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.]

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.]

Syrian Regime Seeks Israeli Green-Light for Separate Alawite Republic

In the “strange bedfellows” department, the embattled dictatorship in Syria—which in the past has rarely felt that it needed Israeli permission for anything, whether it was funding Hezbollah in Lebanon, harboring Palestinian militants, or continuing to claim the Golan Heights—has, it turned out, gone to the Israeli government hat in hand recently to ask its support for setting up a post-civil-war “rump state” in the coastal area of the country.

This was revealed earlier this week by the English newspaper the Guardian, which reported that Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, had asked an unnamed diplomat “to approach the former Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, late last year with a request that Israel not stand in the way of attempts to form an Alawite state, which could have meant moving some displaced communities into the Golan Heights area.”  (At the end of last year, I listed Syrian Alawites as one of “10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2013.”)

Alawites, who are Arab, practice a form of Shi’a Islam and make up about 12% of Syria’s population, but after the humiliation of defeat by Israel in the Arab–Israeli War of 1967, Hafez al-Assad, the current dictator’s father, deposed the Ba’athist Arab-nationalist regime that represented the just-over-two-thirds of the country that is Sunni Arab and made his own Alawite community into the political élite.  The Alawite version of Islam, though secular and liberal by many standards, is Shiite nonetheless, thus putting Assad’s Syria in an axis of fiercely anti-Western Shiite régimes that include Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, as well as radical Shiite Arabs in southern Iraq who have recently found themselves part of the political majority.  The Syrian civil war which began in 2011 began as largely political until it drew an influx of Salafist Sunni fighters.  Many of them sympathetic are foreign fighters sympathetic to al-Qaeda, they tend to regard Shiism in general and the Alawite in particular as heresy, and they have become a prominent part of the opposition.  That, more than anything else, has helped sectarianize the Syrian conflict.  It is now one of the fronts in the wider historical conflict between Shiites and Sunnis that has become a feature of the recent rise of Islamist politics—along with Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, and of course Iraq.  There seems no way that Muslim Brotherhood or Salafist elements would not demand, and probably get, a prominent role in a post-Assad régime.

Like father, like son

After the Ottoman Empire was dismantled at the close of the First World War, the League of Nations put France in charge of some of the empire’s Arab territories, including what are now Syria and Lebanon.  This was by far the most religiously and ethnically diverse part of the Arab world, and the French strove to avert conflict by dividing French Syria into, among other divisions, separate zones for Druze (Jabal Druze), Maronite Catholics (what is now Lebanon), and Alawites (the Alawite State).  (North of the Alawite area was the Sanjak of Alexandretta, with a mixed Arab and Armenian population, which was later snatched by Turkey.)  When Syria became independent in 1946 in its present borders, strong protections for minorities were in place as the formerly quasi-autonomous Alawite State became today’s provinces of Tartous and Latakia, which include all of Syria’s small coastline and are separated from the rest of Syria by high mountains.

It is no secret that Assad, for all his bluster, is making contingency plans for possible rebel victory in Damascus, other major cities, and the vast center and east of the country.  Observers have noted what appear to have been attempts to create a régime-controlled corridor between the Alawite region and centers of régime control in the interior.  And tensions in the Alawite region have risen dramatically.  This has been, for obvious reasons, the least rebellious part of the country, but there have been reports of attempted pogroms of Alawites by Salafist Sunnis.  Other Sunnis are fleeing the area for points east or abroad, despite the fact that is the area least affected by the war.

The flag of the French-era Alawite State.  Presumably if it were restored it would lose the tricoleur.

