Eleven rebels have been killed in clashes in northern Syria with Kurdish rebels of the main Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday.
“Fighting last night [Saturday] in the Afrin region between PYD armed wing the People’s Protection Committees (YPG) and rebels left 11 dead and 20 wounded” among rebel forces, the Britain-based watchdog said.
It also reported clashes in the same area of Aleppo province several days previously at a checkpoint installed by rebel forces south of the town of Kubani, without saying whether there were any casualties.
Since the beginning of Syria’s uprising more than two years ago, the Kurds, who make up about 15 percent of the population, have tried to stay out of the fighting, stopping both rebel and regime forces from entering their areas.
However in some areas, such as the Sheikh Maqsud district of Aleppo city, rebels and Kurdish groups have joined together to fight forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
AFP - 05/26/2013
05/07/2013 - Syria’s War - The View From Turkey - #Syria
The Ras al-Ain branch of the Kurdish National Council in Syria called on the Syrian opposition on Saturday to intervene over an ongoing jihadist assault on the northern city located on the Turkish border.
“Since Wednesday morning, some armed groups have launched an offensive against innocent and unarmed civilians in Ras al-Ain using various types of heavy weapons and sowing fear and panic among children and women,” a statement said.
“We condemn these cowardly attacks and call on the National Coalition, the Syrian National Council and the Free [Syrian] Army to pressure these militants to stop this criminal war, which is detrimental to the principles and objectives of the Syrian revolution,” it said.
The council said hardline rebels were indiscriminately shelling Ras al-Ain with tanks and called on Turkish authorities to “stop interfering and supporting armed groups to implement their own agenda.”
“We ask our fellow Syrians inside and outside the country to stand beside their brethren in Ras al-Ain,” it concluded.
On Saturday, one rebel was reported dead and three wounded in fierce clashes between Kurdish fighters and the jihadist Al-Nusra Front and several other Islamist factions in Ras al-Ain, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
On Friday, armed groups loyal to Al-Nusra Front crossed into Ras al-Ain from the Turkish border with three tanks, a Kurdish activist from the city told AFP via Internet.
While Turkey supports the revolt against Assad, it is also home to a sizeable Kurdish minority that has suffered much persecution and suppression.
Activists say they fear Turkey may be using jihadists in Syria to fight its own battle against the Kurds.
01/19/2013
Source: afp.com
Nov 27/12
Erbil: Rival Syrian Kurdish parties have agreed to re-unify their ranks and push for federalism in Syria after a previous pact that was not implemented, but the new deal has already been undermined by the reluctance of one faction to fall into line.
Syria’s Kurds see the civil war ravaging their country as an opportunity to gain the rights they have long been denied under President Bashar Al Assad and his father before him, who deprived thousands of citizenship.
But they are divided over their role in the Syrian conflict and where they stand in relation to the Arab-dominated opposition, which some regard as inherently anti-Kurdish.
Under firm pressure from Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani, representatives of two main camps: the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and the Kurdish National Council (KNC) met and renewed their commitment to a joint higher council.
“We agreed to adopt federalism as a working draft,” said Aldar Khalil, a member of another council that presides over the PYD.
They also said they would create a joint security apparatus, control border checkpoints together and merge their military wings.
But an armed unit known as the Popular Protection Committess (YPG), which is affiliated with the PYD, issued a statement saying it would not unite with any other military force, according to media close to the group.
There is also discord regarding the new Syrian opposition coalition, which the PYD rejects as a proxy of Qatar and Turkey. The KNC, itself a coalition of more than a dozen smaller parties, has yet to decide whether to join the body.
The KNC is broadly accepted by the political mainstream, unlike the PYD, which is aligned with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a Turkish Kurd militant goup listed as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.
Barzani already brought the two sides together in July, but the KNC repeatedly accused the PYD of flouting that accord, blaming the group for kidnapping one of its members and harassing rival activists.
A source close to the talks said he doubted the latest agreement would make much difference, citing suspicions of complicity between the PYD and Assad.
“Relations will be cordial for a week or two but then the same problems will resurface,” he said on condition of anonymity. “The problem is there are two sides: one is with the regime and the other is against it”.
At the recent meetings in the Iraqi Kurdish capital Arbil, Barzani said he would not support the Syrian Kurds unless they stayed together.
Source: gulfnews.com
#Syria Nov 24/12 Kurds and Arabs …. Syrians gathered together to say no to fighting between brothers …
A plea for unity from Qamishli
Source: youtu.be
Residents and Free Syrian Army fighters pose near a tank after the fighters said they fought and defeated government troops from the town of Ras al-Ain, near the province of Hasaka, 600 km (375 miles) from Damascus, November 22, 2012. (REUTERS/Samer Abdullah/Shaam News Network/HO)Nov 23/12
BEIRUT: Two rival Kurdish groups are in talks aimed at forming a joint force in a standoff with hundreds of Islamist rebels in northeastern Syria, Kurdish representatives said Friday.
Hundreds of fighters loyal to the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) – which has close ties to Turkey’s rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – have been locked in fierce battles with fighters of the jihadist Al-Nusra Front and allied Ghuraba al-Sham group in Ras al-Ain on the Syrian border with Turkey.
