Vol. 77/No. 29      AUGUST 12, 2013

BY SUSAN LAMONT

As the civil war in Syria grinds on, Kurds in the country’s northeast bordering the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq are pressing for autonomy.

On July 19 the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the strongest Kurdish organization in Syria, proposed a new independent council and government for the region, according to Reuters.

The PYD is allied with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey, which has waged a 30-year armed struggle against the Turkish government.

The Kurds are an oppressed nationality of some 25 to 30 million, concentrated in an area that spans eastern Turkey, northwest Iran, northern Iraq and northeast Syria.

Denied a nation state by both the imperialist powers and the region’s capitalist governments over many decades, advances in recent years won by Kurds in Iraq, Turkey and now Syria register a new stage in their fight for national rights and a homeland.

Some 1.7 million Kurds in Syria have tried to stay aloof from the contest for power in the country that erupted in March 2011 between the government of President Bashar al-Assad and various competing bourgeois forces. At the same time over the past year Kurdish militias have begun to assert control over the predominantly Kurdish districts of northeast Syria with little resistance from the Assad regime.

Clashes have been taking place between Kurdish militias and some forces opposed to the government. In mid-July fighters from the Committees for the Protection of the Kurdish People expelled the Islamist jihadist groups Al-Nusra Front and Islamic State of Iraq from the Kurdish town of Ras al-Ain and four other villages in Hasaka province, Agence France-Presse reported July 23.

“The proliferation of newly hung Kurdish flags and signs in the mother tongue in al-Hassaka province give the impression of liberation after years of rule under the Ba’ath party, which expropriated land in Kurdish areas, suppressed expressions of Kurdish identity and arrested thousands of Kurdish activists, especially after riots shook the Kurdish areas in 2004,” Financial Times journalist Loveday Morris wrote last October.

Moves by Syria’s Kurds to consolidate control over their territory brought a sharp response from the government of Turkey, home to one-half the region’s Kurdish population. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Kurdish groups in Syria should refrain from “any de facto autonomy,” before a post-Assad parliament is elected, reported Today’s Zaman, an English-language paper in Istanbul, on July 24.

Kurds in Turkey, backed by Turkish supporters of Kurdish rights, are pressing the government to live up to a cease-fire agreement with the PKK reached in March that includes provisions for a greater degree of national and cultural rights.

A major factor in the new rise of the Kurdish national struggle is the establishment of a largely autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq following the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime by Washington.

The Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq has called for a congress of all Kurdish organizations from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, to be held in August in Erbil, capital of Iraq’s Kurdish territory.

The Iraq-based newspaper Rudaw reported that Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government and head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, had talks with representatives of 39 Kurdish political parties from all four countries to promote the conference.

The meeting will be “the first congress to be held on Kurdish land, and the first to gather all Kurdish parties and groups from across the political spectrum,” regional government spokesman Kawa Mahmoud said, according to a July 23 Bloomberg News report.  
 
 
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