But why would Assad expect Israel to protect an Alawite redoubt or give a green light to an independent Alawite State?  The answer is probably because, although Israel and the Assad régime are historical enemies, Israel has even less affection for the radical Sunni Islamists that would be likely to replace Assad in Damascus.  They would, in their foreign policy, perhaps more resemble the Ba’athists that joined the alliance to destroy Israel in the 1960s.  Moreover, a post-Assad régime in Damascus would also have links to the Muslim Brotherhood, the broad Sunni movement whose brief rule in Egypt from 2011 until this summer seriously destabilized the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip on Israel’s Western flank by turning away from the uneasy détente of the Mubarak years.  Salafists running Damascus might turn the Golan Heights—Syrian (actually, mostly Druze) territory which Israel has occupied since the 1967 war—into a new flashpoint.  No one wants that, except for the wackos who increasingly feature prominently in the armed Syrian opposition.

The state of play at the moment, according to the Economist

Assad is, as the saying goes, the devil Israel knows.  If Israel gives a blessing to an Alawite State, it would deny post-Assad Syria a coastline and would provide the Alawites with a place where they can rebuild, regroup, and perhaps one day take back the rest of the country.  (That seems especially possible after Egypt’s recent counter-revolution.)  But what of the fact that Western countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the European Union generally, are dead against Assad, to the point where even radical Salafists seem like worthy allies of the moment?  Well, that is one of the biggest divides in foreign policy between Israel and its closest ally, the U.S., lately.  Israel wants Assad to stay, even if it is in a tiny breakaway state, and, though Washington is wary, when it comes to its immediate neighborhood Israel usually gets its way without much complaint from the White House.  Turkey can be expected to fight tooth and nail to prevent an Alawite State, so it could get interesting.

Strange bedfellows indeed: is the Israeli government about to join this cheering section?

The good news is that Israel may convince the U.S. to support and nurture the West Kurdistan Autonomous Region in northern Syria.  The bad news is that we might have Bashar al-Assad to kick around for quite a while yet.  But only maybe: no word yet on whether Israel is willing to go along with an Alawite State just yet.  Everyone’s still watching to see how the rest of the civil war plays out.

Syrian Kurds celebrating the establishment last year of a de facto West Kurdistan Autonomous Region.
Some call that moment simply the first crack in the break-up of Syria.

[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 some time in 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Syrian Kurds Liberate 4 More Towns; Diyarbakır Mayor on Hunger Strike; More Carnage in Southeastern Turkey: Kurdistan Update, 11-17 November 2012

The carnage in Ra’s al-’Ayn, in Syria

NORTH KURDISTAN (TURKISH KURDISTAN)

Death Toll in Hakkari Battles between Turks and Kurds Rises to 43.  The death toll from three days of Turkish airstrikes and ground operations against separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) fighters in southeastern Turkey’s Hakkari province which began November 8th (as reported last week in this blog) were raised by the 10th from 13 to 42.  One Turkish soldier was killed, with much of the fighting concentrated in and around Şemdinli, site of a massive ground battle between Turkey and the P.K.K. earlier this year.  Meanwhile, the Turkish military reported on November 14th that two P.K.K. field commanders had been killed along with seven other P.K.K. militants.

Kurdish Mayor, 5 M.P.s Join 700 Hunger Strikers in Turkey.  Six prominent Kurdish politicians in Turkey this week joined the massive hunger strike calling for improved conditions and rights for founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.), Abdullah Öcalan, among other demands.  The politicians include Osman Baydemir, the mayor of Diyarbakır, Turkish Kurdistan’s notional capital, who is the source of the information on the other five.  The others are members of Turkey’s parliament from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (B.D.P.): Sırrı Süreyya Önder, Gültan Kışanak, Aysel Tuğluk, Adil Kurt, and Sabahat Tuncer.  About 700 Kurdish prisoners have been hunger-striking for about two months (as reported on last week in this blog).  Meanwhile, police say that a Kurd from Iran who was one of two P.K.K. members arrested in Hakkari province this week has confessed that he was part of a team that planned to set off bombs in case one of the hunger-strikers should die.