An agreement would set the stage for an expanded conflict in the area between Islamist rebels opposed to Syrian President Bashar Assad and Syrian Kurdish forces.
“We initially agreed on forming these [joint] forces that do not belong to any side, and discussions are ongoing now” in Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, Mohammad Rasho, a representative of the People’s Council of Western Kurdistan told AFP.
Abdul Salam Ahmad, another leader with the People’s Council of Western Kurdistan, said talks had agreed on the formation of a joint military unit called the “Kurdish Army” that will be open to any Kurdish volunteer and not affiliated with any particular party. PYD’s main militia will act as the foundation of the new group.
But others involved in the talks suggested the agreement was far from being finalized. Mustafa Juma’a, the general secretary of the Kurdish Azadi Party and a member of the Kurdish National Council, said any agreement will be difficult to implement.
“The PYD still just want to take control of all the Kurdish territories in Syria,” Juma’a said.
Friday’s talks came a day after the Ghuraba al-Sham brigade called for – in a video posted on the Internet – Islamist volunteers to flock to Ras al-Ain for a drive on the majority Kurdish city of Hassakeh.
“We of the Ghuraba al-Sham battalion call on the Free Syrian Army and the mujahedeen to advance toward Ras al-Ain,” an unidentified rebel commander said in the footage.
“We warn all those who stand in the way of this revolt … especially the PYD, the PKK, and any other armed group, against taking any action that contradicts the path of the revolution,” he added. - With AFP.
Source: dailystar.com.lb
Hundreds of Kurdish militiamen massed in the Syrian border town of Ras al-Ain on Thursday in a mounting standoff with mainly jihadist Arab-led rebels who had seized much of the town from government forces, a watchdog said.
It was the latest in a string of largely peaceful drives for control of mainly Kurdish inhabited areas of the northeast and northwest that neighboring Turkey fears has given succor to the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) it has been fighting for nearly three decades.
The Turkey-backed rebels of the Free Syrian Army accuse the Democratic Union Party (PYD) of having links to the PKK, which has been fighting for self-rule just across the border in southeastern Turkey since 1984, and charge that it is in cahoots with the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
The PYD insists its fighters are entirely Syrian but Washington has backed Ankara in insisting that Syria will not be allowed to become a rear base for the PKK in the face of the 20-month uprising against Assad’s iron-fisted rule.
The standoff between the Kurds and the Arab-led rebels—most of whom the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said were drawn from hardline Islamists opposed to the new opposition coalition recognized some Arab and Western states—highlighted a growing dilemma for the rebels’ supporters.
Some 200 fighters from the Al-Qaeda loyalist Al-Nusra Front and 100 from the allied Ghuraba al-Sham advanced on Ras al-Ain, backed by three tanks they had captured from the Syrian army, the Observatory said.
They were faced by 400 Kurdish militiamen in the northeastern town which has already been largely deserted by its residents, thousands of whom have poured across the border into Turkey, the Britain-based watchdog and residents said.
“Most residents have fled, and the few who remain are living in fear, in poor humanitarian conditions,” one of them, Abu Mohammed, told AFP.
“Because of the fighting and bombing, water and electricity have been cut off completely.”
On Monday, at least 34 people were killed in fighting between the mainly Islamist fighters and the Kurdish militia. Most of the dead were on the rebel side.
Source: nowlebanon.com
15/11/12
By Jonathon Burch | Reuters
CEYLANPINAR, Turkey (Reuters) - From a park on the outskirts of Turkey’s Ceylanpinar, Farhad watches with unease as his would-be liberators, guns slung across their backs, roam through his town just over the border in Syria.
“I don’t want the rebels in my town,” the 25-year-old Kurdish man laments. “Why would I want Assad’s planes to come and bomb us? I don’t want Assad, nor do I want the rebels.”
His is a familiar sentiment among refugees from Ras al-Ain, a mixed Arab and Kurdish town on Syria’s border with Turkey that was dragged into Syria’s civil war last week with the arrival of rebels fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad.
The ‘liberation’ was shortlived.
Since Monday, Farhad has watched Syrian MiG fighter jets strafe his town, hitting homes and driving refugees to scramble through the barbed-wire fence that divides Ras al-Ain from Turkey.
Distaste for Assad and a desire to see him gone are mixed with unease over the intentions of the disorganised and ill-disciplined rebels who would replace him.
Arriving in Ras al-Ain, part of an advance into Syria’s ethnically mixed northeast, the mainly Sunni Muslim Arab rebels have brought the wrath of Assad’s air power with them.
Among Kurds and Arabs alike, interviews with refugees who fled Ras al-Ain underscored the confused loyalties felt by many of those caught up in an increasingly complex war.
Such divisions highlight how difficult it will be for any post-Assad administration to unify a nation riven by sectarian rivalries. The fate of the Kurdish region - home to a chunk of Syria’s estimated 2.5 billion barrels of crude oil reserves - will be key.
KURDISH HEARTLAND
The rebel advance has brought them to the heartland of Syria’s Kurds, the country’s largest ethnic minority, which for decades has been repressed by the government in Damascus.
