It’s not independence, but Syria’s Kurds entrench self-rule

Adnan Hassan, a Syrian Kurd, finally has hope for himself and his people.
Two years ago, Daesh militants nearly wiped out his hometown, Kobani, along Syria’s border with Turkey and killed 10 members of his family. Now with the militants driven out and going down in defeat, a new university is opening in the town, and Hassan will be its professor for Kurdish language and literature. It is the first university in the self-administered Kurdish areas, and the first in Syria to teach Kurdish.
The future of his people, Syria’s largest ethnic minority long ostracized by the government, could not look better, he said.
“We are living a dream and we are waiting for this dream to come true.”
Across the border, Iraq’s Kurds have sparked a major confrontation with their neighbors and Baghdad by holding a referendum for outright independence. Syria’s Kurds, meanwhile, are making major advances toward their own, less ambitious goal: Winning recognition for the self-rule they seized during Syria’s war. They say their aspirations for a federal system in Syria may now find more international and domestic support, and they are positioned as a player Damascus must reckon with in any final resolution of the conflict.
Perhaps more importantly, they have land. Backed by the US in the fight against Daesh, Kurdish forces control nearly 25 percent of Syria. They hold most of the northern border with Turkey and have expanded into non-Kurdish, Arab-dominated areas. The Americans have set up bases there to provide battlefield support for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as well as the training and advising of security forces and the new civilian administrations in liberated areas.
The Kurds have also maintained close ties with Russia and are confident they can fend off Turkey, which is vehemently opposed to a Kurdish entity on its border.
The ruling Kurdish Democratic Union Party, the PYD, heads a de facto self-rule administration in the Kurdish-majority region of northern Syria known as Rojava. As part of their efforts to promote a federal system, they elected new local councils late last month. By early 2018, they hope to elect their first regional parliament, representative of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians and Turkmen.
“In Rojava, we have a federal project. In (Iraqi) Kurdistan, it is the long-awaited state. The two complement one another in realizing the Kurds’ aspiration for a dignified life,” Hassan said.
It is a remarkable turnaround. Syria’s Kurds were about 10 percent of the pre-war population of 23 million, but Damascus had long suppressed any expression of their identity.
Jubilant Syrian Kurds celebrated their neighbors’ independence referendum by flying Iraqi Kurdish flags alongside the flags of their own militia from cars honking down the streets late into the night.
But the surge in Kurdish power in both Iraq and Syria does not mean the two sides are about to join: They remain divided by political rivalries.
Iraqi Kurdistan’s referendum sparked furious opposition from Iraq’s government, as well as Iran and Turkey, who fear it will fuel secessionist movements among their own Kurdish minorities and dismantle the map of the Fertile Crescent in place since WWI.
Syrian Kurdish leaders say their vision is for a federal system across Syria that would maintain unity while giving considerable autonomy to various regions.
They depict their proposal as a way out of the country’s intractable 7-year-old civil war.
The Syrian government is far from ready to share power, bolstered by battlefield victories and unwavering Russian and Iranian backing. Still its position is not secure, with local cease-fires on various fronts liable to crumble and a growing presence of regional and international forces on its territory.
Ankara views the Syrian PYD as an extension of Turkey’s own Kurdish insurgency led by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and is determined to avert Kurdish power next door.
Meanwhile, a race is on between the US and the Kurds on one side and the Syria-Russia-Iran alliance on the other for the oil-rich, eastern province of Deir Ezzor. Each side is fighting to take back as much territory as it can from Daesh. That race could determine the borders of a Kurdish-administrated area.
The drive is also a competition between the Americans and Iran to grab influence in Syria.
“The US can limit Iran’s freedom of action in the region by becoming a major patron for the Kurds,” while trying to be “polite with Turkey,” Joshua Landis, a Syria expert and professor at the University of Oklahoma, said recently to Syria Direct.
Syria’s PYD is ideologically affiliated with the PKK, inspired by its leader Abdullah Ocalan. Washington found in the secular-leaning, disciplined fighters its main leverage in Syria. It advised them to rebrand to distance themselves from the PKK.
The ruling party of Iraq’s Kurdish zone has long cultivated ties with Ankara, the main enemy of Syria’s PYD. Land-locked Iraqi Kurdistan depends on Turkey for access to the outside world for its oil. When the PYD first set up its self-rule administration early in Syria’s war, Iraqi Kurds closed their border with Rojava.
Some believed the rivalry would ease with Turkey’s opposition to the Iraqi Kurdish referendum. But Iraqi Kurds are unlikely to further aggravate Ankara by softening their stance toward their Syrian counterparts.