Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect (23 page)

Rashid had helped organize demonstrations in his hometown of Qamishli. Protestors quickly discovered that the government tapped phones operated by Syriatel, the country's dominant carrier owned by President Assad's cousin, Rami Makhlouf. So protestors came up with an ingenious method to outsmart the authorities. Rashid and others traveled across the border, bought a bunch of Turkish SIM cards, and then handed them out to protesters in Syria. SIM cards are the small circuit boards inserted in mobile phones to provide a local phone number and payment system. The Turkish mobile phone towers picked up signals in northern Syria, and demonstrators were able to communicate with less fear of eavesdropping.

Rashid told me, however, that the local security forces eventually caught on. “I was accused by the government of distributing the SIM cards, which is illegal,” he said. “So I left the country.” Demonstrators generally weren't using Facebook or other social media to mobilize people because the government closely monitored those sites. Syria was not experiencing a Facebook revolution. It was more of a mobile phone uprising. “I wasn't afraid,” Rashid said. I asked why not. After all, people were being arrested and brutalized in jail. “There are two choices,” he said. “One is to escape and survive. The second is to die. If I survive, I will have my freedom.”

In 2011, young Kurds such as Rashid were the minority among the Kurdish population. Kurds remained critical of Assad but were also suspicious of the opposition. The traditional Kurdish parties didn't join the uprising, fearing government repression, and they were concerned that the Islamist opposition wouldn't respect Kurdish rights.
Mohammad Farho, a Syrian Kurdish commentator and activist living in Erbil told me, “Kurds are afraid of the Arab opposition parties because their agenda is not clear.”
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The Arab opposition groups were willing to recognize Kurds as equal Syrian citizens but not as a distinct nationality with legitimate language, cultural, and political rights.

During most of 2011, the Assad government took full advantage of the divisions between Arabs and Kurds. The Syrian military brutally attacked Arab cities such as Homs and Hama but shrewdly decided not to launch such devastation in majority Kurdish areas. “The regime tried to neutralize Kurds,” Yekiti Party leader Hassan Saleh told me. Yekiti is a nationalist Kurdish party that supported Assad's overthrow very early in the uprising. “In the Kurdish areas, people are not being repressed like the Arab areas. But activists are being arrested,” he said.
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While older leaders remained cautious, young Kurds seized the moment to organize antigovernment demonstrations in Qamishli. In other cities such as Aleppo, they joined Arab Syrians to hold protests. And their champion among the Kurdish leaders was Mashaal Tammo.

For his official appearances, Tammo dressed in a dapper suit, tie, and stylish glasses. At age fifty-four he still exuded youthful charm. Tammo formed the Future Movement in 2005 as a center-left group committed to Kurdish rights within the Syrian state. He was arrested and spent two years in an Assad jail, being released in 2011 under popular pressure from the uprising. The charismatic leader supported the uprising from the very beginning. Tammo became a hero to the young Kurds risking their lives in the streets. “There is a new generation of young people in Syrian society who do not share the same fears as the older generation,” he said. “These young people will build the new Syria.”
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Tammo called for the overthrow of the Baathist regime and establishment of a parliamentary system with civil liberties for all. He said any new “constitution should be a mirror of the cultural diversity of the Syrian people. Laws must be developed for parties, voting, the press, and so on…. Those groups who want a modern and civil democratic state will win out.”
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The Future Movement demanded full language,
cultural, and political rights for Kurds within the Syrian state. “Syrian Kurds are not looking to separate from Syria,” Tammo said, “though of course the idea of a Kurdistan is a dream.”
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In a July 2011 interview, he called on the West to impose an economic embargo on Syria but opposed foreign military attacks. “We do not want military intervention from abroad,” he said. “We will solve the problem ourselves.”
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Tammo reached out to Arab opposition forces and joined the executive committee of the Syrian National Council (SNC), the US-backed opposition coalition bringing together secular, Islamist, and some Kurdish groups. He attended an early meeting of the SNC in Istanbul but walked out in a dispute over Kurdish rights: the SNC wanted to keep the country's name as the “Syrian Arab Republic.” Tammo and the Kurds wanted the name changed to “Syrian Republic.”

