Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect (22 page)

The PKK originally called for the formation of an independent, socialist state to include the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. It recruited large numbers of women and promoted some to leadership positions. In my almost-thirty years of reporting from the region, I have met few women leaders in any government or opposition party. So the active participation of women is no small accomplishment. I met some of the PKK women while reporting a story for
Mother Jones
in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.
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The journey began at the seedy Ashti Hotel in Sulaymaniyah. The Ashti looked like something out of a Graham Greene novel. Its smoke-filled lobby served as a meeting place for obscure diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, and spies. Men sat around, staring at glasses of strong tea. Every now and again they'd pour a bit of tea into their saucers, let it cool, and slurp it down. From the Ashti we made arrangements to visit a PKK guerrilla camp in the nearby Qandil mountains. We rode in a four-wheel-drive vehicle as we climbed the mountainside. Green and brown scrub brush covered the land as a chilly wind caused me to button my coat. After one particular death-defying curve in the road, a large, fertile valley opened up. Herds of goats and an occasional gaggle of ducks crossed the road. I knew we had entered PKK-controlled area
when I saw two young women wearing PKK uniforms of green pants and shirts with the traditional twisted Kurdish headscarf.

While waiting for an interview, I chatted with the PKK women as we huddled around a wood stove. They were confident and talkative, saying that almost 50 percent of PKK members are female.
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Other sources report the number may be closer to 40 percent, but in either case, the numbers are impressive. The PKK claims there are no sexual relations among unmarried guerrillas, a fiction maintained to comfort the parents of girls going off to fight in the mountains.

The women boasted of attacking the Turkish military and police. But they said they didn't intentionally target civilians. The PKK does kill civilians working with the government, however, as well as Kurds they consider collaborators. Turkey, Britain, and the United States label the PKK as a terrorist organization. Other Kurdish parties have many criticisms of the PKK, but they make a distinction between terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and nationalist groups engaged in armed struggle such as the PKK. In Syria the PKK-aligned party protected the local population from extremist rebels. “The majority [of Kurds] believe that despite the PKK's practices, they're a better option than Jihadists and al-Qaeda,” said Hozan Ibrahim, a leader of the Local Coordinating Committees now living in exile.

During the 1990s, Syria allowed PKK militants to live in Damascus and receive military training in the mountains surrounding the Beka Valley of Lebanon, then controlled by Syria. The Syrian-PKK cooperation was a marriage of convenience. Assad wanted to pressure Turkey to negotiate the return of the Hatay region (see
chapter 3
). He also opposed Turkey's close alliance with Israel and the United States. The PKK used Syria to launch military attacks on Turkey.

By 1998, the Turkish government had become fed up with the cross-border raids and Syrian intransigence. The Turkish military massed troops along the border and threatened to attack Syria. One newspaper headline read, “We will soon say shalom to the Israelis in the Golan Heights,” meaning Turkish troops would advance all the
way to Syria's border with Israel.
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So Hafez al-Assad, ever the strategic boxer, made one of his famous pivots. In October 1998 Syria signed the Adana Agreement with Turkey, declaring the PKK a terrorist organization and prohibiting its activities inside Syria.

Ocalan was forced to flee Damascus, and in 1999 he was captured in Kenya with help from the CIA. Taken to Turkey, he was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison. He's been serving time in isolation at the Imrali island prison ever since. Ocalan's arrest capped a series of major PKK defeats in the 1990s. In response, the PKK sought accommodation with the Turkish government and moved to the Right politically, abandoning Marxism and calling for Kurdish autonomy, not independence.
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In the early 2000s the PKK formed separate political parties for each of the countries where it operated. The Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat (PYD), or Democratic Union Party, was formed in 2003 as the Syrian offshoot, led by Saleh Muslim, a chemical engineer. The PYD argued that it is an independent party with only ideological ties to the PKK; critics said the two parties are controlled by the same PKK leadership.

