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)

Syrian Kurds’ Declaration of Autonomous “Rojava” Scorned by Turkey, Assad—Even by Iraqi Kurds

The Kurdish people of northern Syria, after declaring an autonomous region last year in liberated pockets and towns near the border with Turkey (as reported at the time in this blog), are finally trying to make their statelet official.  And the plan is meeting with hostility from all sides, even from fellow Kurds in northern Iraq.  But why are Kurds not all on the same page on this—autonomy is supposed to be good, right?—and, moreover, why is this all happening now?

P.Y.D. flags are more common in Syrian Kurdistan lately
than the usual sun-emblazoned Kurdish national ones.

Well, for one thing, the Syrian civil war has reached a strange impasse in recent months.  There has been little change lately in the general boundaries between areas administered by the embattled dictator, Bashar al-Assad, and those under rebel control.  But there have been dramatic changes in the make-up of the rebel opposition.  In particular, the Western-backed Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.), which is being armed by Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and others, has lost ground since summer to a new organization called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) (as reported recently in this blog).  ISIS seems to be an outgrowth of two pre-existing groups, the al-Qaeda-backed al-Nusra Brigades, who have for some time now been a player in the Syrian civil war, and the Islamic State in Iraq (I.S.I.), a radical Sunni Arab militia which featured prominently in the Iraqi civil war during the United States occupation and which in turn has roots in al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the days of Taliban rule there.  The al-Sham of ISIS’s name is an archaic term for Syria plus Lebanon, i.e. the Levant.  ISIS hopes to link up adjoining Sunni Arab areas of Syria and Iraq—both of them Arab-Shiite-ruled nations currently—to create a new Islamic state.

One international idea of a partitioned Syria—
but nobody puts Kurdistan in a corner!

But one rebel area where ISIS is not gaining influence in the far north of Syria, where Kurds have in recent weeks been able to push back the battle lines of ISIS and other Islamist militias.  This has put the People’s Defense Units (Y.P.G.) of the Kurdish-dominated Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, or P.Y.D.) in control of a large swath of the Syrian side of the Syrian–Turkish border.  Maybe even all of it, though reliable information is hard to come by.

Kurds celebrating the liberation of Derki, Syria, last year

When the P.Y.D. first started “liberating” parts of this area last summer, their “victories” were mocked by their detractors, like the Turkish government and the F.S.A., for being in reality a bloodless takeover of areas that had been handed to them by a voluntarily retreating Syrian military.  There was probably some truth to this.  Assad had already been courting and handing political favors to Kurdish, Christian, and Druze minorities in Syria in the months before the Syrian civil war really broke out, in an attempt (a vain one, it turned out) to prevent or forestall the kind of Arab Spring uprisings that were already rocking Egypt, Libya, and Yemen.  Assad last year may have withdrawn from the Kurdish areas in an attempt to see how the creation of an autonomous or independent area might turn out, as part of exploring a “Plan B” of partitioning Syria into an Assad-ruled Alawite (Shiite) coastal state and other ethnic fiefdoms inland.  Or perhaps, fearing a Turkish military intervention to aid the rebels, Assad wanted to create a de facto buffer state hostile to Ankara.  (The P.Y.D. is closely allied with southeastern Turkey’s partially-pacified Kurdish rebel army the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or P.K.K.).  In any case, Assad’s forces have totally withdrawn from border areas since then, hesitant to risk a flare-up with Turkish forces and more interested in fighting for Damascus, Aleppo, and other towns in the heartland.

