Kurdistan forces are liberating Western Kurdistan

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Tomorrows question from ARK. Everyone please comment on this link as it will be read live on Zagros TV.

What do you think of the Free Syrian Army? Are the Kurdish areas ready for their appearance in the region?

It is the first question that is written in arabic. This is the link:
http://www.facebook.com/tv.ark

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Kurdish Supreme Council calls on the Western Kurds to contribute to the development of a symbol of the Kurdish people in Syria.


"Each nation distinguishes from a region to other and our people at this stage requires to have its own symbol sets in Syria and the region. Therefore, we ask the Kurdish people in Western Kurdistan to send their suggestions about symbols and flags."

desteyabilind.kurd@yahoo.com

[Kurdistano]

The Arabs and Christians in Hasaka acknowledge that a great injustice has been committed against the Kurds and the traces of that injustice need to be resolved. These representatives, who are also representatives of the SNC, have a special role among the Arab tribes and Christians of that area. Their visit to the Kurdistan Region is meant to emphasize that the Kurdish question will be resolved within the broader Syrian national project.

Ha most of these Arabs are settlers during the arabization process. If they dont like they can move to Damaskus.

[Kawe]

Kurdish Supreme Council calls on the Western Kurds to contribute to the development of a symbol of the Kurdish people in Syria.

"Each nation distinguishes from a region to other and our people at this stage requires to have its own symbol sets in Syria and the region. Therefore, we ask the Kurdish people in Western Kurdistan to send their suggestions about symbols and flags."

desteyabilind.kurd@yahoo.com

Whether we like it or not, western Kurdistan will have a different flag than southern Kurdistan (not that the flag KRG uses is southern Kurdistans flag, its the flag of all of Kurdistan). This is logical, they will have their own government and will remain part of Syria for a certain time period. Once we are ready to declare statehood, we will use Kurdistans flag to represent all four corners.

Although I hope I am wrong about the part with western Kurdistan having to stay part of Syria for a time, I hope something happens that allows western Kurdistan to join the KRG (which will speed up the process of independence). I am also clearly not a Politician nor am I a student of Politics, so my opinion is nothing more than my opinion.

[talsor]

Analysis: Hamstrung Turkey's nightmares coming true in Syria

Reuters) - Turkey's worst nightmares are beginning to come true in Syria - a protracted sectarian civil war on its long southern border with the emergence of a de facto Kurdish-controlled region friendly to its main domestic foe.

The Syrian conflict is also poisoning Ankara's sensitive relations with Iran, Syria's vital regional ally, and Iraq and complicating ties with Russia, undermining a declared policy of "zero problems" with the neighbors.

"Syria has turned Turkey's neighborhood policy on its head," said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Brussels. "Ankara's approach to the Syria conflict has been a radical departure from traditional Turkish caution."

Yet despite bellicose statements, political support for the Syrian opposition and growing covert aid to opposition fighters, there is little Turkey can do alone to shape the outcome.

"We will not allow a terrorist group to establish camps in northern Syria and threaten Turkey," Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told a news conference on July 26, referring to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a bloody armed struggle since 1984 in southeastern Turkey.

"If there is a step which needs to be taken against the terrorist group, we will definitely take this step."

It was the latest of a string of warnings that have so far had little traction on the course of a conflict that has wrong-footed Turkish diplomatic ambitions in the region.

Before the crisis, Erdogan cultivated a friendship with President Bashar al-Assad, in stark contrast to Turkey's tense relations with the Syrian leader's father, veteran strongman Hafez al-Assad. The ruling couples even vacationed together.

SLIGHTED

After a Syrian uprising inspired by the "Arab Spring" pro-democracy movements in Tunisia and Egypt erupted in March 2011, Erdogan tried to use those personal ties to persuade Assad to embrace reform and open a dialogue with the opposition.

He was rebuffed and felt slighted. From November, he began calling for the removal of Assad and Turkey helped the opposition Syrian National Council organize on its soil.

But the Syrian leader is still there, albeit weakened. He is part of a Shi'ite Muslim axis spanning Iran and Iraq and his own minority Alawite sect, uncomfortable for mainly Sunni Turkey.

The faction-ridden SNC, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, has yet to provide a credible alternative, and international diplomacy is deadlocked and largely irrelevant for now.