Osman Baydemir, now on hunger strike

SOUTH KURDISTAN (IRAQI KURDISTAN)

2 Kurdish Civilians Killed in Turkish Airstrike in Iraq Last Week Were Iranian.  The autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) in northern Iraq has released more information about the two civilians killed in a November 6th airstrike by Turkey over the border into Iraq, ostensibly to root out rebels from Turkey’s banned separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.).  The two were Kurds from Iran, aged 19 and 45, who were in Iraqi Kurdistan on a business trip.  A Kurd named Abubakir Khidr, of Besta village, described the scene: “We were sleeping during the strike and when we woke up we were covered in blood.  Two men died right away and we were injured.  The other man with me ended up losing a leg.”  The head of the village, Said Hussein Ali, added, “The Turkish planes targeted a small shop where Iranian and Iraqi Kurds have conducted business for years.”

Kurdish casualties of a Turkish airstrike on Iraq

Bombings at Iraqi Kurdish Party Offices in Kirkuk Kill 5, Hurt 4.  Five people were killed and four injured on November 14th by bombings outside the offices of a Kurdish political party in Kirkuk, a Kurdish-dominated area in northern Iraq that lies outside the autonomous Kurdistan Region.  The first bomb was planted in a car; the second was set up to detonate after police gathered in response to the first explosion.

WEST KURDISTAN (SYRIAN KURDISTAN)

Kurds Take 4 Towns; Syrian Province Now in 3-Way War with Kurds, Regime, F.S.A.  The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on November 10th that Kurds in northern Syria have taken over three more towns to add to what they are calling a West Kurdistan Autonomous Region which they hope, after the civil war’s end, to make into an at least quasi-independent entity along the lines of northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.).  The towns—Derbassiye, Tall Tamr, and Amuda, all near the border with Turkey—were abandoned by regime forces after being surrounded by fighters from the Democratic Union Party (P.Y.D.), which is affiliated with Turkey’s banned separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.).  A fourth town, Derik, was liberated by Kurds on November 13th.  This leaves almost all of Syria’s Hasakah province outside the regime’s control.  But on November 12th fighter jets and helicopters loyal to Bashar al-Assad’s embattled dictatorship attacked the Hasakah town of Ra’s al-’Ayn (called Serêkanî in Kurdish), one controlled mostly by the opposition’s Sunni-Arab-dominated Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.), killing 18 people, including six Kurds, and injuring scores.  The other 12 included seven members of the Nusra Front, an opposition paramilitary linked to al-Qaeda.  Kurds in the area have accused the Turkish government of backing F.S.A. encroachment into Kurdish-controlled areas.

[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.]

That Creepy Underground Islamic Cult in Tatarstan? Turns Out It’s Just a Split-Level—and the Kids Were Fine

More information is coming out of the Russian Federation’s Republic of Tatarstan, where lurid tales emerged August 2nd (as reported in this blog) of an underground Muslim cult—no, a literally underground Muslim cult—where 27 children were reported to be liberated from a mad 83-year-old prophet’s compound, where they were kept prisoner in an eight-level honeycomb of unventilated subterranean cells, some of them without ever having seen daylight in their lives.  New information suggests that many aspects of the “cult” may have been exaggerated by media and the authorities.  The group’s headquarters, in Kazan, Tatarstan’s capital, were raided as part of a law-enforcement dragnet in response to coordinated dual assassination attempts on Tatarstan’s head mufti (a failed attempt) and his deputy (successful) (reported in this blog at the time), in what appears to be new front, in Russia’s landlocked heartland, of the kind of Islamist separatist insurgency that has kept Russia’s North Caucasus region a veritable war zone for years.  (The radical Salafist “Caucasus Emirate” movement claimed responsibility for attacking the clerics—who were moderates critical of radical Islam.  Tatarstan, which is only about 60% Muslim now, was the site of the medieval Khanate of Kazan, founded by Turkic-speaking descendants of Genghis Khan’s westward invasion of central Eurasia.  Later, during the Russian Civil War (1918-1920), Kazan was capital of the Menshevik-allied Idel-Ural State, before being subdued and crushed by Vladimir Lenin’s Red armies.)