Under Assad and his father before him, Syria’s Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language or even to hold Syrian identity. They were often evicted from their land.
Kurdish activists in Syria, like those in Turkey, have been campaigning for decades for greater autonomy and with Syrian forces and Arab rebels entangled in fighting they have tried to exploit the vacuum.
But even Syrian Kurdish rivals are split over what type of government they want if Assad falls, whether to follow Iraqi Kurdistan’s model of autonomy or simply more self-administration in their areas under a new Syrian government.
There is perhaps no-one who would want to see the rebels overthrow Assad more than Farhad.
Yet years of subjugation by one power have left ordinary Kurds distrustful of an armed revolt predominantly led by a Sunni Arab majority. Many of them fear a post-Assad government will only continue their repression.
More than anything in this flat, arid borderland, they say they want to be left alone.
“Why would we want another government?” asked Mahmoud, a 30-year-old tiler who like many interviewees refused to give his full name for fear of reprisals.
“We have had nothing for 30 years. No identity, no insurance, no pension, no deeds to our homes. We have nothing and we don’t want anything from the government,” he said.
“We don’t want the rebels or Assad. We just want to get on with our own business, Arabs and Kurds. We can look after ourselves.”
NECESSARY EVIL?
Kurdish activists opposed to Assad called for the rebels to pull out of Ras al-Ain, warning that their presence would make the town a target for government forces. The prediction came true.
Other Kurdish activists said those that had taken the town were extremist Jihadist fighters.
In many Kurdish-majority towns east and west along the Syrian border with Turkey, Kurdish militias have begun to claim control. In Ras al-Ain, the large Arab minority offered an opening for the rebels to strengthen their presence on the frontier.
But like the Kurds, many of the Arabs who have fled the town also see the rebels as unwanted house guests who have brought only death to their door.
“The rebels wait outside and when they hear the planes, they come into our houses and then the planes bomb our houses,” said Yousuf, 36, an Arab refugee from Ras al-Ain who fled with his family on Tuesday.
“Both Assad and the rebels should go. We just want to get on and live our lives, Arabs and Kurds together. All I am thinking about is my home and my possessions,” he said.
Others said rebel fighters had stolen from them or pressured them to allow the use of their homes. Reuters could not independently verify the reports.
Nor is it clear how many people have died in the air assault on Ras al-Ain. Opposition activists have reported civilian deaths, including at least 12 on Monday.
A Reuters witness saw a wounded child and woman being brought to a hospital in Ceylanpinar from Ras al-Ain, the child covered in blood.
But to some, like Hasan, a Kurdish refugee staring across the border from Turkey, the rebels have become a necessary evil.
“We don’t want the rebels inside our town, but if they are going to get rid of Assad, then so be it.”
Source: Yahoo!
15/11/12
Kurdish militiamen and residents have wrested control of yet another town in northeastern Syria near the Turkish and Iraqi borders, in what an activist said was part of an anti-Turkey “dirty game” by the regime.
Hundreds of people gathered Tuesday outside the town of Derik’s security headquarters, the last building abandoned by the army and police, blasting out Kurdish music and hearing speeches in the officially banned Kurdish language.
“We tried to tell [President Bashar al-]Assad’s people to leave peacefully. We are a peaceful people”, said Abdi Karim, a 56-year-old officer in the People’s Defense Units (YPG), the militia involved in regaining the town.
The takeover came just days after Kurdish residents backed by militia from the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) took control of three other towns near the border with Turkey as pro-government forces pulled out without a fight.
North and northeast Syria are home to most of the country’s two million-strong Kurdish minority, whose militias operate independently of the rebels’ Free Syrian Army (FSA).
“There are differences between Kurdish anti-regime forces and the Arab opposition, mainly over the question of Kurdish nationalism and recognition of Kurdish as Syria’s second most widely spoken language,” independent Kurdish activist Massud Akko said.
On the ground, YPG member Karim made clear the separation. “If the FSA comes as a guest, we will allow them,” but the non-Kurdish rebels would not be permitted to take over the town, he said.
“We will protect our people from the Turkish, the FSA and Assad,” said Karim.
Akko said Assad’s regime forces were handing over territory to the PYD deliberately, saying this explained the relatively peaceful takeover of towns in the region.
“The regime’s handing over of institutions to the PYD is a dirty game,” he said. “It is a message to Turkey, because Turkey is helping the Syrian opposition.”
“I am not saying the party is collaborating with the regime. But the two sides do tolerate each other,” Akko added.
“The Kurds do not have the military capacity to take control of the Kurdish areas. The province of Hasakeh, for one, is Syria’s second-largest region [after Homs].”
Kurdish civilians backed by militia have quietly taken control of a string of towns in Hasakeh, leaving just two of its main cities under the control of President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
The YPG is one of several Kurdish anti-regime groups in the region. It is seen by some as affiliated with the PYD, but officials in Derik from the two organizations said they are independent of each other.