Protesters in Berlin display P.K.K. flags

The new declaration of autonomy by the P.Y.D. speaks not of a West Kurdistan Autonomous Region, which was the preferred phrase last summer (in Kurdish nationalist usage, West Kurdistan is northern Syria, North Kurdistan is southeastern Turkey, East Kurdistan is northwestern Iran, and South Kurdistan is northern Iraq).  Instead, it calls its new autonomous statelet Rojava (rojava being the Kurdish word for “west”), which looks much larger on maps being circulated now than last year’s sliver and which, it is claimed, will include three autonomous-regions-within-the-autonomous-region: one for Kurds, one for Christians, and one for Arabs.  This last part is odd, since Syria’s mostly mountainous Christian minority has tended to keep its head down in the civil war and not demand its own autonomous region the way some Christians in Iraq do.  Plus, Kurds and Arabs have quite famously not been getting along lately.  It could be that the P.Y.D. is trying to reassure the international community that Christians and Arabs in the enlarged autonomous territory will be allowed freedoms and also to signal to the world, perhaps especially Turkey, that this is not just a Kurdish state—i.e., not an extension of the national aspirations of the dreaded P.K.K. as many Turks fear.

As a reader notes below (see comments), this map may seriously underestimate
the number of Kurds in the border areas.

Well, and how is the idea of an autonomous or independent Rojava going over?  Like a lead balloon—in Ankara, predictably; in Damascus and among the F.S.A., almost as predictably; and, a little surprisingly, in Erbil (capital of Iraq’s northern Kurdistan Region).  We’ll take these in turn.  The Turkish government mostly fears that Kurdish separatism is a contagion that can spread to its own Kurds, even though it has decided to make peace with the idea of an autonomous, perhaps even eventually independent, Iraqi Kurdistan.  The implementation of this year’s historic peace deal between Ankara and the P.K.K. is proceeding relatively smoothly, but naturally Turkey worries that the still-armed P.K.K. rebels already retreating over the border into Iraqi Kurdistan—where the regional president, Massoud Barzani, can assure that they will be watched closely—might instead head to the more lawless Syrian Kurdistan, where they have natural allies in the P.Y.D.

Massoud Barzani, president of Iraq’s Kurds

Assad, for his part, may have liked the idea of a buffer area to keep Syrian and Turkish armies out of firing range of one another, but he is probably nervous about full-blown autonomy or independence.  If successful, the idea could spread rapidly to, say, the Druze.  ISIS already is drawing up its new borders.  And that would be the end of Syria.

(This map is ridiculously generous; Kurds don’t live as far west as the coast.)

President Barzani, the president of the quasi-independent Iraqi Kurdistan, condemns the Rojava declaration as being driven by the P.Y.D. with insufficient input from other Kurdish factions, which had been—nominally and precariously—united through painstaking multilateral diplomacy under Barzani’s auspices over the past couple years.  As Barzani put it, “We only support the steps that have the consensus of all Kurdish parties in Rojava.  We refuse to deal with unilateral actions.”  For the most part, Barzani refers to the Kurdish National Council (K.N.C.), which is closely allied to his own government and approved of by the West but seen by the more hardline P.K.K. and P.Y.D. as Western and Turkish stooges, while Barzani and the K.N.C. regard the P.Y.D. as unruly terrorists who have a working relationship, if not worse, with Assad.

We will be keeping readers informed of how the repercussions of the Rojava declaration play out.

[You can read more about these and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in 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.  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 interview for more information on the book.]

Liberation of Syrian Kurdistan Infuriates Turkey, Iraq, and the Free Syrian Army—in Fact, Everyone but Assad

Celebrations in the liberated town of Derkli in Syrian Kurdistan

[Note: See these earlier articles from this blog on related topics, especially with respect to the Kurds and the Arab Spring: “And Now Civil War ... Could Syria Break Up?” (Nov. 2011), “The Iraq War Is Over, but Is Iraq’s Partition Just Beginning?” (Dec. 2011), “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012” (Dec. 2011); “Get Ready for a Kurdish Spring” (March 28, 2012); “Shifting Alliances in the Kurdish Struggles” (April 1, 2012); “Turkish Delights Hide Ugly History” (April 4, 2012);  “Syria’s Kurds Are Setting Up a Quasi-State—How Long Can It Last?” (July 2012), and, on a pretty much weekly basis, installments of my “Week in Separatist News” columns.]

