Extracts from a fascinating article by The New York Times last on Syria’s Kurds.
The Kurds of Syria, long oppressed by the government of President Bashar al-Assad, are largely staying out of the fighting, hedging their bets as they watch to see who will gain the upper hand.
But the PKK has allied itself with the Assad government. In the past, Syria armed and protected the PKK in its long campaign against Turkey.
Mr. Assad has made major efforts to keep Syria's Kurds out of the fray, aware that their support for the opposition could prove decisive. He has promised that hundreds of thousands of Kurds will be given citizenship, something the ruling Assad family has denied them for nearly half a century.
The Kurds have other reasons for holding back: the opposition movement in Syria is made up in large part by the Muslim Brotherhood and Arab nationalists, two groups that have little sympathy for Kurdish rights, and the Kurds cling to their long-sought goal of a Kurdish state.
“Syrian Kurds are, by and large, sitting out this dance,” said Jonathan C. Randal, the author of a widely respected book on the Kurds — the largest ethnic group in the world without a state.
That is not surprising, given the oppressive history of the Kurdish people, not only in Syria but also in Turkey, Iraq and Iran, the four countries that intersect the traditional Kurdish region.
In the past, they have been denied language, culture and any sort of national identity in those countries, though major changes have been made in oil-rich northern Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
The Kurds make up about 10 percent of Syria's population.
The history of their poor treatment in Syria is lengthy. But the most notable event took place in 1962, when 120,000 Kurds had their citizenship denied on the grounds they were not born in Syria. Today, that number has roughly doubled because of descendants who cannot lay claim to citizenship.
In 1973, Syria began creating an “Arab belt” in northern Syria, confiscating Kurdish land along a 180-mile strip and giving it to Arabs.
Besides the banning of the Kurdish language and books from schools, celebrations like Nowruz — the traditional Kurdish New Year — were long prohibited.
Gokhan Bacik, the director of the Middle East Strategic Research Center at Zirve University in the southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep, said the Syrian Kurds were fragmented among many political parties, making it all the more difficult for them to unite for any single cause.
But even though the Kurds as a whole do not want to jeopardize the long-term goal of a nation-state, he said, they are keeping their own counsel.
“There is a nascent idea of a Kurdish nation,” he said. “They don’t want to risk this process. For them the major point is long-term survival in better conditions.”
The Kurds have said in the past that they are seeking constitutional recognition, compensation for their suffering and a federal government, as well as the removal of the word “Arab” from Syria’s official name — the Syrian Arab Republic.
A wild card in all this is the Kurdistan Workers Party, known as the PKK, a well-armed and well-trained militia [fighting for Kurdish autonomy from Turkey].
The group has already threatened to turn all Kurdish areas in the region into a “war zone” if Turkey crosses the border to intervene in the Syrian crisis.
