Signs of Kurdish Spring: Syrian Border Trench, Barzani Statements, U.S. Push to Delist P.K.K. All Point to Eventual Independence

The “Kurdish Spring” in Turkey two years ago never gathered the same momentum toward change at the top as its namesake, the “Arab Spring” launched the previous year (still playing out bloodily in Egypt, Yemen, and partially-Kurdish Syria).  But shifting dynamics in Syria, along with other developments, point to a gradually settling consensus that Iraq’s northern Kurdistan Region is quietly humming along the road toward full independence.

The president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) in northern Iraq, Massoud Barzani (pictured above), used his strongest language yet on April 8th regarding Kurdish independence.  Referring to the secret World War I–era Franco-British pact which undermined Woodrow Wilson’s later promise of an independent Kurdistan by allowing the new Turkish Republic to consume their homeland, Barzani told a Kurdish television audience, “The mistakes of the Sykes–Picot Agreement should be corrected.  The agreement itself has failed and the region should go back to its original nature, since some of the nations have been linked to each other by force.  No one can stop us from announcing the state of Kurdistan, but we want this to happen through dialogue and mutual understanding rather than war and bloodshed.”

Most surprising, perhaps, has been not only a recently introduced bill in the United States Senate to remove southeastern Turkey’s now more-or-less pacified Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) rebel group from the “terrorism” black list, but also an indication that President Barack Obama supports the move as well.  The Senate bill is backed by none other than Obama’s hawkish gadfly and former election opponent Senator John McCain, of Arizona, who also now says, “It is time we stop treating the K.D.P. and P.U.K. as terrorists” (referring to Iraq’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, headed by Iraq’s largely-ceremonial and now exiled president, Jalal Talabani, and Iraq’s Kurdistan Democratic Party), adding that their designation as “Tier III” terrorist groups “betrays our Kurdish friends and allies who have served as a stabilizing force in the region and displayed consistent loyalty to the United States throughout the years.”  It was largely a U.S.-imposed “northern no-fly zone” over northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War which allowed Iraqi Kurdistan to build sovereign institutions outside of Saddam Hussein’s reach, with Erbil as its capital.  The designation of Kurdish autonomists as “terrorists,” in both the U.S. and western Europe, is a vestige of the Cold War days when Turkey’s role as a front-line state within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) against the Soviet Union made it a far more reliable asset to Western security than it is now.  And, if you want to strict about the definition of “terrorism,” the P.K.K., before its recent cease-fire with Ankara, attacked military targets almost exclusively, not civilian ones.

P.K.K. flags on display at a demonstration in Berlin

But Barzani, in his statements, also referred to the plight of Kurds outside Iraq. “In Turkey and Iran,” he said, “the rights of the Kurds have not yet been officially recognized while Kurds have been attached to these countries forcefully.”  He trod a little more lightly on the question of Kurds in Syria, whom he called more divided, making that situation more complicated.

In fact, actions speak even louder than words—actions like ditch-digging, I mean.  The K.R.G. has been busily digging a massive trench between the Iraqi region it governs and the neighboring portion of northern Syria now called Rojava, or “West Kurdistan,” where retreating Syrian government forces in 2012 allowed the establishment of a fully autonomous de facto state.  Rojava has become a shaky state, with discontinuous territory, but a state nonetheless, with a commitment to multiculturalism: Sunni Arabs, Assyrian Christians, and even diaspora Chechens share power with the majority Kurds in its three self-governing “cantons.”  But one group is shut out of the governing of Rojava, and that is the Kurdish factions strongy allied with Barzani’s K.R.G.: the territory is run by a group closely allied with Turkey’s P.K.K., which alarms both Turkey and the K.R.G. government that is enjoying the pleasant surprise of an oil-lubricated thaw in Turkish–K.R.G. relations.

Building Kurdish unity—not.

