After Assad: Kurdish Autonomy in Syria?

It is often stated that the Kurds are the largest national group in the world without their own country. Around thirty million Kurds are spread, across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, with the largest group (some eleven million) in the latter country.

After the 1991 Gulf war, the Kurds of northern Iraq who had revolted against Saddam Hussein were protected from his vengeance by American and British air power. Thanks to Western protection, these Kurds were able to develop a virtually autonomous region within Iraq.

Once Saddam Hussein had been overthrown in 2003, it was hoped that Iraqi Kurdistan would be fully integrated into the new, democratic Iraq. This has not happened. Although nominally part of the wider state, the Kurdish administration in Arbil takes relatively little notice of the Iraqi national government in Baghdad. Not only that, but the PKK, the Kurdish militants fighting in Turkey, have found refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan, only occasionally being disturbed by cross-border Turkish military attacks.

Now the Kurdish community in Syria, who mostly live in the north-east of the country, have taken advantage of the ongoing civil war to make a claim for autonomy for themselves. President Assad has withdrawn troops from their area to reinforce his assaults on rebel forces in Damascus and Aleppo. The Syrian Kurds, encouraged by their neighbours in Iraqi Kurdistan, have taken control of a number of towns and deployed their own militia. They claim not to be seeking independence but merely the same degree of local autonomy within Syria as Iraqi Kurds have achieved within that country.

This claim will not only be troubling to whatever government next takes power in Damascus, assuming the long promised downfall of President Assad finally takes place, but it will also be a provocative challenge to the government of Turkey.

Almost continuously since the creation of the Turkish republic in 1923, the rulers in Ankara have been in conflict, sometimes amounting to open war, with the Kurdish population which dominates the south-east of that country. The Turks have always refused to concede any degree of autonomy to their large Kurdish minority. The creation of an autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan on Turkey's southern border was provocation enough. For it to be joined by an autonomous Syrian Kurdistan would be an even greater challenge. If Kurds can achieve autonomy in Iraq and Syria, why not in Turkey as well?

Already the Turkish government has said that if the PKK militant group sets up bases in Syrian Kurdistan it will launch military attacks against such terrorists. So far there seems no prospect of this happening and Syrian Kurdish groups have been at pains to make clear they pose no threat to Turkey. Certainly the recent upsurge of PKK attacks in south-east Turkey does not seem to have any links to Syria.

In any case, a Turkish military invasion of Syria, whether to overthrow President Assad or to stifle the growth of Kurdish autonomy in that country, seems unlikely at present. On the one hand the Islamist government of Turkish prime minister Erdogan has strained relations with the largely secularist Turkish armed forces. On the other hand all Arabs (and Kurds) are likely to resent a Turkish incursion into their territory since this would seem too much like a revival of the old Ottoman Turkish empire which ruled that region before 1918.

Even if one assumes that President Assad will soon be ousted from power in Damascus, the new Syria which follows is likely to be a politically confused place. Whether this confusion is considerable, as in post-Gadaffi Libya, or more controlled, as in post-Mubarak Egypt, the Kurdish population of Syria seems likely to exploit the situation to claim some sort of autonomy for themselves. What sort of reaction this will provoke in Damascus is unclear, but it is already obvious that Turkey will view the establishment of yet another autonomous Kurdish region along its southern border with considerable concern.