Now new footage of the interior of the compound, by media and the police, is showing none of the “anthill” type tunnels described initially.  One father of a sect member, Madganur Ziganshin, initially objected when his daughter, Ralifa Ibragimova, joined the group, but now disputes the way the group is described, saying, “They pray.  They are religious.  But they are not junkies, drunks, or bandits.  They never abuse the kids, never beat them.”  He was repeatedly allowed to visit his daughter there and never saw or heard of any tunnels, though it has become clear that the main compound is split-level and built into a hillside, which may have contributed to the characterization of some rooms as underground.

Tatarstan shown in relation to some of the republics of the North Caucasus region

(Which is not necessarily to say they aren’t wacko cultists of some sort.  Neighbors say that the compound’s children threw stones at and cursed at other neighborhood children.  “They consider themselves a higher race, while other people are garbage,” said one neighbor.  But, hey, if they’re throwing rocks at the neighbors then at least they’re not chained up in windowless dungeons, right?  You have to take the good where you can find it.)

The sect, which calls itself the Muammin—“believers,” in Arabic—is what is left of a flourishing group of several thousand in the 1990s, but the increasing conviction of its leader, Faizrakhman Satarov, that he was a “messenger of God” (Islam is strict about there being no prophets other than Mohammed) led many to leave the group.  The children “liberated” are now being sent to orphanages, and many adult sect members will have the book thrown at them for child abuse.

Faizrakhman Satarov.
Better come upstairs, there are some nice policemen here to see you.

Many now that Russian police and anti-terrorism units exaggerated the deviance of the cult and the conditions on its compound to create an impression that radical Islam was being effectively combatted (whereas in places like the Caucasus the authorities are more or less helpless: the Republic of Dagestan, for example, has been effectively ceded to Salafist warlords, while a Moscow-appointed governor runs Chechnya with, to all intents and purposes, Islamic law, mainly to appease radicals).

The flag of the Republic of Tatarstan

It wouldn’t be the first time the Russian government or the Russian mainstream media (for those who care to distinguish the two) practiced such deception.  Demonizing Islam has proved to be a very effective way to make Russia’s cowed citizens grateful for their authoritarian government.  The only mystery is why a fabrication this good wasn’t saved to be used during Vladimir Putin’s next reelection campaign.

[You can read more about Tatarstan, the Idel-Ural State, and other independence 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.]

Turkish Kurdistan Ground War in Progress, Iraq Border Crisis Eases: Kurdistan and Syria Update

[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), “Liberation of Syrian Kurdistan Infuriates Turkey, Iraq, and the Free Syrian Army—in Fact, Everyone but Assad” (Aug. 2012), and, on a pretty much weekly basis, installments of my “Week in Separatist News” columns.]

Developments are coming quick and fast in Kurdistan.  The standoff between three armies—of Iraq’s Shiite-Arab-dominated central government, of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.), and of the Western Kurdistan Autonomous Region in northern Syria—at the border between Iraq’s Nineveh province and Syria has now eased with no casualties.  The result may be greater K.R.G. control over Kurdish-dominated areas it covets in Iraq proper, including Nineveh, which may be what the K.R.G. had in mind all along when it dispatched troops last week to side with Syrian Kurds in the face-off.

Sorry about the “U.S.S.R.”  It’s hard to find this good a Kurdish-population map with contemporary labels.  That’s mostly the Republic of Armenia shown there shaded light green.

But things are heating up dangerously in southeastern Turkey, where to all appearances Syrian control of northern Syria may have made it easier for Kurdish rebels to stage an unprecedented ground offensive to take control of Şemdinli, a town of more than 10,000 in Turkey’s Hakkari province, near the mountainous area where Iraq, Iran, and Turkey meet.  Kurdish rebels also scored a deadly attack in the far west of Turkey, well outside of the Kurdish region, which is also unprecedented in recent years. This will likely heighten the Turkish government’s desire to invade northern Syria and secure a buffer zone (similar to Israel’s in places like Lebanon), to prevent it from becoming a staging ground for further attacks.  Iraqi Kurdistan has already shown its willingness to stand up to the Iraqi army in defense of Syria’s Kurds.  Would they stand up to Turkey’s as well?  In any case, the conflict is widening, even as the Sunni-Arab-dominated opposition in Syria attempts to get the upper hand once and for all, and what happens next is unpredictable.