Rojava is also fighting for its life to limit territorial gains by a new al-Qaeda-derived Sunni Arab terror group, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS, a.k.a. ISIL), which has made great strides in controlling much of the Euphrates valley, all the way from the Syrian–Turkish border region downriver across the Iraqi border to Fallujah, on the outskirts of Baghdad itself.  The K.R.G.’s greatest fear is opening a pathway through its territory for ISIS militants to move freely back and forth and consolidate those gains—especially now that ISIS has been parlaying its stranglehold on Fallujah into foraying northward into K.R.G.-administered lands just outside the official Kurdistan Region, in mixed Arab–Turkmen–Kurdish areas in dispute between Baghdad and Erbil.  The Iraqi central government, too, is is locked in battle with ISIS to preserve the very unity of the non-Kurdish parts of the Iraqi state; backchannel discussions between Baghdad and Erbil have perhaps made it quite explicit that Iraqi Kurdistan cannot get more self-rule of any kind unless it nails shut the doorway to explosive Rojava.  So, for better or worse, the reunification of “West” (Syrian) and “South” (Iraqi) Kurdistan may have to wait until Iraqi Kurdistan disentangles itself from Arab Iraq.

Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) is in yellow, Iraqi Kurdistan in orange.

Even in Iran, the most effectively totalitarian of the four states with significant Kurdish populations, the two main Kurdish political factions moved toward reconciliation this week.  The Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (K.D.P.I.) and its splinter group the Kurdistan Democratic Party (K.D.P.) made moves to repair a split that occurred in 2007.

In Iran, Mustafa Hijri (left) of the K.D.P.
and Khalid Azizi of the K.D.P.I. make nice.

Why is all this happening now?  Perhaps it is because the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad has realized that it must make its Kurdish problem go away before it can successfully solve its (Sunni) ISIS problem.  Not incidentally, taking the mostly Sunni Kurdish people out of Iraq will leave the remaining population with an overwhelming Shiite majority, instead of the current very slight one.  It is also possible that signals from the K.R.G.’s main allies, including the U.S. and, to an extent, Israel are encouraging the establishment of a new solidly Western-allied state in the Middle East to counter Russia’s new expansionism, especially as President Vladimir Putin contemplates a more and more seamless Russian-aligned front along the northern edge of the region that includes the (soon?) whole north Black Sea coast, the North Caucasus, Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Iran.

ISIS—not the good guys, and worth digging a trench to keep out

But Kurds have never been ones to look a gift horse in the mouth.  They have waited for centuries for the Western promises of “self-determination” at the close of the First World War to come to fruition.  They can almost taste it.

Waving the Kurdish flag in Erbil

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Kurds Join Hands with Turkmens & Christians in Syria; Iraq Pits Ethnicities against Each Other in North

Things are getting complicated in Kurdistan.  In Rojava (“Western Kurdistan”), the newly declared autonomous region in northern Syria, a multi-ethnic spirit of cooperation is reigning, while in “South Kurdistan” (northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region), the central government in Baghdad is using Turkmen and Assyrian autonomy as a bludgeon with which to beat back Kurdish national aspirations.  The leadership in these two parts of Kurdistan have never been farther apart.  Does the Turkish-Kurdistan rebel leader, Abdullah Öcalan, hold the key to greater cross-border unity?  Read on.

The “Geneva II” talks in Switzerland meant to bring Syrian government and rebel leaders together went, predictably, nowhere.  They were not supposed to go anywhere.  Everyone understands that unless Kurds are brought to the table—to say nothing of the radical Islamists of the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which controls the upper Euphrates River valley—are brought to the table too, there is nothing really for President Bashar al-Assad and the Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.) to talk about.  What happened in Geneva was a pointless kabuki play which was more about providing a forum for the United States secretary of state, John Kerry, to put Iran in a corner and publicly dress down Assad than to do anything to end the bloodshed in Syria’s civil war.

ISIS likes to recruit them young.

Meanwhile, to hell with peace talks: the Kurds in northern Syria, along the border with Turkey, who make up 9 or 10% of the country’s population, declared an autonomous region in 2012 (as reported at the time in this blog) and since the late fall have been quietly building sovereign institutions there, brick by brick, the rest of the world be damned (see recent article).  And they are including other ethnic groups from the region, too, showing a spirit of cooperation seen almost nowhere else in the strife-torn Middle East.

