Damascus, Syria – As many continue to conflate one political party and its armed wing with an ethnicity that accounts for approximately 10% of the country’s population, Syria’s government seems to be attempting to listen to factions long suppressed in its northeastern corner.
Following a 30 January ceasefire agreement between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the government in Damascus, a flurry of meetings have been held, including with lesser-known Syrian Kurdish parties.
Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani received a high-level delegation from the Kurdish National Council (KNC) on 2 February, with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa meeting them the following day.
“The KNC is an umbrella group of 18 Syrian Kurdish groups and figures, some of them with decades of experience in Syrian and Kurdish politics in the country,” according to an analysis published in January by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, which added that the “KNC’s Roj Peshmerga is a several-thousand-strong force (estimated at around 7,000).”
Multiple security sources The New Arab spoke to about the Roj Peshmerga in recent months – including during field interviews in Erbil in December – gave lower estimates of their forces.
However, they concurred that several thousand Syrian fighters trained by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq continue to be on the region’s payroll and would like to return to their home country. Thus far, the main obstacle to that has been the SDF’s opposition.
Will exiled Syrian Kurdish fighters finally return home?
Many journalists first encountered members of the Roj Peshmerga on the frontlines and at checkpoints during the fight against the Islamic State (IS) in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
The Roj Peshmerga, Nimat Dawood, a member of the KNC presidential body, told The New Arab on 8 February, “are young Syrian Kurds who volunteered to defend the Kurdish people and other Syrian communities in their regions. They gained good training and combat experience through their participation in the fight against IS in the Kurdistan Region. I do not have information on their numbers”.
The possibility of their return will likely be discussed in the future with the new Syrian government, he noted.
“In terms of timing, this [Feb 2-3] meeting came after the announcement of the agreement between the SDF and the Syrian government on 30 January,” Dawood, who is also secretary general of the Kurdish Democratic Equality Party in Syria, said.
“This meeting contributes to de-escalation, increases the chances of the agreement’s success, and reduces the escalation of hate speech and incitement against the Kurds at this time.”
It is also, according to Dawood, the first time in the history of Syrian governments that a political delegation representing a broad segment of the Kurdish people in Syria has been officially received.
“The meeting directly addressed the historical grievances of the Kurds in Syria and the Kurdish question, at a time when previous governments denied any Kurdish grievances, including the exceptional census and even the existence of a Kurdish issue.”
A 5 February brief by ETANA, a Syrian organisation committed to democracy, noted that the recent ceasefire agreement granted special status to the Hasakah town of Amouda, which will be subject to the same security provisions as Qamishli and Hasakah.
Furthermore, a political role will be given to the Kurdish National Council (KNC), the report added.
Kurdish divisions in Syria’s war
Rena Netjes, a Dutch journalist and researcher who has reported extensively from Syria and met with many KNC members over the years, told The New Arab that “the most fundamental and irreconcilable divide” between the KNC and the Democratic Union Party (PYD) – whose military wing, the YPG, formed the core of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – is that the KNC was long “explicitly anti-Assad” and that it considered Bashar Al-Assad’s regime “illegitimate”.
The PYD, instead, has at times maintained “coexistence with regime forces in Qamishli and Hasakah and has actively suppressed anti-Assad protests”, and was “seen by the KNC and other local actors as de facto tolerating or cooperating with the [Assad] regime”.
The PYD, she notes, “was never involved in anti-Assad activity. As early as 2012, it was willing to engage with the Assad regime to suppress the Syrian anti-Assad revolution among Syrian Kurds”.
According to Netjes, Assad effectively handed over Kurdish-majority areas in northern Syria to the PYD because he needed to concentrate his forces around Damascus. In return, the PYD was allowed police offices, weapons, checkpoints, and border posts.
In June 2013, PYD forces killed six Kurdish anti-Assad protesters in Amouda, an incident documented by Human Rights Watch in a 2014 report. “They handed over at least many dozens of anti-Assad Kurds to the regime,” Netjes says, including over 100 in Afrin alone.
In 2012, the PYD invited seven or eight Kurdish Free Syrian Army (FSA) officers to northeast Syria, but shortly after their arrival, they disappeared.
“One of them was a relative of KNC president Mohamed Ismail, who told me plainly: ‘They killed them all,’” Netjes told TNA. “In Aleppo, in 2015, the PYD assisted regime forces in cutting off supply routes to the north. As recently as last month, regime shabiha were still present in Sheikh Maqsoud.”
The KNC demands clarity on the fate of missing activists, oil revenues, past abuses, and security practices, the Dutch journalist says, while the PYD “denies responsibility, keeps negotiations secret, and offers no accountability for killings, disappearances, or repression of rivals”.
While the KNC “draws legitimacy from decades of Kurdish political struggle under repression,” she added, the PYD “derives legitimacy from wartime control, military success against ISIS, and international backing via the SDF”.
Abuses by the PYD
Dawood himself spent time in the PYD’s prisons.
“I was arrested by the security forces of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) following their defeat in Afrin, from 13 April 2018 until 17 May 2018, because of my opposition to their policies and my statements as a member of the Presidency of the Kurdish National Council, criticising their practices and policies,” he told TNA.
In 2022, the KNC urged the US to pressure the PYD to stop the latter’s attacks on its offices and people associated with the party in northeastern Syria.
According to a report at that time by Erbil-based Kurdistan 24, “nine offices of the KNC and its affiliates have been attacked in Qamishlo, Hasakah, Derik, Derbisiye, and Kobani in the past week alone”.
Kurdistan 24 was at that time banned from operating in areas under SDF control. During the years of SDF control, many local journalists were reportedly arrested and tortured for reporting critically on the PYD.