Armed YPG members were among those celebrating the regime forces’ departure from Derik. They sported headscarves with the yellow, red and green associated with Turkey’s rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
In a jubilant mood, others waved PKK flags and held aloft the red, white and green of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region.
-AFP
Source: nowlebanon.com
A picture taken from behind a fence shows Iraqi Kurdish fans holding a Kurdistan flag bearing a slogan as an Iraqi national flag flies during the AFC Cup final football match between Arbil club and Kuwait SC in the Iraqi city of Arbil on November 3, 2012. (AFP PHOTO/SAFIN HAMED)
CAMP DOMIZ, Iraq: Key rings and umbrellas in the colors of the Kurdish flag are on sale at a refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, where thousands of Syrian Kurds who have fled war at home are enjoying the freedom to flaunt their ethnic identity like never before.
Long-oppressed, Syria’s Kurds see the conflict ravaging their country as an opportunity to win the kind of liberty enjoyed by their ethnic kin in Iraq who live autonomously from the federal capital in Baghdad.
The war between forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and rebel fighters has so far driven some 30,000 Syrian Kurds over the border to Camp Domiz, where breeze-blocks are gradually replacing canvas as residents hunker down for winter and beyond.
A further 200-300 people are arriving each day, according to international disaster relief charity ShelterBox, which is helping put up tents.
Despite being displaced, many of the camp’s occupants draw comfort from being in a country where they can at least speak their own language and fly the Kurdish flag without fear of reprisal.
“Even if we didn’t have bread and water we’d be at ease here because we’re at home with our leader Massoud Barzani. Dirt turns to gold in his hands,” said Naja Hussein Omar, praising the leader of Iraqi Kurdistan, whose image hangs on walls around the camp.
“We want an independent state like any other. Where is our state?”
Divided between Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, the Kurdish people number more than 20 million and are often described as the world’s largest ethnic group without a state.
In Syria they make up about 10 percent of the population – the country’s largest ethnic minority.
At the camp, posters advertise a concert to raise money for the people of “Western Kurdistan” – the name Kurds use to refer to the area of Syria they claim as their own.
“God willing we will get another Kurdistan in Syria, and God willing in Turkey as well,” said Ibrahim Abdel-Aziz Ali, who fled his hometown of Hassakeh several months ago after being drafted into the army.
Not everyone is so sure.
Umran Mohammad said all he and other Kurds of his generation sought was equal rights within a united Syria.
“Our country is Syria. We don’t want another Kurdistan,” he said, sitting at a table in the cafe he runs out of a blue shelter made from tarpaulin. “The president can be Kurdish or Alawite or Arab or whatever, as long as it’s through elections.”
If Assad falls, the Kurdish quest for self-rule is unlikely to be smooth.
Already, tensions between two main Syrian Kurdish groups, the Kurdish National Council and the Democratic Union Party (PYD), have at times threatened to degenerate into intra-Kurdish conflict.
Earlier this year, Barzani brought them together in Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where they signed a pact to form a joint council, presenting a united front for Kurdish interests in Syria.
But the KNC has repeatedly accused the PYD of failing to keep its side of the bargain, saying its People’s Defense Units militia continue to set up checkpoints and impose their agenda by force.
The KNC was forged from more than a dozen smaller Syrian Kurdish parties, with Barzani’s blessing, and is broadly accepted by the political mainstream, unlike the PYD, which is seen as tied to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK.
The PYD says it has nothing more than ideological affinity with the PKK, which has fought a 28-year separatist conflict in Turkey that has claimed more than 40,000 lives. But Syrian Kurds at the camp use the two acronyms interchangeably.
“There are loads of PKK people here but they don’t dare say ‘I am PKK,’” said 24-year-old Zenar Ali Abd, who left the Syrian district of Malikiya because he faced army conscription.
Source: dailystar.com.lb
This week’s violence between the PYD (the Syrian branch of the proscribed Kurdish Workers’ Party, or PKK) and Free Syrian Army in Aleppo has prompted fears that not only will a “new front” in the Syrian conflict be opened up—this one between predominantly Arab rebels and Syrian Kurdish separatists—but that its emergence will severely inhibit the rebels’ ability to wage war on the Assad regime. Although well grounded, these concerns tend to obscure the more complicated and contradictory nature of PYD-FSA relationship up until now. More significantly, they also elide much the greater threat of an impending internal Syrian-Kurdish conflict.
The PYD-FSA fighting broke out on Friday in the Aleppo district of Ashrafieh. According to the PYD, it followed the Syrian regime’s shelling of the area and the FSA’s subsequent attempt to seize the road that runs from Ashrafieh to the Sheikh Maksud district of Aleppo. More than 40 were killed and hundreds more captured on both sides. Syrian rebels have characterized the confrontation as a “misunderstanding that was created by a regime plot,” emphasizing that “Our Kurdish brothers are comrades in our nation.”