"They haven't really thought this through," Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based researcher on Turkish security policy, said of Turkey's leaders. "It's been 'let's get rid of Assad' without enough thought as to what comes next.

"Now their two nightmare scenarios are starting to materialize: the emergence of some form of Kurdish entity in northern Syria that would clearly be an asset to the PKK and embolden Turkish Kurds in terms of autonomy, and the Lebanon-ization of Syria with a long-running ethnic and confessional civil war with different groups controlling different regions," Jenkins said.

Some 45,000 Syrian refugees have poured into Turkey, straining resources and security in some border areas. With fierce fighting raging in Syria's second city, Aleppo, near the Turkish frontier, a bigger influx looms soon.

Military defectors have set up bases of the Free Syrian Army in southern Turkey, and some are trained and coordinated by Turkish, Qatari and Saudi officers operating from a secret "nerve centre" near the city of Adana, Gulf sources have told Reuters.

Foreign Islamist militants are joining the Syrian fighters crossing the border from Turkey to fight against Assad, with the apparent acquiescence of the Turkish authorities, said Fadi Hakura, a Turkey analyst at London's Chatham House think-tank.

"They (Turkish officials) want to accelerate the downfall of Assad and his regime," Hakura said, when asked about Ankara's attitude to such fighters. "The Turkish government feels it can control the aftermath of a post-Assad Syria."

Turkey officially denies arming the rebels, but several sources say they are receiving Russian-made small arms on Turkish soil, although not the heavier weapons they would need to change the balance of power with Assad's superior forces.

KURDS

"Looking ahead, the most troubling scenario for Turkey may also be the most likely one: protracted chaos and sectarian conflict, leaving a security vacuum across the border, with an ongoing risk of spillovers affecting Turkish security," Ian Lesser, a former U.S. official and Turkey expert at the German Marshall Fund wrote in mid-July.

That future is already here.

Turkish analysts suspect Assad let the main Syrian Kurdish movement, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), take control of security outside the main cities in the northeast last week to prevent them joining forces with the FSA while enabling him to redeploy state security forces to the main battle zones.

Ankara came close to war with Assad's father in 1998 over the presence of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in Damascus and alleged Syrian support for PKK activities in northeastern Syria.

If the PKK were to take root and launch attacks from that area, Erdogan would face strong nationalist pressure to launch military action.

"What could happen is for Turkey to carry out the kind of surgical strikes that it did in northern Iraq in past years if the government has intelligence that northern Syria is being used by Kurdish terrorists," Ulgen said.

But Jenkins said the border area was too flat to provide useful terrain for PKK fighters, who preferred to operate out of mountainous northern Iraq despite Ankara's much improved relations with the regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan.

TURKISH TALK

Turkey talked earlier this year of possibly setting up a safe haven inside Syria for people displaced by the fighting, or establishing a military no-fly zone to protect civilians, but no such operation seems likely any time soon.

The United Nations Security Council is paralyzed over sanctions, with Russia and China blocking any resolution under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter authorizing the use of force.

Ulgen said Turkey could not take such action alone without either U.N. backing or a strong "coalition of the willing" made up of its main NATO allies, which gave Ankara only lukewarm verbal support when a Turkish warplane was downed in disputed circumstances off the Syrian coast in June.

A NATO source said there was no realistic prospect of the alliance operating in Syria unless Turkey were to come under attack from Syrian forces.

Another constraint on Turkish action is domestic public opinion, which is strongly opposed to military intervention.

Opinion polls conducted by Ulgen's EDAM think-tank show public opinion is ill disposed to any armed involvement in Syria and unconvinced by the government's tough rhetoric, even after the warplane incident.

So despite Erdogan's public warnings, Turkey may remain a prisoner of events beyond its control across the border.

"The truth is that they are stuck," said Henri Barkey, another former U.S. official and Turkey specialist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

"They cannot and will not intervene militarily. All they can do is help on the edges, i.e. allow insurgents free passage, train them, help them organise politically," Barkey told Reuters. "Still this is more than what many others are doing."

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This person was in West Kurdistan. It has alot of information for those who want to get a glimpse of the current situation.

It was raining my first day in Qamişlo. Small puddles were forming in the streets. My aunt pointed at them and said: “Look at the bubbles. We call them spring bubbles.” From that day I was aware that even though it was June and summer in Syria, spring had come to West Kurdistan these fateful months in 2012.

