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» 'With Erdogan breathing down their neck, will Syria’s Kurds turn against Assad?
"... But if a good number of Kurds appear willing to turn against Assad, they’ve been wary about joining forces with the SNC’s government-in-exile for a number of reasons. To begin, some refused to join on account of the early chauvinist noises—made by several members, including Ghalioun himself—about retaining the Syrian republic’s “Arab” identity. More recently, others have worried about inadequate Kurdish representation on the Council...
But regardless of the details, these squabbles are underscored by a larger, more troubling fact. The Kurds don’t have full faith in the SNC, and their concerns stem largely from the council’s seeming dependence on its host nation, Turkey, particularly the ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party headed by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “I believe Turkey is playing a negative role in the SNC in terms of the Kurdish issue,” Dr. Anwar Yussfu, Britain’s representative of the Kurdish Democratic Party in Syria, told me via email. “Erdogan knows that any constitutional recognition of the Kurds in Syria would mean the same, if not more, should be happening in Turkey next.” Still other Kurds fear that Erdogan’s close relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood means that the SNC is being jerry-rigged to give Syrian Islamists a larger role in the opposition than their on-the-ground constituency merits. Mahmood Muhammed, another member of the Kurdish Democratic Party, told the Kurdish-Iraqi news agency Rudaw that “the goal of the Syrian National Council meeting in Istanbul is to tell the world that the Kurdish role in this revolution is weak and that the future new rule of Syria will be in the hands of [the] Muslim Brotherhood.”
Potential Turkish meddling in the SNC’s affairs is a big problem because Kurdish separatism is still the prism through which Ankara views all regional convulsions. Erdogan may voice sympathy for the Palestinians and other stateless peoples, but he’s not nearly as sympathetic when it comes to the PKK, which still wreaks havoc in eastern Turkey through terrorist attacks on soldiers and civilians. Last year, Erdogan threatened to drown the PKK “in their own blood,” a promise he’s since made good on with ferocious retaliatory strikes that extend into Iraqi Kurdistan, long thought to be the PKK’s base of operations...
Later this month, the Kurdish National Council, which presents itself as an alternative, strictly Kurdish-Syrian opposition group, will convene in Erbil, in the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq, to decide whether it should suspend participation in the SNC. The Syrian opposition can scarcely afford to let this happen. It took them eight months to form a transitional body worthy of being shopped for international legitimacy. By contrast, the Libyans took about two weeks to form the National Transitional Council, which remained relatively cohesive and united through the six-month campaign to topple Qaddafi.
To ensure that Syria’s Kurds don’t abandon the opposition, the SNC needs to move fast with a number of concrete reassurances, including increased representation in all decision-making bodies and the speedy drafting of a provisional constitution that would spell out, in no uncertain terms, what the Kurds can expect in the post-Assad era. Here’s where the U.S. State Department, rather than the Turkish Foreign Ministry, ought to lead from the front."
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