The PYD was less magnanimous in the aftermath, with one activist tellingCNN that the FSA had fired on a demonstration in Ashrafieh of people demanding that the rebels withdraw from this Kurdish-majority neighborhood. Another PYD activist claimed that the FSA had violated a prior agreement not to enter these areas with any weapons, then attempted to establish its own checkpoints in Ashrafieh. The Kurdish Taakhi Coordination Committee posted to Facebook on Sunday that all 120 Kurds detained by the FSA were released and that cease-fire discussions were ongoing. Although conditions appear to have relaxed since the weekend, on Wednesday, PYD fighters reportedly ambushed rebels at the Bab al-Salameh border crossing, killing at least one.
This episode, which certainly raises questions about the future balkanization of Syria along sectarian lines, should not be taken in isolation. Three analysts—Ilhan Tanir, Omar Hossino and Wladimir van Wilgenburg—have examined in detail Syrian-Kurdish dynamics in a new report which I was fortune enough to edit. They’ve found that, while mutually suspicious of each other, the PYD and FSA are not yet sworn enemies, owing to the fact that both groups haven’t managed to fully consolidate their gains in northern Syria or, what is more crucial, win over the support of the people they now effectively govern. For Syrian Kurds, the looming threat isn’t a war with Arabs, but rather a war with themselves.
The PYD, which has long been hosted and patronized by the Assad family, benefited enormously from the regime’s withdrawal from Kurdish areas in Aleppo and Hasakah provinces in mid-July. As the only Kurdish party in Syria with its own militias, the PYD was quickly able to establish unilateral control over the cities of Afrin, Amude, Derik as well as large swaths of Qamishli, the capital of Syrian Kurdistan. By the end of July, the regime was completely absent from 14 Kurdish cities in total, indicating that either its forces had been redeployed out of necessity to hotter conflict zones in the country, or that Assad had cleverly calculated that his absence would automatically mean the PYD’s takeover—a development he likely knew would enervate the FSA but terrify its patron, Turkey, which has been at war with the PKK for decades. (Since the Syrian uprising began, that war has reached heights of violence not seen since the 1990s.)
The PYD views the FSA as Ankara’s hireling army, seeking to impose an Arab Islamist agenda in a post-Assad state. Meanwhile, the FSA sees the PYD as an Assadist sleeper proxy, easily switched on and off again depending on the needs of Damascus. One 20 year-old FSA fighter wounded in another weekend battle in Yazi Bah, a Kurdish village close to the Turkish border,told AFP: “The enemy now is the PKK because they’re Assad’s dogs.”
Fighting first erupted in Afrin between the two sides between June 29 and July 3, leading to the deaths of two FSA supporters and one ex-PYD member. Meanwhile, an exclusively Kurdish FSA brigade called Salah-ad Din Eyubi, headquartered in Afrin, has warned the PYD against heavy-handedness, urging pan-Kurdish unity (about which more in a moment).
Throughout the summer, the PYD serially blocked FSA movements and even prohibited the rebels from erecting their own checkpoint in Robarliq, a Kurdish village in Aleppo in early August. Relations between the two groups are poorest in Hasakah province, where the Kurdish presence is highest. The FSA formed a military council in Qamishli in mid-August and a Martyrs Battalion of Al Zahra, which likely carried out the bombing of the regime’s intelligence headquarters there. A Unified Qamishli Brigade of the FSA was announced on September 9 on YouTube, further challenging exclusive PYD control of the city.
And yet, FSA-PYD relations have also been strangely cooperative, couched in what Sheikh Tawfik Abu Suleiman, the rural commander of the FSA’s formidable Tawheed Brigade, classifies as a “cold peace.” As ever, any alliance of convenience here has been the product of the regime’s stupidity. When Syrian security forces fired on a PYD convoy to Aleppo, the PYD shot back, killing six regime personnel. FSA fighters have successfully traveled from Aleppo to PYD-held Afrin to mourn the deaths of 21 people from the village who were killed in the intense battle for Salaheddine, the Stalingrad of the Aleppo siege. On August 7, the PYD even allowed the FSA to attack regime forces in Ashrafieh, which may be one reason why the FSA was quick to downplay this week’s escalation as a “misunderstanding.”
In fact, the PYD faces a greater problem than the FSA in the shape of opposing Syrian Kurdish parties that are the preferred interlocutors for Irbil, Washington and Ankara. In July, Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, shepherded into being the Irbil Agreement in order to unite the PYD and moderate Kurdish parties represented by the umbrella organization the Kurdish National Council (KNC).
The unwritten purpose of the Irbil Agreement was to consolidate all the newly regime-vacated territories of Syrian Kurdistan under the banner of pan-Kurdish unity. But the three express purposes were to create a foreign relations apparatus so that Syrian Kurds could negotiate with the international community independently of Arab-majority opposition groups (such as the now-irrelevant Syrian National Council), provide social services, and establish a joint security force to maintain law and order in liberated Kurdish districts.
However, the problem of where this joint security force would be trained was never codified. Barzani clearly intended to have Kurdish conscripts professionalized in Iraqi Kurdistan. In July, his zerevani—the military police that operate within the Kurdish peshmerga paramilitary forces—trained between 600 and 3,000 recruits in northern Iraq. But the PYD wanted all training to take place under the supervision of its own People’s Defense Units inside Syria. It has already blocked the return of KRG-trained Kurdish defectors from the Assad regime. Barzani, too, has come under fire from the PYD for being seen to have strengthened the KRG’s relationship with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, acquiescing in Turkey’s bombardment of PKK strongholds in the Qandil Mountains of Iraq, for instance.