The world’s media this week are focusing on what seem to be final battles for control of Syria in Damascus and Aleppo, what nearly everyone is predicting to be the dictator Bashar al-Assad’s last stand.  More quietly, Syria’s civil war is spilling over the borders into neighboring countries—not just into Lebanon, where Shiites and Sunnis have been killing each other for decades (see below), but across the borders that transect the stateless nation of Kurdistan—Syria’s borders with Turkey and Iraq.

This week saw some startling developments.  Last week in this blog, I described the liberation of the northern strip of mountainous land along the Turkish border, where Syria’s 2 to 3 million Kurds, who are 9% of the population, mostly live.  A makeshift Kurdish government called the Supreme Kurdish Council, which represents a rapprochement between long-feuding Kurdish factions, has declared this area the Western Kurdistan Autonomous Region, and it is running it as a de facto independent state.  (The notional capital of Syrian Kurdistan, Qamishli, right on the Turkish border, with 184,000 people, is an exception; Kurds seem to control it only partially, though news is sketchy.  Likewise Hasakah, which in the city is mostly Christian Assyrians anyway.)

How this came about is in dispute and points to some of the contradictions in Kurds’ relationship to the civil war.  Kurds, historically, have felt as sidelined as the Christians, the Druze, and the Sunni Arab majority under Assad’s Shiite Arab regime.  But as the rebellion against Assad picked up steam last year, the regime handed out some favors to the Kurds to keep them from rebelling as well: they were, for example, granted full citizenship rights for the first time.  (Previously, they had been regarded as spillover population from Turkey and not fully Syrian.)  And Assad spared the Kurdish region much of the violence he perpetrated elsewhere.  Kurds were strident about their identity but did little to antagonize the regime through most of the war, leading to suspicions by the Sunni Arab nationalists that were coming to dominate the Turkish-backed opposition’s Syrian National Council (S.N.C.) and Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.) that the Kurds were somehow Assad’s allies.  To be fair, the Kurds are a mountain people that are used to having no real allies, so they quite understandably were careful not to throw their lot in entirely with one side or another in the civil war until they could see how it would turn out.  Being geographically out of the way, they could afford this; the fight would have no reason to come to them.  So, when they took over a string of major towns, they themselves described it as the capturing or taking of those towns, whereas in fact they had to work harder to keep the F.S.A. out than they did the regime’s forces.  Why Assad relinquished the region so readily can only be guessed at.  Most likely, he has decided that he will only fight for the important, central, Arab-dominated parts of Syria at this point, now that he is on the ropes.  And if, as some suspect (discussed last week at length in this blog), Assad’s Alawite Shiite inner circle is contemplating surviving a Sunni takeover in Damascus by setting up an Alawite quasi-state west of the mountains by the Mediterranean, then pulling out of Kurdistan would begin the necessary dismemberment process.  Or, if the F.S.A. decided to insist on taking Kurdistan back from the Kurds too, then that, too, would suit Assad: there is nothing wrong with having one’s enemies exhaust themselves fighting each other.  If Assad’s regime survives in an Alawite redoubt, then conceivably the Kurds could benefit from whatever cease-fire guarantees the Alawites their own area by getting a similar deal.  If all of Syria gets ruled by Sunni nationalists, though, then the Kurds will already have their autonomous region and will be in a stronger position to demand to keep it, within a democratic Syria, much on the model of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) in northern Iraq.