A rough breakdown of ethnic territories in Syria and surrounding areas

Assad’s forces have mainly stayed out of the far north of the country, and it depends on whom you ask whether that is because of a Kurdish military rout of government forces in 2012, or because of a secret deal, with Assad deciding to concentrate his energies in the Syrian heartland while allowing the enemy Kurds to build a buffer state to protect him from a Turkish land invasion.  In any case, that government withdrawal allowed the emergence of autonomous Rojava, as the Syrian Kurdish region is known, but also opened the door for the radical Islamists of ISIS to (as reported at the time in this blog) take a string of towns along the border and disrupt Rojava’s geographic coherence.

A rather optimistic map of Rojava territory (see more realistic map below)

In June 2012, the president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region, Massoud Barzani, had brokered a deal between rival Kurdish groups in Syria’s civil war, united under the umbrella of a pro-Barzani Kurdish Supreme Council (Desteya Bilind a Kurd, or D.B.K.).  But by late in 2013, one part of that coalition, the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, or P.Y.D.), which is more or less a local chapter of Turkey’s armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or P.K.K.), broke away and declared a new Rojava under its authority.  This has infuriated Barzani, who has been emerging as an ally of the United States, Azerbaijan, and Turkey.

The new Rojava declared in November 2013 is composed of three autonomous “cantons”: Efrîn (Afrin) in the west, Kobanê (Ayn al-Arab), and one covering the north of Syria’s al-Hasakah province, Cizîre (Jizira, or Jazeera), which includes the notional Syrian-Kurdish capital, Qamishli.  These are explicitly set up to be multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian.  Cizîre has a Kurd, Ekrem Heso, as its president, while the two vice-presidents are a Syriac (Assyrian) Christian named Elizabet Gewriye (a.k.a. Elisabeth Korean) and an Arab named Husen Ezem.  Cizîre has 22 government ministries, including its own foreign-affairs and defense ministries.  The prime minister of Efrîn is Hevi Ibrahim, a Kurdish woman.  Two Christian organizations, the Assyrian Unity Party (A.U.P.) and the Assyrian Women’s Union (A.W.U.) are formally included in the new Rojavan administrations.

A very approximate map of the current situation in Syria shows, at top,
the three autonomous cantons of Rojava (in yellow, from left to right): Efrîn, Kobanê, and Cizîre.

Last month, a special letter was delivered from the imprisoned leader and founder of the P.K.K., Abdullah Öcalan, to President Barzani in Erbil, Iraq, asking him to support Rojava’s sovereignty.  The letter was hand-delivered by Leyla Zana, a high-profile Kurdish member of the Turkish parliament from Diyarbakır, the notional capital of Turkish Kurdistan.  Öcalan also asked Barzani to support the peace process by which the P.K.K. is disarming and withdrawing from Turkey—and, Barzani fears, joining and strengthening the force in Rojava.  No word yet on whether this has softened Barzani’s feelings toward his Kurdish neighbors to the west, but the rivalry has complicated matters for him at home: the leadership of the opposition political party in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Movement for Change (Bzutinewey‌ Gorran), are supporting Rojava.  Gorran is angling for the vice-presidency in the Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.).

Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of Turkey’s Kurds

No one, of course, is more alarmed by these developments than the Shiite-Arab-dominated government in Iraq.  (Most Kurds are Sunni.)  Baghdad fears nothing more than that the spirit of cooperation between Kurds, Turkmens, and Christians in northern Syria would inspire similar alliances on the Iraqi side of the border—creating an even vaster area that would like to split away from Iraq, not just the Kurdistan Region.  Already, the K.R.G. has been itching to annex, and in some cases de facto administering, provinces outside of the official region where Turkmens and Christians live alongside Kurds, especially in Nineveh and Kirkuk provinces—provinces rich in oil.

