Despite years of media shorthand suggesting otherwise, “the Kurds” are not a monolith – not between countries nor within them. In Iraq, relative autonomy has hardly united Kurdish political parties. So, too, in Turkey, Kurds vote for all parties along the spectrum from pro-government to anti-government. And in a place as chaotic as Syria, there is no less complexity to the political landscape.
The nature of Kurdish politics in Syria is convoluted and antagonistic, an alphabet soup of party names that often reach at dreams of a grand unified Kurdistan, while the reality is that each must navigate conflicts and realpolitik to carve out whatever gains they can.
It’s on this chessboard that the US and France are seeking to carve a new path forward, reviving critical talks between rival Kurdish factions that have long stood in the way of a grand bargain in Syria. The hope is that an alliance could translate military support the world afforded to Kurds fighting ISIS into badly-needed political support — if they can resolve to commit to an inclusive arrangement for Syria’s future.
This latest push follows months of meetings – but unity talks are now more important than ever. Faced with threats on multiple fronts, from Turkey at its north to a simmering Islamic State insurgency in its midst, the region which has been a haven of relative stability amid the chaos of Syria’s war could devolve into a free-for-all.
“There is pressure from the United States and the EU to unify the Kurdish factions in northeast Syria to improve political inclusivity,” says Nicholas A. Heras, who leads the Middle East Security Program at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.
Rudaw English spoke to sources with knowledge of the ongoing meetings who said that American officials have thrown their prestige behind efforts to smooth things over between the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which blazed its own trail to power in northeast Syria, and its estranged cousin the Kurdish National Council, which adheres more closely to the mainline Syrian opposition. Together, they paint a picture of an initiative that could potentially resolve the hostility between the two parties and pave the way for a unified administration in Rojava.
The first round of face to face talks between the two parties was held in early April at a US military base on the periphery of Hasakah. In attendance were a key American envoy to Syria, William Roebuck, and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) commander Mazloum Abdi. An internal State Department memo leaked in November offers a glimpse of Roebuck’s objectives for the unlikely gambit — divulging the US view that Turkey’s latest push into Syria left northeastern Syria in “serious jeopardy.”
At one end of the Syrian Kurdish political spectrum is the PYD, which came to power through the barrel of a gun, riding the revolutionary fervor of the 2014 Battle of Kobani. Seizing huge swathes of territory in hopes of establishing a self-governing Kurdish homeland in Syria’s north, it set up an administration effectively controlling Rojava.
On the other end is the Kurdish National Council, also referred to by its Kurdish acronym, ENKS. Shortly after war broke out in Syria, the ENKS allied with PYD as part of a wider umbrella of Kurdish factions opposed to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. At a 2011 meeting in Erbil, Iraq, they dubbed themselves the “Kurdish Supreme Committee.” But the alliance fell apart, and the ENKS joined the Syrian National Council, which comprises of nationalist Syrian opposition groups nominally backed by the Free Syrian Army.
The ENKS charges that political opposition outside the PYD establishment cannot function in Rojava, accusing the administration of consolidating power into a one-party state. Party members have been arrested or gone missing, and ENKS offices in Rojava have been closed and even burned. Three previous attempts to get the two parties to reconcile have failed, and a conference organized by France last year did not result in any agreement due to the huge differences between them.
Positions on Assad are another major sticking point between Kurdish factions. “You could say the PYD is anti-Erdogan, not anti-Assad; and [ENKS] is anti-Assad, not anti-Erdogan,” explains Rena Netjes, an Arabist and Associate Fellow at the Hague-based Clingendael Institute who is currently researching northeast Syria.
In the eyes of Turkey, which hosts the ENKS, the PYD is inextricably linked to its foe Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The ENKS themselves want an end to what they see as the PKK’s role in the PYD, one party source told Rudaw English. Another said that Turkey isn’t against the establishment of a Kurdish homeland in Syria — just one run by the PKK.
ENKS has also participated in peace talks in Astana and Geneva — and as ineffectual as those initiatives may be, they’re the only schematic for an armistice the UN Security Council has been able to reach unanimous consensus on in adopting Security Council Resolution 2254 into the framework to eventually bring an end to the war. Unpalatable as they find it, the PYD may have to collaborate with their rivals to secure a seat at the table.
That leaves the clock ticking for Kurdish unity, and there is a risk of the whole autonomous project unravelling if Assad and Russia consolidate power across Syria or Turkey pushes deeper into the region.
“A strong deal between the [ENKS] and the PYD could, in theory, be a first step towards deescalation between the PYD and Turkey,” said Charles Thépaut, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“These talks and these understandings should have been found two or three years ago when northeast Syria was more stable and there was a heavier US military presence,” Thépaut told Rudaw English.