Speaking of Iraq: it was the K.R.G. itself, under its president, Massoud Barzani, which brokered the formation of the Kurdish Supreme Council out of two warring factions in the so-called Arbil Agreement, named for the K.R.G. capital where it was signed.  (These two factions are the Democratic Union Party (P.Y.D.) and its local proxy the People’s Council of Western Kurdistan—which have ties to the militant Marxist separatists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.), which has been waging low-level civil war against the government in Turkey for decades—and the Kurdish National Council (K.N.C.), which the P.Y.D. tended, in earlier conflicts, to regard as too mainstream and conciliatory, too quick to cut deals with the regime.  Neither ever trusted the F.S.A. much.)  Barzani has taken a strong hand in aiding the Syrian Kurds, by helping unite them and by setting up training camps to train Kurdish refugees from Syria so they could go home and continue fighting.  This proactive approach is a gamble for Barzani: the Syrian civil war aside, Barzani had just been reaching the point where Turkey was warming to the existence of a K.R.G. quasi-state in northern Iraq and signing lucrative energy deals with it. With the K.R.G. as an ally, Turkey would never again have to rely on Iran or on Syrian or Iraqi Arabs for Middle Eastern oil and natural gas; plus, it could solidify its role as a conduit of those essentials to Europe.  Only such a geopolitical edge could ever convince a Turkish government to cosy up with Kurds of any country.  But by siding with Syrian Kurds so decisively, Barzani may have sacrificed warming ties with his Turkish neighbors.  More seriously, by exercising his own foreign policy, Barzani has upped the ante in his war of words with the central Iraqi government in Baghdad, which is already accusing him of setting up a quasi-state and has tried to punish the surprising number of western oil and natural-gas firms who are willing to go behind Baghdad’s back and sign deals with the K.R.G. directly.

But now Barzani has angered Baghdad as never before (read about it in detail below), by dispatching his own personal Kurdish army to Iraq’s Nineveh province (a Kurdish-controlled area outside K.R.G.’s technical jurisdiction) to side with Syrian Kurds in a border standoff at the Syrian-Iraqi border where the Iraqi army had tried to push its way into Syria this week.  The result is an armed standoff between thousands of soldiers in two armies: a Shiite-run Arab one and two Kurdish ones.  No one has yet blinked.  If Iraq is ever going to collapse into separate countries once and for all, it may start here, and any day now.  Perhaps Barzani is even dreaming of joining the two Kurdish autonomous regions, the Syrian and the Iraqi one, into a transnational Kurdish proto-state, even a fully independent one.  The whole map of the Middle East may get redrawn soon.

The current border standoff between Barzani, the Syrian Kurds, and Baghdad is occurring in the light green blob just north of the “I” in “IRAQ” in this map.

Turkey is also furious.  It has long regarded Kurds as its most serious enemy, internal or external, and it long ago used its leverage as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s front-line bulwark state in the cold war with the Soviet Union to coax NATO, the European Union (E.U.), the United States, and others to classify the P.K.K. as a terrorist organization (even though they restrict themselves almost entirely to military and quasi-military (civil defense) targets) and to overlook Turkey’s brutal genocidal policy towards the fifth of its population that is Kurdish.  And now it sees the P.K.K.’s allies in Syria setting up a quasi-state, and with the help of Turkey’s so-called friends in the K.R.G. as well.  Ankara is quite paranoid and irrational about the Kurdish issue.  Surely, Syrian Kurds have enough to do without trying to use their territory to launch fresh attacks against Turkish targets in Turkey, but that is just what Turkey says it has done, and the result is the ongoing battle of Şemdinli (described in more detail below).  The spring thaw always brings a renewal of violence—mostly hit-and-run attacks by the P.K.K. against Turkish military outposts—in mountainous southeast Turkey, but this spring’s attacks have been bolder and more numerous than usual, an outgrowth of the “Kurdish Spring” rebellions in Turkey earlier this year (reported on in this blog at the time) and of relentless legal and political pogroms against Kurdish leaders and Kurdish civil society by the Turkish government.  Now, according to Turkey, Kurdish forces streamed across the border from Syria and surrounded and attempted to take the town of Şemdinli, resulting in a pitched battle that is still ongoing.  Who knows what really happened.  This may be the cover story for what was in reality an unprovoked, Turkish-initiated offensive.  For one thing, Şemdinli is not that near the Syrian border and so would be an odd choice of a town to besiege with an offensive reaching in from Syria.  But one thing is clear: Turkey’s on-again-off-again war with its Kurds is now no longer the usual P.K.K. hit-and-runs, round-ups by security forces, or the occasional quick airstrike at a suspected mountain base.  It is now a ground war, and it will probably get better before it gets worse.