Tammo's views were gaining popular support because he called for Kurdish rights and for overthrowing Assad without foreign military intervention. Then on October 7, 2011, masked men assassinated him outside a safe house where he was hiding. The Syrian government accused opposition “terrorists” of carrying out the murder. But many Kurds blamed the Syrian authorities, who benefitted from the death of a popular leader with a significant following among young people. On the day of Tammo's funeral, fifty thousand people marched in Qamishli to protest his assassination. Government security forces fired live ammunition into the crowd and killed at least five people in Qamishli and several in other cities.
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Tammo's murder was a turning point in the Kurdish struggle. Mass demonstrations got bigger, the traditional Kurdish parties lost influence, and the youth-driven opposition gained stature. The Kurdish movement became radicalized with more people calling for the overthrow of Assad by force of arms.

The Democratic Union Party (PYD) was the first of the Kurdish groups to take up armed struggle in
Rojava
, Kurdish for the northern region of Syria. It smuggled in weapons using networks established by its affiliate, the PKK. I interviewed a PYD leader who used the name
Can Med in Erbil in the fall of 2011. At that time, the PYD called for limited foreign military intervention to protect civilians and topple Assad. He also predicted that the PYD would soon launch armed attacks on the Syrian military. “If you want to get arms in the Middle East, it's easy,” said Med. “We can do that.”
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The PYD clashed with government troops but also with the Free Syrian Army and extremist Islamists who tried to take over towns in the Kurdish region.

In July 2012, Assad began to withdraw his army from the smaller Kurdish towns to concentrate forces in Damascus. A garrison remained in Qamishli, the largest predominantly Kurdish city in Syria. The PYD stepped into the gap and sent its fighters into four towns close to the Syrian–Turkish border and into a Kurdish district of Aleppo. They raised the PYD flag, with the Kurdish flag flying below it.
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Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani saw that the PYD was gaining ground. So he began to give military training to Syrian Kurds, many of whom lived in refugee camps in northern Iraq. Barzani formed the Special Coordination Committee (SCC) with its own militia. But as of late 2013, those militia had not taken up fighting inside Syria, partly fearing retaliation by Assad—but mostly due to opposition from the PYD. In July 2012 the PYD, SCC, and all the other Syrian Kurdish parties met in Erbil at the invitation of Barzani. They signed what became known as the Erbil Agreement, which formed a united political and military coalition against Assad. But very quickly, internal rivalries caused splits. The PYD formed its own coalition, the People's Defense of West Kurdistan. The two groupings met again in September and called for a united front against Assad and for Kurdish rights within Syria.

Although sharp differences remained among the sixteen Syrian Kurdish parties, both the Syrian and Turkish governments became very worried. The Turkish military feared that the Kurds could create a de facto independent state in northern Syria that would have close ties with the PKK. So early in 2012, Turkish authorities and their Syrian rebel allies sought to discredit the PYD. They argued that the PYD and PKK supported Assad and had cut a deal to seize Kurdish territory in order to attack Turkey.

The Turkish government cited the 1980s- and '90s-era alliance between the PKK and Assad to prove that they were cooperating once again. That conveniently fit with Ankara's policy of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood while opposing political gains by Kurds. Turkish authorities told their national media that the Syrian government had rewarded the PYD for its support by allowing it to take over the four Syrian towns. Numerous Western media took up the refrain. Dutch journalist and analyst Wladimir van Wilgenburg offered a more nuanced view, noting that at various times the PYD has had de facto détentes with almost all the major armed players. “The main goal of the PYD is to create autonomous areas,” he told me.
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“So, it doesn't matter to them if they need to cooperate with al-Qaeda, Assad, Free Syrian Army, or anyone, as long as it serves their goals. They are not a proxy of anyone; they follow their own strategy.”