Tensions between the PYD and the KNC have been far worse than those between the PYD and the FSA. Dr. Abdulhakim Bashar, the former head of the KNC, has accused the PYD of assassinating Nasiradeen Pior, a senior figure in the Kurdish Azadi Party, and of complicity in the regime’s assassination in October 2011 of Mishal Tammo, a popular Kurdish political figure and one of the few Kurds to have joined the Syrian National Council. In June, Mustafa Jumu’ah, the vice president of the KNC, was kidnapped by the PYD for suggesting that the group had made $200 million through smuggling, an accusation the PYD denied. On September 20, PYD militias raided three KNC party offices close to Qamishli. In late August, the KNC’s local committee in Amude suspended its membership in the Irbil Agreement because, it alleged, the PYD had engaged in extortion. In retaliation, the PYD arrested three KNC activists in Amude, who were only released on September 2 after the 10-member executive guiding the Irbil Agreement intervened. Overall, Tanir, Hossino and van Wilgenburg conclude the PYD has used the Irbil Agreement as a pretext to wage a unilateral power seizure in Aleppo and Hasakah. Perhaps the most interesting report to emerge from the Ashrafieh skirmish was the Daily Star’s claim that the FSA unit mainly responsible was the Kurdish-majority Salaheddine Battalion, which consists of “disgruntled former PKK members and anti-Assad Kurdish locals, alongside Arab Islamists.” Even if the fighters themselves were predominantly Arab, that they have aligned themselves with a Kurdish militia against the PYD is extremely revealing.
The KNC must walk a knife’s edge. On the one hand, it needs credible partners and patrons to offset the PYD’s rising power, yet in order to grow its own constituency, it needs to prioritize Kurdish autonomy. This paradox was best embodied in the hot-cold prescriptions of Mustafa Jumu’ah, the kidnapped Azadi Party member who first advocated a partnership between the FSA and moderate Syrian Kurds, but then appeared to retract it by affirming that the FSA had no place inside Kurdish areas of Syria.
Though it would be crude to read in the PYD-KNC divide an exact extenuation of the Syrian-Turkish one, the recriminations and accusations coming from either side do suggest that these relationships now broadly run parallel with each other. So while the West awakens to the prospect of an Arab-Kurdish sideshow in Syria, what it hasn’t fully appreciated is the likelihood of an even more protracted and geopolitically fraught Kurdish civil war in Syria, one that would certainly be exploited by Damascus and almost certainly eventually ensnare Turkey and Iraq
via @michaelweiss
Source: nowlebanon.com
October 31, 2012 12:18 AMBy Jennie Matthew
A Syrian boy plays with a destroyed army tank in the northern Syrian town of Azaz on October 29, 2012. (AFP PHOTO/PHILIPPE DESMAZES)
AZAZ, Syria: Mohammad Haffar was killed at dawn, shot while reportedly trying to rescue his brother Faisal, mortally wounded, from the latest gun battles between Sunni Arab rebels and Kurdish militia in Syria.
It was the second clash in 48 hours and killed up to four Arabs near the Kurdish village of Yazi Bah, close to the Turkish border in northern Syria, according to Arab rebel fighters in their nearby bastion of Azaz.
Angry, upset men and fighters dressed in fatigues totting Kalashnikovs gathered outside his house to pay their respects. Few wanted to talk to a Western reporter. The sense of loss and anger was palpable.
They carried Haffar’s body through the rubbish-strewn streets to the graveyard, firing into the air and shouting “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest) in a cortege of mourners on foot and wounded Arab rebels limping on crutches.
One of them was Fahad, 20, nursing a shattered arm in a sling and a heavily bandaged right foot injured, he says, in fighting against the regime of President Bashar Assad in the northern city of Aleppo.
“The enemy is now the PKK [Kurdish militia] because they’re Assad’s dogs,” he mutters, slumped in a plastic chair outside Haffar’s home, waiting for the funeral procession to begin. “When they kill us, we’ll kill them.”
Fellow fighter Abu Sabri agrees.
“We will punish them. I can’t say now, but in the coming days, you’ll see.”
But on Monday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a Kurd tortured by rebels died after being captured near the northern village of Hayan.
Tensions run deep between the PYD – the Syrian branch of the leftist and secular Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which the rebels accuse of being lackeys of the regime – and the rebels, who often say they want an Islamic government.
Analysts say clashes in the north, where the country’s 15 percent Kurdish population is heavily concentrated, stem not just from distrust, but from a struggle for power and control with Syria’s future deeply uncertain.
Some rebels say they are anxious to keep a cease-fire and nervous about opening a second front in a war they are struggling to win without international support.
But there are reports of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the main rebel group, sending reinforcements to Al-Qastal, the checkpoint where Haffar was killed.
Any escalation now would be all the more worrying after 30 people were reported killed in Aleppo Friday in the deadliest FSA-PYD clashes of the uprising.
