Turkey's support for the uprising against Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, has been challenged during the last week or so as Kurds in the north-east of Syria have taken control of several towns and cities.
The ploy, if it succeeds, will bring a further extension of Kurdish automony in the Middle East, complementing Iraq's booming Kurdistan region, where 5 million Kurds govern themselves as a federal entity within Iraq and with minimal interference from the central government in Baghdad.
The problem from Turkey's perspective is two-fold: firstly, a Syrian Kurdistan alongside Iraqi Kurdistan will encourage Turkey's own restive Kurdish population to demand greater political and human rights, as well as embolden their demands for autonomy from the rest of Turkey.
Turkey's Kurds, numbering more than 13 million, are a far more sizeable group than their fellow Kurds in Iraq, Syria and Iran. As in Syria, Turkey's Kurds have been targeted through oppressive measures that have suppressed their cultural, political and human rights.
The second problem for Turkey relates to the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK), a guerilla movement that has fought the Turkish state over the past 40 years. Initially the PKK sought autonomy for Turkey's marginalised Kurds but later turned to demanding greater political and human rights, following the imprisonment of the organisation's leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1999 and the movement's eventual decline.
A Syrian Kurdistan, however, would offer a lifeline to the PKK in the same way the uprising in Syria has provided an opportunity for other political movements to assert their presence. Further, the PKK is closely linked in Syria to the Democratic Union party (PYD) which controls most of the liberated areas as part of a broader coalition of Kurdish parties in Syria, known as the People's Council for Western Kurdistan (PCWK). The other main Kurdish opposition bloc of parties is called the Kurdish National Council (KNC).
In other words, Turkey fears north-eastern Syria becoming a bastion for its long-time enemy the PKK (and its sister movement the PYD), fearing that this will supplement existing PKK strongholds in the rugged mountains of Iraq's Kurdistan region, which it has sought to eliminate – but without success – over the past 30 years through umpteen military incursions.
Ranj Alaaldin is a Middle East political and security risk analyst. He is a senior analyst at the Next Century Foundation and is doing a doctorate on the Shias of Iraq at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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