Here is the rundown of these and other top stories from Kurdistan and surrounding areas this week:

Şemdinli, in happier times, now a war zone

Over 100, Mostly Kurds, Die in Battle for Turkish Town; P.K.K. Claims Control.  115 militants have now been killed, according to the Republic of Turkey’s ministry of the interior on August 5th, in the battle for Şemdinli in Hakkari province in the far southeast of Turkey.  The interior ministry also reported that six Turkish soldiers and two village guards have died.  Those eight, as well 14 P.K.K. fighters that included an alleged female suicide-bomber, all died in a single incident in the battle, an August 4th attack on a military outpost.  A later report cited 15 Turkish fatalities.  The clash began July 29th with what the Turkish government claims was an attempted takeover of the town by Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) rebels sneaking across from the newly-declared Kurdish safe haven in northern Syria.  The P.K.K. is a banned separatist militia based in Turkey, but Turkey is portraying the P.K.K.’s traditonal ally, Syria’s Democratic Union Party (P.Y.D.), which co-governs the newly declared Western Kurdistan Autonomous Region in Syria, as an active threat to Turkey’s security.  Şemdinli is not actually even that close to the Syrian border, wedged as it is quite close to where Turkey, Iraq, and Iran meet, but a P.K.K. source within Turkey had announced a plan to parlay Kurdish political victories in Syria into military victories in Turkey.  The town has symbolic value, however: it was near here, in Şemdinli district, that the P.K.K. first, on August 15, 1984, declared war against the Turkish state.  Turkey’s minister of the interior, İdris Naim Şahin, hit the xenophobic talking points hard in comments to the press, saying that the P.K.K. dead in the battle for Şemdinli included “Armenian, Iranian, Syrian, Iraqi, and Israeli citizens” (prompting a lightning-quick reply from officials in the Republic of Armenia, declaring the utter impossibility of this).  Meanwhile, casualties piled up.  On August 5th, according to the military, rebels attacked a border post in Hakkari province near the Iraqi border, resulting in a battle in which six Turkish soldiers, two village guards, and 14 rebels (including three women) were killed and 15 soldiers wounded.  The skewed deaths in the rest of the battle are explained by Turkey’s use of air strikes.  The Turkish government has been stingy with information about the battles.  The P.K.K., for its part, claims to control Şemdinli.  On August 6th, an overnight explosion was reported in Mardin province, Turkey, on a length of the crude-oil pipeline between Kirkuk, in Kurdish-dominated Iraq, and Ceyhan in Turkey.  The pipeline carries about a quarter of all of Iraq’s crude exports and was expected to be out of commission for 10 days.  Sources close to the P.K.K. report that the group was responsible.  On August 8th, four bombs were found along a Kirkuk pipeline in Iraqi territory and were defused.  P.K.K. members also stopped a bus at a roadblock in Bingöl province in east-central Turkey and abducted three off-duty soldiers riding as passengers.  Their whereabouts are unknown.  The next day, a roadside bomb followed by an ambush of a military bus by P.K.K. rebels killed one Turkish soldier and wounded at least 11 people near Foca, in Izmir province—quite unusually, since Izmir is a resort area on the west coast, on the Aegean Sea, far from the Kurdish region.

