed oil-rich Kirkuk as their capital, and they appeared to have finally achieved their goal. KRG officials planned to hold a referendum on complete independence for the Kurdish region of Iraq.

Syrian Kurdish groups were closely watching developments in Iraq. Should conditions further deteriorate in Iraq and Syria, Kurds might have the option of joining an independent Kurdish state on their northern border. But as of mid-2014 all the groups still formally called for greater rights within the Syrian state, not independence. The numerous Kurdish political parties disagreed on particulars but united on certain broad principles for greater political and culture rights:

In the opening months of 2011, popular uprisings overthrew the military dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. By March, Syrians in Damascus and the southern city of Daraa held peaceful demonstrations demanding reforms, such as free elections and an end to police brutality. Similar spontaneous demonstrations broke out in the Kurdish region but on a smaller scale. I met a leader of those demonstrations after he fled Syria and was living in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan. “Ciwan Rashid” agreed to do the interview on a crowded Erbil street with a shopping mall and restaurants. “Rashid” was his activist name; he kept his real name secret for obvious reasons.25

Rashid had helped organize demonstrations in his hometown of Qamishli. Protestors quickly discovered that the government tapped phones operated by Syriatel, the country's dominant carrier owned by President Assad's cousin, Rami Makhlouf. So protestors came up with an ingenious method to outsmart the authorities. Rashid and others traveled across the border, bought a bunch of Turkish SIM cards, and then handed them out to protesters in Syria. SIM cards are the small circuit boards inserted in mobile phones to provide a local phone number and payment system. The Turkish mobile phone towers picked up signals in northern Syria, and demonstrators were able to communicate with less fear of eavesdropping.

Rashid told me, however, that the local security forces eventually caught on. “I was accused by the government of distributing the SIM cards, which is illegal,” he said. “So I left the country.” Demonstrators generally weren't using Facebook or other social media to mobilize people because the government closely monitored those sites. Syria was not experiencing a Facebook revolution. It was more of a mobile phone uprising. “I wasn't afraid,” Rashid said. I asked why not. After all, people were being arrested and brutalized in jail. “There are two choices,” he said. “One is to escape and survive. The second is to die. If I survive, I will have my freedom.”

In 2011, young Kurds such as Rashid were the minority among the Kurdish population. Kurds remained critical of Assad but were also suspicious of the opposition. The traditional Kurdish parties didn't join the uprising, fearing government repression, and they were concerned that the Islamist opposition wouldn't respect Kurdish rights. Mohammad Farho, a Syrian Kurdish commentator and activist living in Erbil told me, “Kurds are afraid of the Arab opposition parties because their agenda is not clear.”26 The Arab opposition groups were willing to recognize Kurds as equal Syrian citizens but not as a distinct nationality with legitimate language, cultural, and political rights.

During most of 2011, the Assad government took full advantage of the divisions between Arabs and Kurds. The Syrian military brutally attacked Arab cities such as Homs and Hama but shrewdly decided not to launch such devastation in majority Kurdish areas. “The regime tried to neutralize Kurds,” Yekiti Party leader Hassan Saleh told me. Yekiti is a nationalist Kurdish party that supported Assad's overthrow very early in the uprising. “In the Kurdish areas, people are not being repressed like the Arab areas. But activists are being arrested,” he said.27

While older leaders remained cautious, young Kurds seized the moment to organize antigovernment demonstrations in Qamishli. In other cities such as Aleppo, they joined Arab Syrians to hold protests. And their champion among the Kurdish leaders was Mashaal Tammo.

For his official appearances, Tammo dressed in a dapper suit, tie, and stylish glasses. At age fifty-four he still exuded youthful charm. Tammo formed the Future Movement in 2005 as a center-left group committed to Kurdish rights within the Syrian state. He was arrested and spent two years in an Assad jail, being released in 2011 under popular pressure from the uprising. The charismatic leader supported the uprising from the very beginning. Tammo became a hero to the young Kurds risking their lives in the streets. “There is a new generation of young people in Syrian society who do not share the same fears as the older generation,” he said. “These young people will build the new Syria.”28

Tammo called for the overthrow of the Baathist regime and establishment of a parliamentary system with civil liberties for all. He said any new “constitution should be a mirror of the cultural diversity of the Syrian people. Laws must be developed for parties, voting, the press, and so on…. Those groups who want a modern and civil democratic state will win out.”29 The Future Movement demanded full language, cultural, and political rights for Kurds within the Syrian state. “Syrian Kurds are not looking to separate from Syria,” Tammo said, “though of course the idea of a Kurdistan is a dream.”30 In a July 2011 interview, he called on the West to impose an economic embargo on Syria but opposed foreign military attacks. “We do not want military intervention from abroad,” he said. “We will solve the problem ourselves.”31

Tammo reached out to Arab opposition forces and joined the executive committee of the Syrian National Council (SNC), the US-backed opposition coalition bringing together secular, Islamist, and some Kurdish groups. He attended an early meeting of the SNC in Istanbul but walked out in a dispute over Kurdish rights: the SNC wanted to keep the country's name as the “Syrian Arab Republic.” Tammo and the Kurds wanted the name changed to “Syrian Republic.”