The PYD opposed both Assad and the Turkish-backed rebel groups. Saleh Muslim, head of PYD, gave an interview to
Al Jazeera
in which he said, referring to Syria, “We cannot defend tyranny, oppression, and we want to bring down the regime, and the difference is only in the mechanisms and means.”
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Turkish authorities didn't want to admit that, broadly speaking, Syrian Kurds opposed both Assad and the Islamist opposition backed by Turkey. The PYD reflected that view as well. “The Kurds have established themselves as a third way in Syria,” wrote Mustafa Karasu on the PKK's official website. “They did not side with either the current regime or an opposition completely lacking in democratic and liberationist characteristics.”
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Ironically, he went on to echo a position that the United States and Europeans could endorse: “Bashar Esad [al-Assad] will leave Syria and the Baas [Baathist] regime will cease to exist, but a Syria in which political Islam will be sovereign will not be acceptable. There will not be a single hegemony…. Political Islamists will not be side-lined as they were by the Baas regime, but they will also not be the primary power holders.” He also criticized the Arab nationalist opposition for not recognizing Kurdish rights.

The PYD has gained credibility on the Kurdish street because of its
seemingly reasonable demands and its ability to defend Kurdish towns from both the Assad military and extreme Islamists. Many Kurds sharply disagree with the PYD, seeing them as sectarian and authoritarian. But accusing the PYD of supporting Assad only served to discredit the Turkish authorities.

When that campaign didn't work, the Turks shifted course. The Turkish foreign minister said his country wouldn't oppose autonomy for Syrian Kurds, a major PYD demand.
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Then in July 2013, Turkey invited PYD leader Saleh Muslim to meet with high intelligence officials. Turkish officials told Reuters that they wanted assurances that the PYD firmly opposed Assad and that it wouldn't create an autonomous region through violence.
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For its part, the PYD was willing to make alliances with the Turks, local Syrian government officials, and the Arab opposition. So the possibility existed for a political reconciliation between Turkey and the PYD.

“The PYD is a pragmatic party that has its own project to administer Syria's Kurd-populated areas,” according to Maria Fantappie, researcher for the International Crisis Group. “We can expect them to make all the alliances they need as a temporary compromise.”
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On January 21, 2014, Kurds declared autonomy in three provinces of northern Syria. Spearheaded by the PYD, representatives of fifty parties signed the declaration. The newly autonomous authorities promised to work with other Kurdish political parties and to protect the rights of Assyrians and Arabs who live in the area. They promised free elections within a few months. The autonomy announcement, which had been planned for months, came just before the start of the Geneva II peace talks and was designed to highlight the Kurdish issue internationally.

The PYD, as the main driver of the autonomy plan, took the initiative because it saw Syria fracturing, with Alawites and Sunnis exercising de facto control of their areas. PYD leader Aldar Xelil told Reuters that Syria should remain one nation but with a federal system in which Kurds would have considerable local control as they do in Iraq. “A division from Syria itself, it won't happen,” he said. “A federalized system though—that is possible.”
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While autonomous in name, the newly minted authorities struggled to provide basic services in the small cities they controlled. They refined diesel pumped from government oil wells and distributed it at low cost to farmers for use in tractors and home generators. The PYD was providing basic security against attacks from the Syrian army and extremist rebels. Human Rights Watch of New York sent a delegation to the newly autonomous zone. Delegation member Floyd Abrahams said, “Compared to other parts of the country…the security situation is relatively stable.
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Abrahams went on to criticize the PYD, however, for not allowing free expression and media, and for police routinely beating criminal suspects. He said the authorities don't have a “high intolerance” for different political views. Leaders of the other major Kurdish trend, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), also criticized the autonomy plan as mere rhetoric. The Assad government still controlled much of Qamishli, noted KDP member Mohammed Ismail. “Government ministers still come on visits here,” he told Reuters. “State employees still get their salaries, the phones still work, the healthcare system is in place. Where is this local autonomy they speak of?”
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