3-Way Standoff with Iraqis, Kurds at Syria Border Eased after U.S. Mediates.  An end is in sight for the tense stand-off at the border between Syria and Iraq’s Nineveh province between a Syrian Kurdish militia, the Arab-Shiite-dominated Iraqi central government’s military, and the private military of Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.).  Parleys between the parties first debated this week whether to “activate” a joint committee which would come to an agreement on sharing military role in places like this part of Nineveh, the Zumar district—areas which lie outside K.R.G.’s formal jurisdiction but where Kurdish troops have been in charge since the United States invasion in 2003.  (There is such a committee, but it hasn’t had much sway since the U.S. withdrew from Iraq in December 2011.)  Then, on August 6th, a statement from the K.R.G.’s military, the Peshmerga, said that the K.R.G. and Baghdad would both pull troops back from the border.  “The Iraqi army and the Peshmerga,” the statement said, “will take responsibility for each of the areas where they are stationed, protect the borders between Iraq and Syria and remove tension on the main roads in the area.”  The K.R.G. also said that diplomatic mediation by the United States helped reach the agreement.

Standoff in the Nineveh border region

Syrian Regime Troops Hang Back as Kurds Celebrate in Semi-Liberated Qamishli.  In Qamishli, the notional capital of Syrian Kurdistan, or Western Kurdistan, as Kurdish nationalists call it, about 100,000 Kurds celebrated in the streets on August 6th, even though technically the city has not been fully liberated and so is not a de facto part of the de facto independent Western Kurdistan Autonomous Region declared last month.  The government troops loyal to the embattled dictator, Bashar al-Assad, who usually patrol most of the city, were not visible during the celebrations—a fact likely to bolster the view in, for example, Turkey and among the mainstream Sunni-Arab-dominated Syrian opposition, that Assad essentially gave the liberated areas to the Kurds as part of some sort of deal.  Celebrants carried large portraits both of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) and, at least in Syria and in his native Turkey, the spiritual leader of Kurdish nationalism, and of Massoud Barzani—president of northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.), and son of Mustafa Barzani, president of the brief-lived (1946-47) Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, in what is now Iran.

Kurds celebrate in Qamishli

K.N.C. Distances Itself from P.Y.D. in Arbil Meeting with Turkish Diplomat.  In related developments (see above story), it was revealed this week that during the Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s meeting with representatives of the Kurdish National Council (K.N.C.) in Arbil, Iraq, last week, the K.N.C. reassured him that its coalition with the People’s Council of Western Kurdistan to form the Kurdish Supreme Council which now governs the self-declared Western Kurdistan Autonomous Region in northern Syria is “strategic.”  The People’s Council is closely affiliated with the Democratic Union Party (P.Y.D.), a pro-Kurdish party in Syria whose ties to Turkey’s banned separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) greatly worries Ankara.  In fact, at the meeting with Davutoğlu at which these reassurances were made, P.Y.D. representatives were not invited.  Meanwhile, the P.Y.D.’s leader, Mohammed Saleh Muslim, speaking from the half-liberated Western Kurdistan capital, Qamishli, responded to Turkish concerns, saying, “Turkey has nothing to do with Syrian Kurds.  The protection of my people in my areas, in my town: that is my right, no one can deny it, and that’s what we did.  So there is no need for Turkey to be worried and make threats.”