Tammo's views were gaining popular support because he called for Kurdish rights and for overthrowing Assad without foreign military intervention. Then on October 7, 2011, masked men assassinated him outside a safe house where he was hiding. The Syrian government accused opposition “terrorists” of carrying out the murder. But many Kurds blamed the Syrian authorities, who benefitted from the death of a popular leader with a significant following among young people. On the day of Tammo's funeral, fifty thousand people marched in Qamishli to protest his assassination. Government security forces fired live ammunition into the crowd and killed at least five people in Qamishli and several in other cities.32

Tammo's murder was a turning point in the Kurdish struggle. Mass demonstrations got bigger, the traditional Kurdish parties lost influence, and the youth-driven opposition gained stature. The Kurdish movement became radicalized with more people calling for the overthrow of Assad by force of arms.

The Democratic Union Party (PYD) was the first of the Kurdish groups to take up armed struggle in Rojava, Kurdish for the northern region of Syria. It smuggled in weapons using networks established by its affiliate, the PKK. I interviewed a PYD leader who used the name Can Med in Erbil in the fall of 2011. At that time, the PYD called for limited foreign military intervention to protect civilians and topple Assad. He also predicted that the PYD would soon launch armed attacks on the Syrian military. “If you want to get arms in the Middle East, it's easy,” said Med. “We can do that.”33 The PYD clashed with government troops but also with the Free Syrian Army and extremist Islamists who tried to take over towns in the Kurdish region.

In July 2012, Assad began to withdraw his army from the smaller Kurdish towns to concentrate forces in Damascus. A garrison remained in Qamishli, the largest predominantly Kurdish city in Syria. The PYD stepped into the gap and sent its fighters into four towns close to the Syrian–Turkish border and into a Kurdish district of Aleppo. They raised the PYD flag, with the Kurdish flag flying below it.34

Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani saw that the PYD was gaining ground. So he began to give military training to Syrian Kurds, many of whom lived in refugee camps in northern Iraq. Barzani formed the Special Coordination Committee (SCC) with its own militia. But as of late 2013, those militia had not taken up fighting inside Syria, partly fearing retaliation by Assad—but mostly due to opposition from the PYD. In July 2012 the PYD, SCC, and all the other Syrian Kurdish parties met in Erbil at the invitation of Barzani. They signed what became known as the Erbil Agreement, which formed a united political and military coalition against Assad. But very quickly, internal rivalries caused splits. The PYD formed its own coalition, the People's Defense of West Kurdistan. The two groupings met again in September and called for a united front against Assad and for Kurdish rights within Syria.

Although sharp differences remained among the sixteen Syrian Kurdish parties, both the Syrian and Turkish governments became very worried. The Turkish military feared that the Kurds could create a de facto independent state in northern Syria that would have close ties with the PKK. So early in 2012, Turkish authorities and their Syrian rebel allies sought to discredit the PYD. They argued that the PYD and PKK supported Assad and had cut a deal to seize Kurdish territory in order to attack Turkey.

The Turkish government cited the 1980s- and ’90s-era alliance between the PKK and Assad to prove that they were cooperating once again. That conveniently fit with Ankara's policy of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood while opposing political gains by Kurds. Turkish authorities told their national media that the Syrian government had rewarded the PYD for its support by allowing it to take over the four Syrian towns. Numerous Western media took up the refrain. Dutch journalist and analyst Wladimir van Wilgenburg offered a more nuanced view, noting that at various times the PYD has had de facto détentes with almost all the major armed players. “The main goal of the PYD is to create autonomous areas,” he told me.35 “So, it doesn't matter to them if they need to cooperate with al-Qaeda, Assad, Free Syrian Army, or anyone, as long as it serves their goals. They are not a proxy of anyone; they follow their own strategy.”

