ed note–the answer to this is “yes’, because Israel and America will use whatever they have at their disposal when they want a government removed and replaced.
Time.com
“I am sick, I cannot sleep,” says Hervin Ose, fighting back tears as she remembers her friend and fellow Syrian Kurdish activist, Mashaal Tammo. “Till now I cannot believe he is not here. Sometimes I even try to call him, sometimes I wait for him to call me.”
On Friday Oct. 7, Hervin met Tammo at a friend’s house in Qamishli, a Kurdish-majority town in northeastern Syria, just across the border from Turkey. “He had a sadness about him,” she recalls, speaking via Skype. Tammo, one of the few Syrian Kurdish leaders to have openly called for the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, had recently escaped an assassination attempt. Now he spoke as if he was going away on a long trip. “My message is finished in this life,” he told her. Before taking his leave Tammo even snapped a few pictures of his friend. “I wondered,” says Hervin. “He’d never taken a photo of me before.” (See pictures of Syria’s ongoing protests.)
It was the last time she was to see him alive. Hours later, according to reports, masked assailants gunned down Tammo inside his Qamishli home, leaving his son and another Kurdish activist wounded. Hervin, who insisted on being quoted by her real name — “I am a wanted person already… I am tired of being afraid,” she says — has no doubts as to who ordered her friend’s murder. “Bashar,” she says, “he made this decision.”
The day of the funeral, after going to see Tammo’s body at the morgue, Hervin joined tens of thousands of people — as many 100,000, she says, though most observers put the figure at 50,000 — on the streets of Qamishli. It was, by any count, the largest protest in the northeast since the beginning of the popular uprising against the Assad regime. It too ended in bloodshed when Syrian security forces began to spray the mourners with gunfire, killing at least two people.
Although protests have been taking place in the north since the early spring, they now show signs of escalating, observers say. (Since Tammo’s funeral, they have continued every day, one activist told me.) According to Henri Barkey, a Lehigh University professor and former State Department official, the fresh wave of demonstrations may well mark the Syrian Kurds’ long awaited entry into the popular revolt against Assad. “After Tammo’s murder, [the Kurds] are now a party to the conflict,” says Barkey. As he sees it, “increased mobilization” in the Kurdish northeast, one of the poorest and least developed regions of Syria, now appears to be imminent. (See why the Syrians should refrain from armed conflict.)
Of course, were Syria’s Kurds to rise up en masse, the numbers of protesters would be much higher, acknowledges Hervin. (Syria is home to 2 million Kurds, or about 10% of the population.) What stands in the way, she says, is the disconnect between a number of local political parties and the people on the street, particularly young Kurds. “The young people understand the responsibility they have, they understand that the Syrian revolution needs their help,” she says. “The normal people support, they have joined … but the parties haven’t made up their mind.”
Earlier this year, the Syrian regime managed to drive a wedge between the parties, promising to grant citizenship rights to 300,000 stateless Kurds descended from families who escaped Turkey after a series of brutally suppressed Kurdish uprisings. Banking on these and future concessions, a number of Kurdish groups chose to remain on the sidelines rather than join the popular uprising against Assad. A telling sign came in the wake of Tammo’s release this June summer after more than three years in prison. According to a source familiar with the details of the event, when Tammo reiterated his support for the anti-Assad revolution at a reception held in his honor, several Kurdish leaders left the room in protest.
Precedent may also have played a role. In 2004, when anti-government riots swept through Qamishli, as well as Kurdish neighborhoods of Aleppo and Damascus, Syrian security forces responded not only by killing dozens of Kurds but also by deploying several Arab tribes against the protesters. Solidarity with the Kurds among Syria’s Arab population was scarcely perceptible. The memory of the 2004 events, according to observers, has kept many Kurds wary of closing ranks with the Arab opposition.