The PYD has developed a reputation for sectarianism, putting its own interests ahead of the broader Kurdish movement. The Kurdish National Council, the umbrella Kurdish opposition group, “has accused the PYD of attacking Kurdish demonstrators [and] kidnapping members of other Kurdish opposition parties,” according to a report by the Carnegie Middle East Center.
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The PYD has also been accused of assassinating leaders of other Kurdish parties.
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The PYD also shared the PKK's cult worship of Ocalan. Supporters kept his picture in their homes, chanted his name at demonstrations, and wore his image on T-shirts. A PYD leader calling himself “Can Med” told me, “The leader Abdullah Ocalan gave us a solution for all the issues. He defined the way to solve our issues.”
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However, the PYD and its armed militias presented a disciplined, secular force in a region beset with religious extremism and chaos. The party gained popular support in northern Syria as the best among the bad alternatives.

These days, the Turkish and Syrian governments condemn the
PKK and PYD as terrorists and blame them for lack of progress in achieving Kurdish rights. But long before the PKK was founded, the Syrian government oppressed its Kurdish population.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Turkish government cracked down on Kurdish activists. The repression forced some Kurds from Turkey to flee to Syria. The military rulers of Syria, even before the Assad family came to power, didn't trust the Kurds. In 1962 the government conducted a special census in the predominantly Kurdish province of Jazira. The government denied citizenship to an estimated 120,000 Kurds, claiming they were born in Turkey or Iraq.
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That constituted some 20 percent of Kurds living in Syria at the time. Successive generations born in Syria didn't receive citizenship either because their parents weren't listed as citizens.

Noncitizen Kurds remained in limbo. They couldn't obtain passports, be hired for government jobs, officially open businesses, or receive government-subsidized higher education and healthcare. The government confiscated the land of unregistered Kurds and gave it to Arabs. The problem festered for almost fifty years. Some 80 percent of Kurds lived below the Syrian poverty line as of 2007.
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I interviewed Bashar al-Assad before the uprising and asked why many Kurds still had no citizenship rights. He claimed it was simply a technical problem of sorting out who was Syrian and who was Turkish. I pressed him by pointing out that since many Kurds criticized his rule, wasn't the dispute political? “We don't have political problems,” he claimed. “Who is Syrian is Syrian.”
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In reality Assad didn't want to resolve the citizenship issue without exacting concessions from Kurdish leaders who periodically criticized his government. By 2011 the number of Syrian Kurds without citizenship grew to an estimated 300,000. Fearing Kurdish support for the uprising, Assad shifted course on April 7, 2011. He suddenly granted citizenship to about 250,000 Kurds. The exact numbers remain in dispute.
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The reform was popular among Kurds, and Assad bought some much-needed time. But Kurds disliked his
government, in no small part because of how he handled the 2004 Kurdish rebellion.

On March 8, 2004, Iraq adopted the Transitional Administrative Law, which formally recognized a semi-independent Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Syrian Kurds celebrated what they considered a tremendous victory for Kurds throughout the region. That national pride expressed itself at a local soccer match. On March 12 the mostly Kurdish hometown soccer team from Qamishli played a match against the mostly Arab team from the city of Deir Ezzor. Riding around in buses before the match, Deir Ezzor fans held up portraits of Saddam Hussein and chanted insults against Kurdish leaders. Kurdish fans shouted slogans supporting George W. Bush.
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Fights broke out between the two camps, and the security forces sided with the Deir Ezzor fans.

The police killed six people on the first day. Refugee camp resident Balo said, “The next day when they went to bury them, there was conflict between the police and the people. The uprising started there.”
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Soon there were running battles in the streets. By the end of March, forty-three people were killed, hundreds wounded, and some 2,500 individuals arrested.
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It was the worst anti-Kurd repression in modern Syrian history up to that time. Thousands fled across the border to Iraqi Kurdistan, where many still live today. Their children and grandchildren learn about the Kurdish struggle and the evil Bashar al-Assad. “We know after this regime in Syria falls,” said Balo, “we are going to work for our rights, and we are going to free our Kurdistan.”