Flag of the Assyrian people

With this in mind, the Iraqi central government declared last month intentions to create three new Iraqi provinces.  Two of these would be designed to be ethnic homelands for Iraq’s restive non-Kurdish minorities.  The Nineveh Plain, which is the heart of traditional Assyria, would be a new province dominated by Assyrian Christians, while Tuz Khormato province to its east (now part of Saladin province) would be set aside for Turkmens—who have long demanded their own autonomous region, or even independent state, to be called Türkmeneli, just to the south of, or overlapping with, the current Kurdistan Region.  Turkmens have also been pushing, so far without success, for a role in the K.R.G. administration.  (The third new province would have its capital at Fallujah, currently in Anbar province.  This is a rather pathetic attempt to minimize the damage to Iraqi unity done by ISIS, which last month took control of Fallujah and declared it a Sunni-Arab-ruled Islamic state.  The Sunni tribes in and around Fallujah are unlikely to be very impressed with the promise of their own province while (Shiite) Iraqi bombs rain down on the city.)

It rather looks as though Baghdad is trying to tie an ethnic noose around the Kurdistan Region, entrenching Turkmens and Christians in autonomous regions that would prevent Kurds from solidifying their control of Mosul and Kirkuk.  But Nineveh’s Sunni Arab governor in Mosul, Athil al-Nujaifi, sees an even more sinister motive.  “Reviewing the maps,” he said, “show that the two provinces proposed are located on the shortest route between Iran and Syria in Mosul.”  He said Iraq’s Shiite Arab president, Nuri al-Malaki, plans to sow sectarian division in the region, move Kurdish forces back over the border into official K.R.G. territory, and open a supply route through Iraq for weapons from Iran (a Shiite theocracy) to its allies in the (Shiite Arab) Syrian government.  Gov. Nujaifi, who fears that what he sees as the Shiite-on-Sunni war in Anbar will spread north to Nineveh, has even gone so far as to suggest that the current Nineveh province should declare autonomy from Baghdad as a Sunni Arab autonomous region.

Gov. Athil al-Nujaifi

And now there is an even further complication: it seems that ISIS and its affiliates in Syria have recruited at least 200 Iraqi Kurds into their ranks—even though Kurds on the whole tend to be socially progressive and politically moderate by Middle Eastern standards.  Their ultimate goal seems to be making Iraqi Kurdistan into an Islamic state separate from Iraq.

Despite all this, the Kurdish people have survived centuries of divide-and-rule tactics.  They are not about to be turned back now.  The momentum toward autonomy and independence, on the whole, seems unstoppable.  But there may be a lot of ethnic and sectarian bloodshed along the way.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Related articles from this blog:
“And Now Civil War ... Could Syria Break Up?” (Nov. 2011)
“The Iraq War Is Over, but Is Iraq’s Partition Just Beginning?” (Dec. 2011)
“Get Ready for a Kurdish Spring” (March 2012)
“Shifting Alliances in the Kurdish Struggles” (April 2012)
“Syria’s Kurds Are Setting Up a Quasi-State—How Long Can It Last?” (July 2012)
“Liberation of Syrian Kurdistan Infuriates Turkey, Iraq, and the Free Syrian Army—in Fact, Everyone but Assad” (Aug. 2012)
“Turkish Kurdistan Ground War in Progress, Iraq Border Crisis Eases” (Aug. 2012)
“Kurdistan Update: Both Turks & PKK Claim to Control Şemdinli, Zaza MP Abducted, Donna D’Errico and Noah’s Ark” (Aug. 2012)

“Carnage Continues in Turkish Kurdistan” (Aug. 2012)
“Kurd Truce in Syria?, Plus: Turkmen and Kaka’i in Conflict with Iraqi Kurds” (Nov. 2012)
“Syrian Kurds Liberate 4 More Towns; Diyarbakır Mayor on Hunger Strike; More Carnage in Southeastern Turkey” (Nov. 2012)
“Kirkuk Car Bombing, Stand-Off in Iraq, Turkish Airstrikes: Kurdistan Update” (Dec. 2012)
“10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2013” (Dec. 2012)
“Iraq’s Kurds and Arabs Debate Inclusion of Minorities in National Anthem” (July 2013)
“Syrian Regime Seeks Israeli Green-Light for Separate Alawite Republic” (Aug. 2013)
“The Caliphate Movement Comes to Syria: New Islamist Army Falters in Azaz but May Try to Carve Out Separate State” (Sept. 2013)
“Syrian Kurds’ Declaration of Autonomous ‘Rojava’ Scorned by Turkey, Assad—Even by Iraqi Kurds” (Nov. 2013)
“10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014” (Dec. 2013)
“Al-Qaeda-Affiliated ISIS Militia Declares Fallujah an Islamic State as Sunni–Shi’a War Spreads from Syria to Iraq” (Jan. 2014)
“Middle East Update: Al-Sham Islamic State Takes Form, West Kurdish Constitution, New Rights for Christians, Turkmens” (Jan. 2014)
“Yet Another Genocide Olympics: 10 Political Causes Sure to Disrupt the Sochi Games” (Feb. 2014)