Turkish Top Diplomat’s State Visit to Arbil Included Side Trip to Rally Iraqi Turkmens.  When the Republic of Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, visited northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region last week (as reported in this blog), his visit to the city of Kirkuk infuriated the central Iraqi government in Baghdad.  Kirkuk lies in an oil-rich region which is dominated by Kurds but lies outside the reach of the official Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.), though to a great extent the K.R.G.’s president, Massoud Barzani, and his militias seem to run the place.  Iraq’s increasingly authoritarian Shiite Arab prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and his allies, regarded the visit—which was an unannounced side trip on Davutoğlu’s state-visit-ish visit to the K.R.G. capital, Arbil—as evidence of a worrying cosiness between Ankara and Arbil, knowing that Barzani openly covets Kirkuk and other Kurdish-dominated lands outside his official bailiwick.  This despite the fact that one of the purposes of Davutoğlu’s visit was to warn Barzani against continuing to support Kurdish separatists in Syria.  It turns out that the Kirkuk visit was far from a Turkish stamp of approval on Barzani’s designs on the city, as was revealed this week when the text of Davutoğlu’s speech to Kirkuk’s Turkmen community was officially released.  Turkmens speak a language related to Turkish and have deep cultural roots with Turkey and Azerbaijan, though they are scattered (much like the Kurds, actually) as large minorities in countries such as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.  They dominate only in the basket-case Soviet republic of Turkmenistan, way on the other side of Iran.  Locally, they are often rivals to the Kurds, and Turkmen aspirations toward an autonomous region in Iraq like the Kurds’ are a source of friction because their planned autonomous or independent Türkmeneli overlaps significantly with the K.R.G. lands and their penumbra.  Davutoğlu told a crowd of rapturous Turkmens, “After 75 years, I am come to Kirkuk as the first Turkish foreign minister.  You waited for us too long, but I promise you won’t wait for us that long in the future.”  At another point, he said, “Kirkuk has a special place in our heart.  I met with members of Kirkuk provincial council and told them that Kirkuk is one of our [sic] ancient cities.”  Not that this shouldn’t make Baghdad nervous too.  The Turkmens hate the Shiite Arabs as much as the Kurds do.  It is notable, however, that Ankara, which seems to be rapidly reassessing its warm ties with the K.R.G. in light of the perceived threat to Turkey from a K.R.G.-armed autonomous state in Syrian Kurdistan, seems to be hedging its bets and making friends among Turkmen nationalists as well.  During Davutoğlu’s speech, a man in the audience shouted, “They are annihilating the Turkmen in Kirkuk.  Help us!” and Davutoğlu replied gently, “No, be sure that such a thing won’t happen.  ...  We will spare no effort to help Kirkuk.”

An optimistically large map of the prospective Turkmen state of Türkmeneli, in what is now Iraq.

Ossetians in Syria Seek New Life in North Ossetia—but Not in South Ossetia.  In the Syrian civil war, Ossetians, most of them descendants of refugees from the Russian Empire’s brutal invasion of the Caucasus in the late nineteenth century, are now seeking to relocate to Russia.  A letter signed by 33 of the estimated 700 Ossetians in Syria and addressed both to the government in Moscow and to the Russian Federation’s Republic of North Ossetia–Alania, in the North Caucasus, asks Russians “to receive as compatriots the ethnic Ossetians from Syria who wish to move to the Russian Federation, to return to their ancestral land in Ossetia in order to live in peace and harmony with the peoples of Russia.”  The letter’s author, Hisham Albegov, says, “Not all of them want to leave.  Many have Arab wives, some have successful businesses that they hope to continue after the war ends.  But 150-200 people are dreaming of returning to Russia.  Some of them even have Russian citizenship.”  The 33 listed in the letter “are the people hardest hit by the war, those who have lost their homes or relatives.”  So far there is no indication that such a letter has been sent to the Republic of South Ossetia, which most of the world regards as part of the Republic of Georgia, but whose de facto independence Russian troops secured in a 2008 war with Georgia.  The Russian government has (as reported in this blog) largely reacted with indifference to the plight of the far more numerous Circassians in Syria who would like to return to their homeland in southwestern Russia, between North Ossetia and the border with Ukraine.  But Circassians are predominantly Muslim, and a rising Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus makes the Russian government wary of them.  Most Ossetians, however, are, like most Russians, Eastern Orthodox Christians, so they may have a chance.

Locations of South Ossetia and North Ossetia

Free Syrian Army’s Arabs Alarmed as Assad Releases 1,200 Kurdish Political Prisoners.  Media are reporting that the regime in Syria has released 1,200 Kurdish political prisoners, along with a larger number of ordinary criminal convicts in the northern, Kurdish area.  An opposition leader in Homs, Abu Salah, said that he believed this was a deliberate attempt by Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s embattled dictator, to, in the words of one news report, “show the Arab population what life would be like under control of the Kurds after his resignation”—even though it is near impossible that Kurds could ever control non-Arab portions of Syria.  Salah also reassured the Turkish government that the Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.) would prevent Syria’s Kurds from threatening Turkey.

[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.]