Now the details, from this week’s news reports from Syria and Kurdistan ...

Syria-Border Standoff Brings Iraqi Kurds, Iraq Army Face to Face, Arms Drawn.  As the civil war in Syria raged toward an apparent endgame, the central government of the Republic of Iraq sent 7,000 soldiers on July 27th to border crossings between Syria and the Iraqi province of Nineveh and tried to cross into adjacent Syrian areas controlled since last week by a new quasi-independent Kurdish government along Syria’s northern rim.  But 3,000 Kurdish peshmerga rebels blocked their way, leaving the two battalions at a standoff, which as of August 1st is without an end in sight.  The deputy minister of peshmerga, or soldiers (literally, “those who face death,” in Kurdish), for  Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) said that his ministry had sent an artillery unit to the area to protect the Syrian peshmerga—a move which Iraq’s increasingly authoritarian Shiite Arab prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, called unconstitutional: Nineveh (ancient cradle of the Assyrian Empire), though it includes most of the Kurdish region that borders Syria, lies outside the K.R.G.’s technical jurisdiction.  In reply, the K.R.G. peshmerga deputy minister, Anwar Haji Osman, warned that actions against them by Baghdad could lead to the K.R.G. forces attempting to bring non-K.R.G. Kurdish-dominated regions in Iraq under its control, including heavily contested areas like Kirkuk.  Maliki has sent more troop reinforcements to the site of the standoff.

Bashar al-Assad pictured on a border crossing between Iraq and Syria.

“Hey, guys, I’ll see you later.  If anyone needs me, I’ll be sipping piña coladas at poolside somewhere with Idi Amin.”

A K.R.G. military commander, Gen. Izzadin Saado, said that, if the Iraqi military pushed forward as far as Zumar, Sinjar, and Mira, in Nineveh, then they would effectively retake areas that Kurdish have de facto autonomously governed since the United States invasion of 2003.  Nineveh is home to Kurds who are adherents of the Yazidi sect, a secretive religious minority who blend Sufism, Zoroastrianism, as well as other pre-Muslim local beliefs and are branded as heretical by most Muslims.  “The Ministry of Peshmerga prepared its forces to protect against any Iraqi army attacks and in any places,” Osman said, adding, “If the Iraqi army assaults peshmerga in Zumar area”—referring to a Nineveh border crossing in question—“we will extend the fight to all places.  We will not fight in one place.  We will protect our land in all places.”  Maliki himself issued a statement advising the K.R.G. that policing borders was Baghdad’s responsibility, adding, “Such action by the Kurdish regional forces could ignite a conflict with the Iraqi armed forces.”  By July 30th, Iraqi lawmakers were gathering signatures to compel the K.R.G.’s president, Massoud Barzani, to appear before the parliament in Baghdad and answer tough questions. Meanwhile, the Kurdistan Islamic Union (K.I.U.), the Kurdistan Islamic Group (Komal), and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (P.U.K.) have all condemned Maliki’s unilateral actions.