Abu Shaaban, 50, who has had a shop selling car seats since before Haffar was born, says he is devastated that the young boy he watched grow up has been killed.
“He was like a son to me,” he says. “We’re sad for them [the family] because they [Haffar and his fellow fighters] were so young. God bless them.” Like the others, he says he has no problem with the Kurds.
“The Kurdish people used to be with us all day here,” he says. But asked what had changed, he says he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to talk about it.
Since the war began, life has changed for Kurds in northern Syria.
In the town of Afrin, an AFP reporter saw in August how they were able to experience their first hint of self-administration.
According to Kurds, they banned the rebels from entering their region armed, and cut a deal that saw Assad’s troops withdraw, although a security facility, complete with a portrait of the president remained in Afrin.
But for diehard FSA supporters, the PYD are nothing more than henchmen from the regime – armed and paid by the regime to keep the rebels at bay. Arab guides travelling with AFP say it is no longer safe for them to visit the Kurdish villages.
Peter Harling, analyst at the International Crisis Group, says the PYD has successfully exploited the uprising, creating friction with the armed opposition particularly in the all-important Turkey border area.
“There is a lot of competition between these opposition armed groups over the weapons transit route. That fact that many of the border points are in fact controlled by the Kurds, has created some tension with the Kurds too,” he says.
Harling believes the PYD wants to stay out of the conflict as far as possible, essentially neutral, but determined to profit whatever the outcome.
Observatory Director Rami Abdel-Rahman says armed groups have adopted practices of the regime and voiced fears that communal tensions may grow in the north.
“In areas where rebels have forced the regime out, there is a security vacuum. Some of the fighters don’t want democracy at all, they’re just warlords who are taking advantage of the chaos,” says Abdel-Rahman.
Source: dailystar.com.lb
In its statement, the PYD said 19 FSA members were killed in the clashes, while 40 PYD fighters also lost their lives. The PYD has also accused the KNC of driving a wedge between the FSA and the PYD.
However, in a statement the KNC noted that “the PYD’s clashes with the FSA just simply serve the interests of the Assad regime.”
The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) has meanwhile stated that some groups functioning under the umbrella of the FSA are violating human rights in the country. The general director of the SOHR, Rami Abdulrahman, said there is an authority gap in regions that used to be controlled by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
The observatory also reported that more than 200 Kurdish civilians were detained over the weekend by militants.
Rebels in Aleppo have fought with Kurdish militants in recent days, accusing Syria’s Kurds of siding with Assad. Many Kurds say they want to stay out of the violence by distancing themselves from either side.
The fighting in Aleppo’s predominantly Kurdish neighborhood of Ashrafieh late Friday occurred a day after Syrian rebels pushed into largely Kurdish and Christian areas that have been relatively quiet during the three-month battle for the city. Kurdish groups have for the most part tried to steer a middle course in the conflict between the rebels and the Assad regime, while some figures have allied with the rebels, others with Assad, and others have remained neutral.
Mohieddine Sheik Ali, head of the Kurdish Yekiti party, told The Associated Press that the clashes broke out after rebels entered Ashrafieh, violating “a gentlemen’s agreement” not to go into Kurdish areas in Aleppo.
He said there are 100,000 Kurds in Ashrafieh and many in the nearby Sheik Maksoud area. Sheik Ali said tens of thousands of Arabs have also fled to these areas from the violence in other parts of Aleppo.
The observatory said the clashes led to a wave of kidnappings between the two groups, but did not provide further details. Pro-government news websites also reported the clashes.
Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Syria and make up around 10 to 15 percent of the country’s 23 million people. Most of them live in the northeastern province of Hasakeh near the border with Turkey, but large neighborhoods in Aleppo as well as the capital Damascus are Kurdish-dominated.
After the anti-government uprising began in March last year, both the Syrian government and opposition forces began reaching out to the long-marginalized minority whose support could tip the balance in the conflict.
Source: todayszaman.com
28/10/12
DERIK, SYRIA // At first glance the scene in the classroom at the school in Derik does not seem unusual, a teacher flits from pupil to pupil, checking their work over their shoulders.
But the verb conjugations on the whiteboard are in the outlawed Kurdish language, a lesson that would have been unthinkable before the uprising.
While the rebel war against the regime of Syrian president, Bashar Al Assad, has engulfed much of Syria, the Kurdish enclaves of the north-east have largely been spared the worst of the violence. This has afforded Kurds the opportunity to assert their cultural identity after decades of oppression.
“It is an honour for me to teach the young children Kurdish, here in a government school,” says Farida Sayeed, a 25-year-old dressed in a flower print shirt and jeans, who works as a hairdresser hairdresser when she is not volunteering at the town’s main school. The children gathered are aged between six and 10, but other classes cater to adults and women.
A traditional source of opposition to the regime, the Kurds - who comprise up to 10 per cent of Syria’s population - have historically faced systematic discrimination, with restrictions on the use of their language in schools and Kurdish music.
After regime forces pulled out of the centres of many villages and towns in Al Hasaka province following clashes with Kurdish forces in July, Kurdish language lessons were introduced at state schools in the evenings,
In Derik - also known as Al Malikiya - schools have over the past month begun running them in the course of the normal school day.
