Kurds Look Beyond Assad, With Dreams of Autonomy

By FARNAZ FASSIHI in Beirut and a Wall Street Journal Reporter

Leaders of Syria’s large minority Kurdish population show signs of organizing against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, a movement with the potential to tip the domestic balance against Mr. Assad and complicate regional politics.

Syria’s six-month prodemocracy movement has had only limited participation so far from the country’s estimated 1.7 million Kurds. Several young Kurds have been active in protests and are members of the alliance of young activists that organizes demonstrations, but the cities in predominantly Kurdish areas have been largely quiet.

Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesSyrian Kurds from the EU, U.S. and Arabian Gulf meeting at a conference in Stockholm in early September.

This doesn’t translate into support for Mr. Assad, however, given the long-tense relationship between the ruling regime and the minority Kurds, against which it long discriminated.

Kurdish activists and analysts say that in the past three weeks, members of the 11 unofficial Kurdish political parties have met with Kurdish activists from the Local Coordination Committee, an alliance for young protest organizers, to plan for a post-Assad period. These Kurdish parties plan to name a special committee and hold a conference in Syria within the next few weeks, activists say.

Such a Kurdish group would be unrelated to the recently formed Syrian National Council, the country’s largest opposition umbrella. While Kurds say they share the opposition’s overall goal of a democratic Syria, many Kurds have also expressed frustration at what they see as protesters’ Arab agenda, and also say they aspire to greater autonomy within Syria.

“Syrian Kurds are not looking to separate from Syria—though of course the idea of a Kurdistan is a dream,” said Meshal Tammo, the spokesman for the Kurdish Future Movement, a political grouping in northeastern Syria.

Many of the estimated 16 million Kurds spread across Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria look to the autonomous Kurdish Northern Iraq as a model of governance. Many in Syria say they would support creating a similar federalized or autonomous zone.

“If the [Assad] regime is gone, it will offer an opportunity for the Kurds to push forward for autonomy, and of course they will try,” said Joost Hiltermann, an expert on Kurds and deputy program director of Middle East for the International Crisis Group.

Such a move would agitate Turkey and Iran, which have tried for years to crush separatist aspirations of their own Kurdish populations. As Syrian unrest has spread in the past few months, Iran and Turkey have stepped up attacks against Kurdish separatist groups PKK and PJAK along their borders with Northern Iraq.

The Assad regime—under the current president and under his father, Hafez al-Assad—has long discriminated against the Kurds. More than 500,000 Kurds had no citizenship and few prospects for obtaining it, and couldn’t travel, own property or enroll in school. Kurds aren’t allowed to speak Kurdish or teach it in school.

When Syrian protests broke out in mid-March, Kurdish activists said they held back from protesting, to prevent the government from framing the protests as ethnic uprising.

The regime has circled cautiously around the Kurds, largely refraining from using lethal force against protestors in Kurdish areas. Only a handful of Kurds have been among the 2,700 people the U.N. says have been killed during amid the protests. As one of his earliest concessions when demonstrations broke out in mid-March, Mr. Assad in April pledged to grant citizenship to Kurds, though Kurdish activists say only 45,000 have legalized their status.

Many Kurds worry that if Mr. Assad falls from power, their rights will not be secured if nationalist Sunnis Arabs gain control or if Islamists have more say in Syrian politics.

“The Kurds are no different from anyone else in Syria—they are scared of what will come afterwards,” said Mr. Tammo of the Kurdish Future Movement.

In Syria, Arab and Kurdish divides are increasingly exacerbated as Kurds have boycotted a number of opposition conferences held outside of Syria, saying their demands have been overlooked. Kurds walked out of the first conference in July held in Turkey over disagreement over keeping the word “Arab” in the title of the country.

“It was a question of respect: Obviously there are greater issues than Kurdish grievances at stake, but Kurds need to be assured that they are an important part of a future Syria,” said Massoud Akko, a Kurdish author and activist exiled in Norway, who was among those who left.

In early September, about 50 Syrian Kurds held a solidarity conference in Stockholm and issued a statement that said, “The Syrian revolution will not be complete without a just solution to the Kurdish cause.”

Write to Farnaz Fassihi at farnaz.fassihi@wsj.com