The two sides share some common ground in their political vision of decentralizing power away from Damascus, but it will take significant trust-building.
“The process will have some stages,” said Amjed Osman, a spokesperson for the Syrian Democratic Council, the SDF’s political wing that is part of the Rojava self-administration.
Like the PYD, the ENKS favors political decentralization for Kurds in Syria — or even a federal system, although one source close to the talks said the “the federalism according to the PYD is not the same kind of federalism that the ENKS is asking for,” namely, it would not include Kurds ruling Arab-majority areas like Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa that are currently under SDF control.
The two groups regularly trade barbs; PYD views ENKS and the mainstream Syrian opposition as being hopelessly co-opted by Turkey, particularly with the 2018 invasion and ongoing occupation of Afrin, that has seen numerous reports of violations of freedoms and human rights. On the other hand, Syrian opposition groups largely think the SDF signed a deal with the devil himself by allowing Assad’s forces to protect their territories.
There is some truth to both viewpoints. ENKS is certainly influenced by the Turkish position, but the relationship has its limits. The autonomous administration has also collaborated with Assad’s forces when needed, but they also have little delusion they won’t be discarded when they’re no longer useful to the regime. And when rebel proxies took over Afrin, ENKS condemned the Turkish-led invasion, causing friction within its own coalition. In meetings with Turkish officials, ENKS delegates also raised concerns over demographic change in areas with historically large Kurdish populations as more than a million people were displaced by Russia and the Syian regime’s bombardment of Idlib and sought shelter in Afrin.
The US and France see the SDF and its affiliates as key to the area’s security and preventing an ISIS resurgence, but they’ll need Turkey on board for any long-term political aspirations they might have for the Syrian Kurds.
France has an interest in Rojava’s long-term stability. Some of its citizens left metropolitan France to join ISIS, and though it’s a prominent member of the multinational coalition that armed Syrian Kurds to counter ISIS, it’s refused to repatriate captured ISIS members to face justice at home. That’s partly because of ongoing radicalization issues in French prisons and out of fear that domestic law simply doesn’t cover the kind of crimes its citizens are accused of committing in Iraq and Syria. Last year seven French men were sentenced to hang in Iraq, with little alarm from Europe over the questionable investigations and trials.
However, for Turkey, a valuable member of NATO, anything involving the PYD is a total non-starter. Although it is not listed internationally as a terror group, its debatable history with the PKK is a hurdle that must be overcome.
It’s obvious from the photos of PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan plastered on walls across Rojava that the PYD follows his ideology of “democratic confederalism.” But officials insist they are different from the PKK — they say they aren’t separatists, and that their revolution takes the form of a more decentralized government, with councils led by gender-representative co-chairs in charge of their local areas.
What a deal between the factions might look like is anyone’s guess, but the ENKS has called for pluralism in the self-administration currently dominated by the PYD, political parity and a return of its military force, the Rojava Peshmerga, to the region. Previous talks have focused on power-sharing between the parties, such as sharing security roles and how to allocate seats on civil councils and within the central administration.
Kurdish unity is also critical for the future of security within Rojava. The American draw-down in Syria has left Kurdish-led forces tasked with policing an area far beyond just their historical homeland, stretching to Arab areas that are not always welcoming.
ISIS remnants remain capable of launching attacks, and the self-administration is grappling with how to continue detaining tens of thousands of suspected ISIS militants and their families, including thousands of traumatised and vulnerable children, whose countries refuse to bring them home. Pleas from the self-administration to convene courts in northeast Syria have no international political backing, and the entire situation is all the more unstable in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.
Rojava needs to sort its internal politics before it can look outward. Turkey has now launched three operations targeting key towns Afrin and Tel Abyad, pushing the PYD into an uneasy detente with Assad. The Kurds don’t have many cards left to play to avoid Rojava being subsumed back into the regime’s control, a threat made all the more likely after the October incursion and subsequent deal brokered by Turkey and Russia.
Until recently, the PYD had little need to dispose itself of diplomacy – instead securing its corner of Syria by force. But geopolitical realities have compelled it to reconsider. Though much smaller and weaker, ENKS has one thing that PYD doesn’t — political cover from the West. Despite the tactical military alliance with the coalition in combating ISIS, Project Rojava has never received the international community’s political endorsement, and some kind of partnership with the ENKS could make such support an easier sell for Europe and the US.
But it will have to be give and take — such is the nature of diplomacy, a lesson that the young autonomous administration will have to learn if it is to govern with international support.