The PYD opposed both Assad and the Turkish-backed rebel groups. Saleh Muslim, head of PYD, gave an interview to Al Jazeera in which he said, referring to Syria, “We cannot defend tyranny, oppression, and we want to bring down the regime, and the difference is only in the mechanisms and means.”36

Turkish authorities didn't want to admit that, broadly speaking, Syrian Kurds opposed both Assad and the Islamist opposition backed by Turkey. The PYD reflected that view as well. “The Kurds have established themselves as a third way in Syria,” wrote Mustafa Karasu on the PKK's official website. “They did not side with either the current regime or an opposition completely lacking in democratic and liberationist characteristics.”37 Ironically, he went on to echo a position that the United States and Europeans could endorse: “Bashar Esad [al-Assad] will leave Syria and the Baas [Baathist] regime will cease to exist, but a Syria in which political Islam will be sovereign will not be acceptable. There will not be a single hegemony…. Political Islamists will not be side-lined as they were by the Baas regime, but they will also not be the primary power holders.” He also criticized the Arab nationalist opposition for not recognizing Kurdish rights.

The PYD has gained credibility on the Kurdish street because of its seemingly reasonable demands and its ability to defend Kurdish towns from both the Assad military and extreme Islamists. Many Kurds sharply disagree with the PYD, seeing them as sectarian and authoritarian. But accusing the PYD of supporting Assad only served to discredit the Turkish authorities.

When that campaign didn't work, the Turks shifted course. The Turkish foreign minister said his country wouldn't oppose autonomy for Syrian Kurds, a major PYD demand.38 Then in July 2013, Turkey invited PYD leader Saleh Muslim to meet with high intelligence officials. Turkish officials told Reuters that they wanted assurances that the PYD firmly opposed Assad and that it wouldn't create an autonomous region through violence.39 For its part, the PYD was willing to make alliances with the Turks, local Syrian government officials, and the Arab opposition. So the possibility existed for a political reconciliation between Turkey and the PYD.

“The PYD is a pragmatic party that has its own project to administer Syria's Kurd-populated areas,” according to Maria Fantappie, researcher for the International Crisis Group. “We can expect them to make all the alliances they need as a temporary compromise.”40

On January 21, 2014, Kurds declared autonomy in three provinces of northern Syria. Spearheaded by the PYD, representatives of fifty parties signed the declaration. The newly autonomous authorities promised to work with other Kurdish political parties and to protect the rights of Assyrians and Arabs who live in the area. They promised free elections within a few months. The autonomy announcement, which had been planned for months, came just before the start of the Geneva II peace talks and was designed to highlight the Kurdish issue internationally.

The PYD, as the main driver of the autonomy plan, took the initiative because it saw Syria fracturing, with Alawites and Sunnis exercising de facto control of their areas. PYD leader Aldar Xelil told Reuters that Syria should remain one nation but with a federal system in which Kurds would have considerable local control as they do in Iraq. “A division from Syria itself, it won't happen,” he said. “A federalized system though—that is possible.”41

While autonomous in name, the newly minted authorities struggled to provide basic services in the small cities they controlled. They refined diesel pumped from government oil wells and distributed it at low cost to farmers for use in tractors and home generators. The PYD was providing basic security against attacks from the Syrian army and extremist rebels. Human Rights Watch of New York sent a delegation to the newly autonomous zone. Delegation member Floyd Abrahams said, “Compared to other parts of the country…the security situation is relatively stable.42

Abrahams went on to criticize the PYD, however, for not allowing free expression and media, and for police routinely beating criminal suspects. He said the authorities don't have a “high intolerance” for different political views. Leaders of the other major Kurdish trend, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), also criticized the autonomy plan as mere rhetoric. The Assad government still controlled much of Qamishli, noted KDP member Mohammed Ismail. “Government ministers still come on visits here,” he told Reuters. “State employees still get their salaries, the phones still work, the healthcare system is in place. Where is this local autonomy they speak of?”43

The PYD had emerged as the strongest Kurdish party in Syria, controlling a number of towns and border crossings into Turkey. After over forty years of covering insurgencies around the world, I've developed a rule of thumb. You can learn a lot about how a group will govern after the revolution by how they exercise power in areas they control before the revolution. Let's take a look at how the PYD stacks up.