Yet another obstacle, according to anti-Assad activists, is the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the militant group whose nearly 30-year long conflict against Turkey has claimed over 40,000 lives to date. (On Oct. 19, the PKK staged a series of coordinated attacks in southeast Turkey, killing 24 soldiers.) Many Turkish analysts believe that Assad is now using the PKK or one of its factions as leverage against the Turks, who have lost all faith in the Syrian regime. “Even if Syria doesn’t admit this, there is a link between them and the PKK,” says Huseyin Yayman, a Turkish expert. “With Syria’s backing, the PKK has room to operate against Turkey.” The PKK has done little to dispel such suspicions. In a recent interview, Cemil Bayik, one of the group’s leaders, warned that if Turkey were ever to intervene against Assad, the PKK would fight on Syria’s side.
As far as Ismail Hami is concerned, the PKK serves yet another purpose for Assad: to keep the Syrian Kurds in check. Hami, whose Kurdish Yekiti Party openly sides with the Syrian opposition, wants nothing to do with the PKK. “They have pulled their party [the PYD] out of the negotiations with the other Kurdish parties,” he says. “They have another attitude to what is happening in Syria. We cannot work together. They do not support the protests.” Hervin goes a step further, accusing the PKK of having played a role in her friend’s killing. “They had threatened Mashaal many times,” she says. “They attacked my house in Damascus and they told me, exactly, we will kill you and kill Mashaal … not by night, but by day.” They warned her against working with the mainstream Arab opposition, she says, telling her, “You are not good for what we want.” (See the top 10 elite fighting units.)
Back in May, during a protest in Qamishli, Hervin recalls, the PKK’s Syrian branch, the PYD, did their best “to make this demonstration weaker, smaller, and not important.” Then, she says, they hoisted banners of imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, as well as PKK flags. “We’re against this flag,” says Hervin. “We’re against any flag except the Syrian national flag. We are Syrian … We don’t want the Syrian regime to [be able to] say this is a message to Turkey. Our problem is with Bashar, not with anyone else.”
In response to claims of involvement in Tammo’s murder, Roj Welat, a PKK spokesperson, noted by email that the PKK condemned the assassination, as well as “all attacks against all Kurdish politicians in all states.” Most probably, he wrote, “the assassination [was] carried out those who wanted to break up the unity of the Kurdish opposition.” The PYD, he added, “already said that this assassination against a Kurdish politician [was] carried out by Turkey. Turkey already has a very profound history record of political assassinations on the Kurdish people, and other ethnic backgrounds both in Turkey and in the region.”
Asked to provide his position on the anti-Assad uprising, Welat acknowledged “great problems in Syria” but refrained from criticism of the regime. The solution to Syria’s problem lies in democracy and freedoms, he wrote, as well as by “democratic autonomy for Kurds living in Syria.”
The Kurdish protesters are clearly concerned with being identified as a separatist movement. Although he acknowledges that his party’s ultimate goal may be Kurdish autonomy, Ismail Hami is quick to assure, “We see the Kurdish areas as a part of Syria. We have no ideas about separation.” Talking about autonomy, especially at this point, says Hervin, “is a crazy idea.” (See pictures of Syrians fleeing into Turkey.)
Yet it is precisely this which has led the mainstream Arab opposition to keep the Kurds at arm’s length, says Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma. The opposition, he says, “are leery of promising too much to the Kurds.” Strategically, the Kurds would be an advantage, perhaps even a decisive one, thinks Landis. Politically, however, they could be a liability. “The opposition understands that the Kurds are an important potential ally in weakening the government but they’re an ally that could easily become a Frankenstein,” says Landis. “If they begin asking for autonomy and so forth, the government is going to be able to use that against the opposition.”
“Once you stimulate the Kurds to make trouble for the government, the government will say, look, these people are going to tear Syria apart,” says Landis. By raising the specter of another Iraq, the government “will get the sympathy of people in Damascus and Aleppo, who are frightened of the Jazirah [the predominantly Kurdish northeast].” For them, he says, “the Jazirah stands for poverty — and anger.”
Reached by phone this Friday, Hervin, her voice drowned out by anti-regime slogans shouted into a loudspeaker, was attending another demonstration in Qamishli.