Middle East Update: Al-Sham Islamic State Takes Form, West Kurdish Constitution, New Rights for Christians, Turkmens

The redrawing of the map of the Middle East continued apace this past week, following the takeover of Fallujah and part of Ramadi in western Iraq’s Anbar province by a radical Islamist group affiliated with al-Qaeda.  Turkmens, Christians, and Kurds are all scrambling for pieces of the territorial pie as Syria and Iraq both spin out of control and into anarchy.

Anbar
First, the radical Sunnis.  The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), an outgrowth of last decade’s al-Qaeda in Iraq (a.k.a. Islamic State of Iraq, or I.S.I.) militia (which itself grew out of the al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan), had for months been building up its strength in the power vacuum of Syria’s civil war, mostly at the expense of the far more moderate, Western-backed, but utterly disorganized and fractious Sunni rebel network known as the Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.).  Then, on January 3rd (as reported at the time in this blog), ISIS fighters entirely took over Fallujah, a major city in Sunni-Arab-dominated Anbar province in western Iraq, about a half hour’s drive from the western outskirts of Baghdad.  ISIS fighters have held on there, but have been a bit less successful in taking over the smaller city of Ramadi, Anbar’s capital.  Fallujah was the scene of two of the fiercest battles in the United States’ war in Iraq, in 2004, with U.S. and Iraqi-government forces trying to quell a radical Sunni insurgency.  Things look similar now, except that the U.S. is gone, and the Islamists are winning (never mind that Sunni radicals would never have gained a foothold if the U.S. hadn’t invaded in the first place).  Fallujah is probably the city with the strongest anti-Shiite sentiment, and most of that anger is directed at the Shi’a Arabs who have run Iraq since the Sunni (but fiercely secularist) dictator Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003 and the 65%-or-so Shi’a majority came to power in the ensuing elections.  Now, as Shiite bombs are feared soon to rain down on Fallujah, the prejudices of ordinary Sunni people in the city are hardening.  The Iraqi government is reportedly planning on keeping its assault—once it gets up the nerve to launch it in earnest—away from civilian areas for this very reason, but it won’t take much for any moves by Baghdad to feel like an anti-Sunni massacre to those in Fallujah.  The tribal Sunni militias in Anbar which the U.S. had tried to cultivate as partners to the new Shiite-led government—with partial success—seem now to be siding mostly with ISIS.

Ongoing chaos in Fallujah

ISIS has declared Fallujah to be an independent Islamic state.  Whether that state is something called the Islamic State of Fallujah, or whether it is presumed to be the kernel of an emerging Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham is something which may slowly become apparent.  Perhaps the ISIS warlord in Fallujah, Abu Waheeb, is improvising as he goes along.  (Al-Sham means, roughly, the Levant, i.e. Syria and Lebanon; some news sources are calling ISIS “ISIL,” for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and some are saying, inaccurately, that ISIS stands for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—but they all refer to the same group.)  Much will depend on whether control of all or some of Anbar can be consolidated and whether that territory can be linked up with ISIS’s “liberated” territory in eastern Syria.  Which brings us to ...

Fallujah this week

North-central Syria’s heartland
Late last year, ISIS began capturing small towns in northern Iraq, mostly along the border with Turkey, in Syria’s Kurdish region.  The first of these was Azaz (as reported at the time in this blog), and others followed.  But by December ISIS was exceeding all expectations, capturing smaller towns in the far east along the Iraqi border and in the far west, in the Alawite (Shiite) Arab heartland of Latakia province.  Its biggest prize, however, has been ar-Raqqah, a provincial capital in north-central Syria.  Ar-Raqqah province borders Turkey and includes Kurdish areas, but its capital is on the Euphrates, which flows from ar-Raqqah to Ramadi and Fallujah in Iraq.

