For many years, the Kurdish tragedy was poignantly illustrated by the gifts and sweets stuffed through gaps in a barbed-wire fence, the babies held high and the news shared across the closed Syria-Turkey border. Every religious holiday saw thousands of people dressed in their finest line the border at dawn just to see their relatives on the other side of a boundary arbitrarily drawn by Britain and France after World War I. The nation states invented by the war’s victorious Western powers left the Kurds divided between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, each of which sought to deny and suppress Kurdish identity.
Almost a century later, however, the geopolitical earthquake that began with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and continued through the Syrian uprising has challenged the foundations of the regional political order built by the French and the British, putting the future of the Middle East once again up for grabs. This time, the estimated 30 million-plus Kurds, whose numbers make them the world’s largest stateless people, are better organized. Buoyed by the oil-fueled prosperity of Iraqi Kurdistan — first severed from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq by the U.S. after the 1991 Gulf War, and then formalized as a crypto-state after his fall — they are emerging as the region’s new wild card, nowhere more so than in the turmoil of Syria’s rebellion.
Syrian-Kurdish fighters last week took control of towns across northern Syria after Assad ceded them to shore up his forces in Damascus and Aleppo. Two weeks earlier, Iraqi-Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani had brokered a deal between rival Syrian-Kurdish groups, forming a national council and vowing to suppress their differences in order to pursue common Kurdish interests. That development stunned Ankara. Mainstream Turkish commentator Mehmet Ali Birand notes that the creation of an autonomous Kurdish zone in northeast Syria, following the emergence of a similar entity in Iraq, could portend the realization of one of Turkey’s worst nightmares coming true — “a mega–Kurdish state” along the southeastern border where the largest section of its own, restive Kurdish population of some 14 million is concentrated. Even the word Kurdistan is taboo in Turkey, where a separatist insurgency and efforts to suppress it have claimed more than 30,000 lives over the past three decades.
“The Kurdish move in Syria is historic,” says Mustafa Gundogdu, of the London-based Kurdish Human Rights Project. “They forged a third way. Instead of being squashed between the Assad regime or the opposition, they made a move based on establishing their own long-term interests. They work with the opposition forces, but they are also independent of them. They have established themselves not as a victim, but as a player in the game.”
http://world.time.com/2012/08/06/how-the-kurds-have-changed-turkeys-calculations-on-syria/?iid=gs-main-mostpop1
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