Institutions in the town of 26,000 people are scrambling to find qualified teachers and books to keep up with the demand.
“There aren’t enough people who know writing and high speaking,” says Aozan Dershawi, an engineer who volunteers at the newly established Badr Khan language centre, which has 25 pupils enrolled.
“I haven’t had any formal training in Kurdish, but I’m also poet and writer and have taught myself.”
Language lessons are not the only cultural activities that are thriving.
Kurdish singers have long faced arrest and harassment from authorities, but now they are finding a voice.
In Derik’s new Democratic Cultural Centre - formerly the Arab Cultural Centre - a group of five musicians are practising Kurdish folk songs, backed by the keyboard and tanbur - a traditional long-necked lute.
They are part of a music and theatre group called Judi, which was established in 1986.
But their forthcoming performance at the cultural centre will be the first time they have been allowed to grace the stage there.
“We’ve always had to practise in secret outside of the city because the government made so many problems for us,” says Zedan Sheikhi, head of music at Judi, explaining that after last Nowruz - the Kurdish new year celebrations, the group had to go into hiding after a performance.
He regales the story of Saeed Gabari, a famous Kurdish singer that was detained by the authorities, when he was released he had been blinded.
Mr Sheikhi also reeled off the names of others who have spent time in prison for their art.
In 2010 members of a Derik band were arrested for signing patriotic songs at a wedding.
“There are two kinds of song; if you sing about love and life, the punishment wouldn’t be so bad, but if you sang about politics or the Kurdish motherland, it would not be tolerated,” said Mr Sheikhi.
Throughout this small mixed but largely Assyrian Christian and Muslim Kurdish town a stone’s throw from the Turkish border, there is an air of limbo.
While Kurds meet at the cultural centre in the evenings - the Baath party employees who ran the old Arab Cultural Centre still run the building until 1pm.
“They are employees, we didn’t want to kick them out,” said Mr Sheikhi.
It is a similar scene at the town’s schools, where the administration remains loyal to the regime.
While Al Assad’s government has little visible presence on the streets, army checkpoints still sit on the edge of the town, though they are easily circumnavigated.
The sense of liberation is tinged with apprehension and awareness that it could be taken away in an instant. Sitting on some of the country’s most valuable oil reserves, there is a fear that the fighting will inevitably move to Al Hasaka.
The Kurds have at times enjoyed sporadic periods of de facto autonomy under the governments of Baghdad, Tehran, Damascus and Ankara, but they have also often paid dearly for attempts to grab freedom, including Saddam Hussain’s genocidal Al Anfal campaign, which destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages and culminated in a poison gas attack on the city of Halabja in 1988.
But Syria’s Kurds are attempting to learn from past mistakes, quietly building an armed militia which it hopes will be able to protect Kurdish interests in a post-Assad era, whatever form the government takes.
People’s Protection Units patrol the border armed with Duska machine guns and AK-47s.
In the mean time, Berevan Sheiki, a 21-year-old member of Judi, said she would make the most of her new-found freedoms.
“I came here before and sang in Arabic,” she said. “Now I feel free. When you sing in your mother language, you feel free.”
Source: thenational.ae
27/10/12
Syrian rebels clashed with Kurdish militia in the northern city of Aleppo, leaving 30 dead and some 200 captured, a watchdog said Saturday, sparking fears of a new front in an already fractured country.
The fighting between armed rebels and members of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), erupted on Friday in the majority Kurdish neighborhood of Ashrafieh, it said.
“There were 30 people – Arabs and Kurds – killed in the fighting, including 22 combatants from both sides,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a statement, adding that Ashrafieh is now under PYD militia control.
Scores of people were then captured, mostly by the rebels, the Observatory said.
“More than 200 people have been kidnapped,” Observatory Director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. “Some 20 rebels were kidnapped by the PYD. The rest of the those kidnapped are Kurds.”
The area had been relatively free of the violence that has rattled Aleppo since fighting between regime forces and armed rebels erupted in the city on July 20.
But on Thursday, residents said some 200 rebels moved into the district, announcing they had come to spend the Eid al-Adha Muslim holidays, starting the next day, in the area.
“Snipers have set up in the buildings and 50 armed men, dressed in black and wearing headbands with Islamic slogans, entered a school near me. I heard them tell the residents: ‘We are here to spend Eid with you’,” one resident said soon after the rebel force arrived.
“I am waiting for things to calm down before leaving,” he said.
The fighting came the next day – on Friday, coinciding with the first day of a truce between Syria’s warring parties which has largely been ignored by all.
Syria’s Kurdish minority has on the whole remained neutral during the country’s civil war, which has sown divisions among the country’s patchwork of ethnic and religious groups.
The conflict, which has pitted the army, security forces and pro-regime militias against rebel fighters since a revolt against Assad morphed into an armed insurgency, has left at least 35,000 people dead, according to the Observatory.
The PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Ankara, the United States and the European Union, took up arms in the Kurdish-majority southeast of Turkey in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed about 45,000 lives
Source: nowlebanon.com
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