The B.B.C.’s most recent map of different areas of rebel control in Syria

But is ISIS going to capture the entire upper Euphrates and build a coherent territory in the way that the Kurds have?  Maybe not.  The al-Nusra Front, the loosely organized Syrian-based component of ISIS, is apparently seeing some defections, with individual militias deciding that the former I.S.I. units with whom they formed ISIS last year are foreigners who are too radical for them, and maybe even worse than the embattled Alawite dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad.  This is partly because of ISIS’s governing style, which involves sweeping into town, executing a few “infidels” and “traitors” in the town square, and then dispatching armed morality patrols to enforce shari’a (Islamic law).  What had become, by late last year, a three-way battle in Aleppo, ar-Raqqah, al-Hasakah, and Deir ez-Zor provinces among Assad’s government forces, the F.S.A., and al-Nusra may soon become a four-way battle among the government, the F.S.A., al-Nusra, and ISIS.  No, wait, five-way—since Kurdish militias (more on them below) are also vying for control of al-Hasakah city and parts of Aleppo.

These new twists put Western backers like Turkey and the U.S. in a quandary.  They know whom they want to win in Iraq, but in Syria it’s not so simple.  It was bad, and embarrassing, enough, when various forms of aid sent in the direction of the F.S.A. ended up in al-Nusra hands, but now the West may need to calculate that it’s worth backing al-Nusra for a little while—you know, just a little while—until ISIS is brought under control.  Sounds like a bad idea: help bad guys because they’re helping you fight worse guys depends a lot on fallible judgments as to who is bad or worse, and it can have an effect called “blowback.”  After all, that’s how the Taliban and al-Qaeda came to power in Afghanistan in the first place.  As for the Syrian opposition’s other “Western” backers, Saudi Arabia, well, for them strengthening al-Nusra might not even be a difficult choice.  Many of them are Saudis anyway, and have the tacit blessing of the royal family.  Look for a serious, perhaps permanent falling out between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia over how to handle Syria.

An image circulating in ISIS circles shows the nascent Islamic state
in Anbar and Syria as part of an eventual global Caliphate.
Hey, wait a minute—gulp!—is that Vienna?

Syrian Kurdistan
Things are a little bit more stable in the far north of Syria, along the border with Turkey, as the de facto self-governing Western Kurdistan Autonomous Region formed last year in liberated pockets along the border was in November 2013 rechristened Rojava (which simply means “western” in Kurdish) and was given specific contours and a formal (unrecognized) government (as reported at the time in this blog).  This past week, the Rojava government started filling in the details of its supposedly federal-style internal structure, with separate autonomous entities for Kurds, Christians, and Arab Muslims.  On January 6th, the Rojava’s governing Western Kurdistan Constituent Assembly unveiled a new constitution, which specifies the three autonomous subdivisions and confirms that the new state will be official multilingual, with state business conducted in Kurdish, Arabic, and Syriac (i.e. the variety of Aramaic—the language spoken by Jesus—which is in use today in the Syriac, Chaldean, and Assyrian communities of Middle Eastern Christians).  Other statements out of Rojava have also referred to equal rights for the Turkmen and even Chechen minorities.

The Western Kurdistan Constituent Assembly speaks to the public

This may have something to do with the fact that, to both Turkey’s consternation and that of the Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) in neighboring Iraq, Rojava is being run by the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, or P.Y.D.), a group linked to Turkey’s outlawed, traditionally-Marxist-Leninist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or P.K.K.) and antagonistic to the K.R.G. government.  In Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, Kurds vie for control of the Kurdish-populated penumbra outside the official autonomous region, in places like Mosul, Kirkuk, and the Nineveh Plains that are also regarded as homelands for the Turkmen and Assyrian people, who naturally want their own autonomous regions.  Are the Rojava Kurds competing with the K.R.G. for the loyalties of the region’s smaller minorities?  If so, this could get much messier.