I interviewed Christians who had fled Hasakah, a mainly Kurdish region in northern Syria. They were terrified of the al-Nusra Front militiamen who had set up roadblocks, robbing and raping Christians. By comparison, the PYD militia respected Christian rights, according to Saba, a Christian female refugee I interviewed in Lebanon. “They protect their areas but they don't interfere in ours,” she said. “They are very well organized. We've never had any problems with them.”44

But some Kurds living in the PYD-controlled town of Afrin told a different story. “Almost everyone in Afrin has been threatened by the PKK,” resident Tourlin Bilal told Global Post. “They demand taxes from everyone. If you refuse they threaten, steal, or destroy your property…”45

In theory, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and Kurdish National Council (KNC) were jointly ruling the towns. Another resident named Oum Beshank said, “On paper, there is a coalition rule, but in reality the PKK [PYD] are the only ones with the weapons to force the people.”46

The PYD faces strong opposition from other, smaller armed groups, such as the Islamic Kurdish Front, the Peshmerga Falcons, and the Martyrs of Mecca, all located near Aleppo.47 Such groups fight alongside Arabs of the FSA and denounce the PKK. They want to remain part of Syria and oppose separatism, claiming that the PYD favors independence. Serious fighting broke out when two extremist groups, al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), kidnapped 250 Kurds in July 2013. Most of the hostages were Kurdish civilians taken when the groups seized control of two Kurdish villages. The groups clashed with the PYD, and dozens were killed on both sides.48

Some FSA militias and extremist groups issued a joint statement denouncing the PKK/PYD, indicating a new level of antagonism. They accused the PYD of dividing Arab and Kurd, thus helping the Assad government. The PYD, they wrote, created “a hostile relationship with hate and resentment that drains a lot of our time, effort, blood, and money.”49 The groups made no mention of Kurdish rights, instead characterizing the entire Syrian struggle as religious. “Our goal is to pleasure Allah and to ensure a safe life for our people in Syria and to maintain the unity of the Muslim Syrian people, and to maintain the progress of our blessed revolution until the fall of the criminal regime.”50

Even the FSA and conservative Islamists believe that religion will solve problems between Kurds and Arabs. They fear that the call for Kurdish rights is just a prelude to the dismemberment of Syria. To find out more about the mainstream Arab opposition view, I went to Istanbul to interview Muslim Brotherhood leaders.

I met with Omar Mushaweh, a member of the Directorate of the Muslim Brotherhood. Asked about Kurdish rights, he immediately criticized the PKK for divisiveness. He made no distinction between the PKK and PYD. The brotherhood received strong financial, political, and military support from Turkey, so it wasn't surprising that he echoed the Turkish government position that the PYD was supporting Assad. “There are some extremist Kurds who are actually supporting the regime,” he told me. “At the beginning of the uprising, some of them created instability in southern Turkey.51 He criticized the PYD for raising the PYD and Kurdish flags in the towns it controls, saying they should fly the Syrian opposition banner. Mushaweh expressed a willingness to talk with the Barzani-backed KNC, which he saw as more moderate. “The KNC has their own vision about the Kurdish state, which doesn't necessarily represent the vision of all the Kurds in Syria,” he said. “We are negotiating with them to reach the best solution.”

Neither the brotherhood nor other Arab opposition groups are willing to recognize the Kurdish region's autonomy. Mushaweh argued that autonomy only promoted separatism. “Many of the Kurdish leadership don't express their desire to separate from Syria, but they sometimes list some demands that will lead eventually to separation,” he said.

For years, Kurds were among the strongest opponents of Assad. But Kurdish groups found themselves fighting both Assad's army and political Islamists who were unwilling to recognize Kurdish rights. Kurdish leaders, at latest count, had formed sixteen parties broken into two coalitions. Those reflect the wider conflict between the major trends in Kurdish politics: Barzani's forces in the KRG and the PKK in Turkey. They sometimes form tactical alliances, but their underlying political differences make future unity difficult.

Masoud Barzani sees himself as a leader of all Kurds. He has the financial and military resources of the KRG and can thus potentially train a powerful Syrian peshmerga. Significantly, he has the support of the United States and Turkey, who strongly oppose the PKK. The United States, which claimed to be a staunch defender of Kurdish rights when seeking to oust Saddam Hussein, did an about-face in Syria. Because it sees the PKK as the main enemy, the Obama administration came out against autonomy. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Philip Gordon said, “We don't see for the future of Syria an autonomous Kurdish area or territory. We want to see a Syria that remains united.” He also said the Syrian opposition should be more inclusive of Kurdish concerns but didn't provide specifics.52

The Kurds weren't following US advice. They continued to oppose the Assad regime while asserting their national rights. Both Arabs and Kurds have a common interest in creating a parliamentary system in which the majority rules but minorities retain their rights. The Arab opposition must accept Kurdish demands for local political control while the Kurdish groups should seek unity among themselves and reach out to the civil-society opposition.

As the Syrian uprising continues, both the government and rebel forces are paying closer attention to Kurdish demands. The Kurds have become the wildcard in the Syrian uprising, and they have no intention of leaving the game.