Anwar Hoji Osman

Turkish Foreign Minister, Syrian Rebel Leader Appeal to Barzani to Hold Back.  Both the foreign minister of Turkey and the leader of Syria’s opposition in the civil war traveled to Arbil, capital of Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdish region this week to ask the Kurdistan Regional Government’s president, Massoud Barzani, to exercise restraint in his support for Kurdish separatism in northern Syria.  First, on July 29th, the president of the Syrian National Council (S.N.C.), the main armed opposition group in Syria, arrived in Arbil, capital of the K.R.G., to try to convince Barzani to try to convince Syria’s Kurdish rebels to join the S.N.C.  Currently, amid the chaos of Syria’s civil war, a coalition of Kurdish militias who united last month in an agreement in Arbil presided over by Barzani, are running most of the Kurdish towns in northern Syria as a de facto independent Western Kurdistan Autonomous Region, with logistical support from Barzani’s regional Kurdish military.  The S.N.C. president, Abdulbasid Seyda—who is himself a Kurd, though most S.N.C. members are Sunni Arabs—will also meet with the leadership of the Supreme Kurdish Council (also called Supreme Kurdish Committee), the newly minted governing body of the autonomous region in Syria, which is a coalition of the Kurdish National Council (K.N.C.) and the People’s Council of Western Kurdistan (P.C.W.K.) (an outgrowth of Syria’s main pro-Kurdish party, the Democratic Union Party, or P.Y.D., which is perceived as allied with the Kurdish separatist militia in Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K.).  The S.N.C., which is heavily supported by Turkey’s government, is thus under pressure to neutralize the influence of the P.K.K., Ankara’s deadliest enemy, in Syria.  Then, on August 1st, the Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, arrived in K.R.G. territory to deliver the message that Turkey would not tolerate anything it regards as a threat to its territory from without and urge Barzani to withdraw his political and logistical support of the P.Y.D., which Ankara conflates with the P.K.K., via the Supreme Kurdish Council.  The Turkish government has been particularly focused on the relatively small issue of P.K.K. flags being raised in newly liberated areas in northern Syria.  (Predictably, the central Iraqi government in Baghdad had a hissie fit over Turkey sending Davutoğlu directly to the Kurdish regional capital rather than to Baghdad, but especially because they made a side trip to Kirkuk, an oil-rich Kurdish-ruled city which is not technically in the K.R.G.’s territory.)  This all comes as Turkey undertakes an enormous mobilization of its military forces along the Syrian border, with tanks maneuvering ostentatiously on August 2nd in Turkey’s Şanlıurfa province, within a kilometer of the Syrian border and within sight of Kurdish-controlled towns.  But Hussein Kochar, the P.Y.D.’s top representative in Iraq, insisted July 27th that Barzani is committed to Kurdish unity and would take no actions to undermine the coalition that formed the Supreme Kurdish Council, adding, “55% of the Syrian National Council is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.  Syrian people know this will fail because the Brotherhood cannot manage a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and diverse country like Syria.”

Massoud Barzani and Ahmet Davutoğlu

Baghdad Claims Autonomous Kurdish Region Made Secret Arms Deal.  On July 29th, an anonymous high-ranking official in the Republic of Iraq’s Shiite-Arab-dominated government told media that intelligence agencies had discovered a secret deal between a foreign country and Massoud Barzani, president of the northern autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.).  “The weapons,” the source said, “include anti-armor and anti-aircraft missiles, and a large number of heavy weapons.”  The source pointed out that the deal is unconstitutional because defense is handled only by the central government.

French Energy Firm Buys 35% Stake in 2 Blocks in Kurdish Region; Baghdad Fumes.  The French multinational oil and natural-gas firm Total, S.A., has joined Exxon Mobil Corporation and Chevron Corporation of the United States in engaging directly with Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) rather than with the Iraqi central government, in this case by buying a 35% share in two exploration blocks in K.R.G. territory currently owned by Marathon Oil Corporation, of Houston, Texas.  As with Chevron and Exxon, both of which were banned from further bids with the central government as a penalty, Baghdad threatened severe punishment in the form of “blacklisting” for Total or any other firms that sign unilateral deals with the K.R.G. without going through the central government.  Total is based in Courbevoie, France.

Amid Civil War, Kurds Kill 6 Syrian Soldiers in Tit-for-Tat.  In Syria, Kurdish fighters described as being from the Popular Protection Units, killed six government troops on July 27th in retaliation for three Kurds killed in an earlier attack.  The fighters promised more reprisals if Kurds were not left alone.  The Units, also known as the Y.G.P., are governing the territory in northern Syria known now as the Western Kurdistan Autonomous Region.  On July 29th, celebrations were held in street parties in the major liberated towns in Syrian Kurdistan, including Qamishli, the declared capital of Western Kurdistan, which appears to have finally been ridden of the central government’s military.