Freeing Kurdistan—whatever form that might take—won't be easy. The Syrian government, ultraconservative Arab rebels, and Kurdish groups all want to control the oil fields in the Kurdish region. Before the civil war and 2011 Western economic embargo, Syria produced 370,000 barrels per day, accounting for only 0.4 percent of total world output.
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The country is a small-time player internationally, but control of the fields is vital for any new Syrian government.

The Assads brought Syrian Arabs to live in the predominantly Kurdish area, so the population is now mixed. But the Syrian government and some rebels fear that an empowered Kurdish minority would seek control of oil production as happened in neighboring Iraq. The Iraqi Kurds have asserted the right to sign independent exploration, drilling, and distribution contracts with Western oil companies, despite strong objections from the central government in Baghdad.

Iraq, like Syria, has a state-owned oil company. The Baghdad government negotiated service contracts with foreign companies, who earn a fee for drilling and distributing the oil. That gives the foreign companies about one dollar per barrel. The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), on the other hand, signed production contracts in which oil companies own a percentage of the production and earn three to five dollars per barrel.
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Looking to the future, US and Western oil companies would be pleased if they could cut a similar deal with a Syrian Kurdistan.

That's a hypothetical dispute, however, because Western sanctions halted all Syrian-government oil production starting in late 2011. The Syrian army withdrew from much of the area. Local tribes, extreme Islamist groups, and the PYD competed for control of the unprotected oil wells. Locals set up open-air refineries by boiling the oil and then extracting diesel and heating oil. Explosions periodically rock the area, and huge plumes of toxic, black smoke pollute the air.
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While control of oil sets the backdrop for the struggle, the issue of Kurdish separatism always comes to the forefront.

For the first three years of the uprising, Syrian Kurdish groups rejected separatism and called for greater rights within the Syrian state. By mid-2014, conditions were rapidly changing in the region. The extremist group ISIS captured swaths of territory in Iraq. The Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq sent peshmerga and intelligence agencies into the Iraqi city of Kirkuk and took control of the city away from Baghdad authorities. Iraqi Kurds had long claimed oil-rich Kirkuk as their capital, and they appeared to have finally achieved their goal. KRG officials planned to hold a referendum on complete independence for the Kurdish region of Iraq.

Syrian Kurdish groups were closely watching developments in Iraq. Should conditions further deteriorate in Iraq and Syria, Kurds might have the option of joining an independent Kurdish state on their northern border. But as of mid-2014 all the groups still formally called for greater rights within the Syrian state, not independence. The numerous Kurdish political parties disagreed on particulars but united on certain broad principles for greater political and culture rights:

• All Kurds born in Syria should have full rights as Syrian citizens, including the right to government jobs, passports, healthcare, and higher education.
  
• Kurds should have the right to be educated in Kurdish (as well as Arabic) and have Kurdish recognized as a legitimate language. They want the right to celebrate Kurdish holidays and learn Kurdish history.
  
• The new constitution should recognize Kurds as a distinct people.
  
• The name of the country should be changed from the Syrian Arab Republic to the Syrian Republic, reflecting the fact that Syria is a multinational country, not just Arab. It's similar to the debate in the United States whether America is a “Christian nation.” Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and many others are deeply offended by that notion. They are people of the United States, but no one religion defines them. Similarly, Kurds consider themselves part of Syria but not Arab.
  
• Kurds should have some kind of local political control. Kurdish parties offer different solutions, including federalism, autonomy, and decentralization. The Kurdish movement is still fiercely debating the issue, and that struggle will certainly continue if a new government comes to power in Damascus.
  
• Kurdish parties have advanced these democratic demands for many years, but they gained momentum as the Syrian uprising began in March 2011.
  

In the opening months of 2011, popular uprisings overthrew the military dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. By March, Syrians in
Damascus and the southern city of Daraa held peaceful demonstrations demanding reforms, such as free elections and an end to police brutality. Similar spontaneous demonstrations broke out in the Kurdish region but on a smaller scale. I met a leader of those demonstrations after he fled Syria and was living in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan. “Ciwan Rashid” agreed to do the interview on a crowded Erbil street with a shopping mall and restaurants. “Rashid” was his activist name; he kept his real name secret for obvious reasons.
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