Northern Iraq
Meanwhile, perhaps as a direct response to the developments in Rojava, the Iraqi parliament in Baghdad voted on January 8th to make Turkmen, Syriac, and Assyrian national languages alongside the existing official languages, Arabic and Kurdish.  (There is a lot of variation in how to name the modern Aramaic languages; some use the terms Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac interchangeably, or use one term as including the other two, or name the same language differently depending on which self-identified ethnic or sectarian group is using it.)  Meanwhile, Turkmen leaders in areas hard-hit by terrorist violence said this week that they were forming popular defense committees along the lines of those formed by Kurds in Syria.

Some Turkmens’ rather optimistic vision
of an autonomous region or independent state to be called Türkmeneli

Things change in the region almost daily.  Springtime of Nations will do its best to stay on top of developments and keep you informed.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Al-Qaeda-Affiliated ISIS Militia Declares Fallujah an Islamic State as Sunni-Shi’a War Spreads from Syria to Iraq

Only a few days old and 2014 is already starting to look like the year that Syria’s civil war bursts its seams and begins spilling over into neighboring countries.  To the west, a series of bombings in Lebanon include some targeting Hezbollah, the powerful Iranian-backed Shiite Arab militia which is allied with the regime in Syria and has long operated as a quasi-state entity in divided Lebanon.  For the first time since the Lebanese civil war wound down in 1990, Sunnis and Shiites are killing each other in serious numbers in a kind of mimickry of the sectarian battle lines in Syria.  But most dramatically this week in western Iraq, a Syrian-based militia called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has declared the Sunni-Arab-dominated city of Fallujah to be an independent state.

ISIS, which I flagged just a few days ago as one of “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014,” is an outgrowth of two groups.  First is the Al-Nusra Front (a.k.a. Al-Nusra Brigades), who have for a while now operated as increasingly well organized jihadist fighters ideologically opposed both to the “heretic” Alawite Shi’a regime of Syria’s embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, and to the more moderate Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.) half-heartedly and warily backed by the West and armed by Turkey and others.  (They hate the Kurds too.)  Along with Al-Nusra, ISIS is also formed out of elements from the Islamic State of Iraq (I.S.I.) (a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Iraq), a hard-line Sunni militia founded by Taliban and other jihadist fighters hardened by war in Afghanistan who set up shop in Iraq in the power vacuum created by the United States invasion in 2003.

Abu Waheeb (on phone), ISIS commander for Anbar province
and presumably de facto ruler of the Islamic State of Fallujah

I.S.I. had never really managed to secure enough territory in the chaos of Iraq’s mid-2000s civil war to advance its dream of a Sunni Arab state separate from the more numerous Arab Shiites who, now that Iraq was a fledgling democracy, were poised to run Iraq.  But by absorbing the Al-Nusra Brigades, they coalesced rapidly into a fighting force efficient enough to capture first Azaz, along Syria’s border with Turkey, which they declared an independent Islamic emirate in September 2013 (as reported on at the time in this blog).  By the middle of December, ISIS and its affiliates had captured a string of other towns in Syria, including Jarabulus, another border town; Al-Bab, near the fiercely contested city of Aleppo; Ar-Raqqah, a northern provincial capital; Shadadeh, in the Kurdish-dominated northeastern province of Al-Hasakah; the Al-Omar Oil Field, on the Euphrates River in Deir ez-Zor province abutting Iraq; Maaloula, far to the south on the outskirts of the national capital, Damascus; and, most daringly, western outposts such as Harem, in Idlib province, and Salma, deep in Alawite-dominated and Assad-friendly Latakia province by the Mediterranean coast.  In Azaz and other communities, ISIS was quick to set up international-border-style roadblocks, hang their ominous black flags, and open schools and other social services which were welcomed, naturally, by devastated, hungry communities pummeled to dust by years of civil war.

Syrian areas of control as of two weeks ago.
(The original map can be found at the highly recommended blog Political Geography Now.)