7 Soldiers, 39 Rebels Die as Kurds and Army Battle for Turkish Border Town.  In addition to the usual grinding on of low-level civil war in Turkey’s southeastern Kurdistan region, the Turkish military is also in the midst this week of major offensives against Kurdish separatist rebels both in Diyarbakir province, which is not far from the Syrian border and which includes the unofficial Kurdish “capital,” Diyarbakir, and in Hakkari province, at the three-way conjunction of Iraq, Turkey, and Iran, where Turkish forces launched airstrikes August 2nd in response to what Ankara says is an attempt by Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) rebels to parlay what Ankara considers their new base of operations in northern Syria into an almost unprecedented attempted takeover a Turkish town, in this case Şemdinli.  Near the beginning of the week, in Diyarbakir province, a remote-controlled roadside bomb destroyed a military vehicle on July 27th, killing two soldiers and injuring one other and a civilian.  Separatist rebels from the banned P.K.K. were suspected.  On July 29th, in southeastern Turkey’s Şırnak  province, two Turkish soldiers died when their vehicle overturned in a non-combat-related incident.  On July 30th, the government announced that battles between the army and the P.K.K. in Şemdinli, in Hakkari province, had killed two Turkish soldiers and wounded 10.  The same day, two women the government called P.K.K. members were arrested in Istanbul and had ammunition confiscated.  Two Turkish soldiers died in a battle with the P.K.K. near Lice, in Diyarbakir province, on August 1st.  Around the same time a P.K.K. landmine destroyed part of a road near Diyarbakir.  The military reported via media on August 1st that 39 P.K.K. rebels had been killed in Hakkari, near the border with Iran, in operations ongoing since July 25th, which apparently intensified July 29th when nearly 100 P.K.K. fighters, according to the Turkish military at least, crossed into Turkey from northern Iraq and reached Şemdinli, where Turkish troops subsequently surrounded them, having been tipped off by two P.K.K. informants who had surrendered.  The battle of Şemdinli was still ongoing on August 3rd, and attempts by police, media, and Kurdish support groups to reach the area were hampered by a forest fire.  On August 3rd, meanwhile, in Siirt province, an armed attack by suspected P.K.K. fighters on a gendarmerie station killed one Turkish soldier and injured 13.  A second military position in Siirt was attacked as well, but without casualty.

Şemdinli this week

Ankara Grants Residency to Exiled Iraqi Vice-President.  At the expiration of his 90-day visa, Iraq’s exiled vice-president, Tareq al-Hashemi, who has been living in Turkey, was given a Turkish residence permit, it was announced July 30th.  A member of Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority and an opponent of the increasing authoritarianism of President Nouri al-Maliki (a Shiite Arab), Hashemi fled to Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdistan region in December after Maliki issued a warrant for his arrest (as reported in this blog at the time) on charges of terrorism and running personal death squads.  After being sheltered by Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.), Hashemi moved on Turkey, where he has been harbored by the ruling administration, to Maliki’s anger.

Tareq al-Hashemi

20 Hurt as Lebanon’s Sunnis, Shiites Battle in Streets—Spillover from Syria Strife.  The civil war between, in part, a Sunni Muslim majority and a Shiite minority in Syria has been echoed in the streets of neighboring Lebanon’s second-largest city, Tripoli, where 20 people, including three soldiers, were wounded July 27th in street clashes.  The fighting began between a neighborhood dominated by Sunnis and one home to members of the Alawite branch of Shi’a Islam (the same as that followed by the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad).  But it quickly spread to other Tripoli neighborhoods.  By the next day, the country’s army command was declaring itself in control of Tripoli and blamed the violence on “tensions that had been mounting since” the July 18th suicide-bomb in Damascus that gutted Syria’s defense cabinet.

Tripoli, Lebanon, this week

[Also, 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 in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]