Originally published on the CGS blog on April 13, 2016.
On March 17, 2016, the “federal democratic system of Rojava” (a Kurdish term for northern Syria) was proclaimed officially. Some 150 representatives of Kurdish, Arab, and Assyrian (largely Christian) groups met in the city of Rmellane in northeast Syria and voted in favor of the union of three “cantons” largely populated by Kurds–the cantons of Afrin, Kobani, and Jezireh.
The government as well as the Syrian National Coalition, a major opposition coalition present in the Syria negotiations (which have been going on in Geneva since the middle of March), both stated their refusal of a federalist system. They saw such a system as a first step to the breakup of Syria.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry said that “Any such announcement has no legal value and will not have any legal, political, social or economic impact as long as it does not reflect the will of the entire Syrian people.” There was no indication of how the “will of the entire Syrian people” was to be determined in the war-torn land.
While the Kurdish issues in Turkey have attracted international attention and the largely autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq is a major player in Iraqi politics, the Kurds in Syria have been less discussed.
Until now, the Kurds of Syria have not been as visible a factor as other ethnic or sectarian groups. As Michael Gunter, a specialist on the Kurdish world, writes:
On July 19, 2012, the previously quiescent Syrian Kurds suddenly emerged as a potential game changer in the Syrian civil war and what its aftermath might hold for the future of the Middle East. In an attempt to consolidate an increasingly desperate position, government troops were abruptly pulled out of the major Kurdish areas.1 The Kurds in Syria had suddenly become autonomous, a situation that also affected neighboring Turkey and the virtually independent KRG in Iraq. Indeed, the precipitous rise of the Kurds in Syria could become a factor in changing the artificial borders of the Middle East established after World War I by the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement.
In hopes of keeping the Kurds out of the growing armed conflict, shortly after the 2011 start of the Syrian civil war, Bashar al-Assad granted Syrian citizenship to some 220,000 Kurds who had been long waiting to become citizens or had been stripped of their citizenship in a 1962 census.
However, armed conflict spread, and the Islamic State started to control territory near Kurdish majority areas. Some observers see the Kurds as “objective allies” of Assad, as they have many of the same enemies.
Working with the regime has largely saved the Kurdish areas from government bombardment and allowed Kurdish leadership to build alternative forms of government.
During the current “fog of war” it is difficult to see what forms of cooperation will be developed among the Kurdish areas of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and possibly Iran. There have been recent talks in Switzerland among Kurdish leaders of the four countries. There are those who see all proposals for federal-confederal forms of government in a previously highly centralized state as a step toward the breakup of the state.
However, in the first years of the French mandate of Syria after the First World War, the French had created a form of “federal” administration, although the French had facilitated the creation of Lebanon, which until then had been part of “Greater Syria.” It is difficult to envisage a centralized one-party state–such as that under the leadership of Assad–being recreated when the armed conflict stops. Although the Kurds are not present in the UN Geneva negotiations (at the insistence of Turkey), the federal proposal is now “on the table,” and merits being watched closely.