ISIS’s reference, in its name, to al-Sham uses an archaic Arabic term referring to, roughly, Syria and Lebanon—sometimes called in English the Levant (thus some call the group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL)—and by calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, ISIS implied a desire to create a theocracy embracing most or all of Syria–Lebanon and the Sunni-Arab-dominated parts of Iraq.  (Kurds, who rule northern Iraq, are Sunni but for the most part have no use for fundamentalist strains of Islam.)  Consequently, they announced last week that they intended to annex Iraq’s Anbar province after taking over Syria.  Anbar, which covers about a third of Iraq, was the scene of some of the worst fighting in the U.S.-led war in the 2000s, partly because it includes vast oil-rich areas with very little population—territories which could conceivably go to either side if Iraq were to be split into Sunni and Shiite entities.  Fallujah itself was the scene of battles in 2004 where U.S. and allied troops fought street to street battles against I.S.I. and other jihadist militias, with well over 1,000 dead.

Abu Waheeb

Those ambitions seemed quixotic a week ago, almost laughably so.  But Anbar, where Sunni unrest directed at the Shiite-dominated central government never really died down, has been boiling over the past several days, following the arrest of a prominent Sunni leader, Ahmed al-Alwani, in Ramadi on December 28th.  The central government and Sunni negotiators agreed on a partial withdrawal of government forces, but then on January 1st the Iraqi army moved in on Sunni rebel positions in Fallujah, just 40 miles or so west of Baghdad, and in Ramadi, which is Anbar’s capital.  By January 3rd, it was being reported that the Sunni-dominated al-Qaeda group ISIS had taken over all of Fallujah and militants were announcing over loudspeakers at Friday prayers, “We declare Fallujah as an Islamic state, and we call on you to be on our side!”  The complete takeover was confirmed by the governor of Anbar, speaking to reporters by phone from Ramadi, and he also confirmed that parts of Ramadi were al-Qaeda-controlled as well.  ISIS forces have helped themselves to Fallujah police weaponry originally contributed by the U.S. Marines.

Ramadi’s Army base on fire this week amid the fighting

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department says that tribal groups in Iraq are organizing against ISIS and that, in the words of a U.S. spokeswoman, “ We are working with the Iraqi government to support those tribes in every possible way.”  These seem to include member of the Sunni but anti-Qaeda “Awakening Councils,” explicitly organized by the U.S. military during the insurgency and still wielding power.  Other sources say Awakening fighters are showing up on both sides in the fighting.  In any case, Baghdad is not waiting for help on the ground: today government airstrikes on Fallujah were reported.

Young Sunnis this week in Anbar resort to American pop culture to make their anti-Qaeda point.
Where is Sigourney Weaver when Iraq needs her?

In a way, this is more of the long-running deep historical rivalries between Sunni and Shi’a communities in the Arab world.  But the Arab Spring revolts have sharpened that conflict, and many of the civil wars and low-level insurgency and demonstrations in Arab countries have become proxy sectarian wars backed by the three regional superpowers: the theologically radical Sunni monarchy Saudi Arabia, the Sunni-majority secular state Turkey, and the Shiite theocracy Iran.  The Sunni–Shi’a conflict is everywhere.  Saudi Arabia’s Sunni royal families represses Shiite Arabs along the Persian Gulf; a Sunni minority monarchy barely prevented a majority-Shiite uprising in Bahrain in 2011; predominantly Sunni southern Yemenis are fighting a war of secession from formerly partitioned Yemen; the removal of Saddam Hussein shifted power from Sunnis to Shiites in Iraq in 2003, while Sunni Arabs in southwestern Iran wage a low-level insurgency against the government; in Turkey, official state secularism and weak democratic institutions lead to knuckling down on the activities of Shiite minorities like the Alawites and the Alevis, who include many Kurds; Lebanon is a powder-keg with a fragile constitutional power-sharing arrangement between Druze, Shiites, Christians, and Sunnis, with Shiites by far the best armed and organized; and the Syrian civil war is essentially a majority-Sunni revolt against a Shi’a minority dictatorship.

January 2014 may be looked back on as the tipping point, when the civil war in Syria could no longer be contained and became a more general regional war, embracing and weaving together numerous smaller wars in the Middle East.  In the middle of it all, al-Qaeda is building a network of “emirates” which it is using to found a theocratic, terrorist state, across borders, in the heart of the Arab world.  Unless the Iraqi government can somehow regain control.  The next few days will tell.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]