Kurds and The People of Syria

Only one and a half year ago the Kurds in Syria did not exist. Today, Turkey is threatening to send its army into Syria because it fears that the now very much existing Kurds are seeking to found a self-ruled Kurdistan.

Prior to the uprising the Assad regime shifted between two standpoints towards the Kurds in Syria, said a member of the newly formed Supreme Kurdish Council that is a union between all Kurdish parties in West Kurdistan (North Syria). Either the Kurdish people did not exist or it was seeking to create division in Syria.

Another member of the council said during an interview with the West Kurdish TV-channel, Ronahî TV: “The Baath party has always told the Syrian people that Kurds want to create divison in Syria. That is why Kurds have never been able to have fruitful discussions with the people of Syria.”

Kurds in West Kurdistan and Syria have not been seeking to cause disunity during the many years of oppression because the Kurds had until recently been lulled into a deep sleep by their oppressor but also by themselves. They thought passivity, they thought sleep was the safest way to survive in Syria and it seemed impossible to wake them.

I saw this myself when I was in Qamişlo the last months of 2010, I saw this myself before I left in January 2011 when the uprising in Tunisia took place. I asked people in Qamişlo: “Will you demand your rights too, will you rise against Assad too?”

“Never!” they answered.

But the Kurds of West Kurdistan and especially Qamişlo make up a contradictory people. Before the liberation of several Kurdish cities they were living deads but with a consuming, burning fire deep beneath the thick, thick skin. This fire ultimately led to their uprising together with the rest of Syria and to their calls for the fall of the dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

Still many have claimed that the Kurds have not been a part of the Syrian uprising.

This is not true. The Kurds have been demonstrating in solidarity with the Syrian people since the first day but this support is dismissed as not being enough.

They fail to understand how great a support this is when considering one important detail that I heard repeated several times by several people during my stay in Qamişlo, one important event that still haunts the people of Qamişlo: the Kurdish uprising in March 2004.

“Where were the Syrian people when Assad massacred more than 30 Kurds in Qamişlo? Ask them this, Naila,” they told me, “where were they, where were the Syrian people when we needed them?”

We have been protesting just like the rest of Syria, they told me while shaking their heads, and yet they still say we are not a part of the uprising? We needed them and they did not come. They needed us and we came. We are still here.

PYD, Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat

The Supreme Kurdish Council consists of two groups; the strongest is PYD, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, that is considered to be West Kurdistan’s version of PKK not only by Turkey and many journalists and observers but also by certain groups in Qamişlo.

During my time there I met many Kurds who are (too put it mildly) not very fond of PYD. Every Friday I went to two protests, one non-PYD at 1 pm and the other a PYD protest at 6 pm. The protests differed from each other in that the PYD protesters carried pictures of Abdullah Öcalan and waved PYD and Kurdish flags (the one used by the Kurdistan Regional Government, KRG) while the non-PYD protests only waved KRG flags.

One evening I returned from a PYD protest by the Qasimo Mosque. I had been away for 3 hours and the people I was staying with asked if I had enjoyed the demonstration that much. I could not hide my enthusiasm because even though I am a supporter of all Kurds and not just a single party, I had to admit that this protest was the best out of the ones I had been to.

Remember, they told me, that PYD knows what it is doing. Their protests have the same effect as drugs, they make you high. They shook their heads at me but I knew it was only natural that they would say this because the last time I had been in Qamişlo, I noticed something deeply disturbing.


(This is very dangerous )
Everyone in West Kurdistan watches Turkish TV-dramas, they are very popular there and in the Arab countries. In late 2010 their favourite drama was about a doctor who was working and living in a mountainous area in Turkey. The inhabitants were harassed by the PKK and the village attacked by the Kurdish “terrorists”.

In one episode the doctor’s fiancé was brutally murdered by the PKK in front of her young pupils.

I would sit and look at them incredulously as they spoke about the characters from the Turkish drama as if they were real; they would even mourn their deaths as if they were close family. The Kurds are a passionate people so they do not merely watch TV-dramas, they live them and these Turkish propaganda portrayals of PKK did nothing but make the Kurdish viewers more skeptical towards PKK although they know well that what Turkey says about Kurds has to be taken with a grain of salt.

The importance of the above-mentioned is that PYD is considered to be an affiliate of PKK by some in Qamişlo and their suspicions are confirmed by the fact that PYD protesters enthusiastically wave the flag with the picture of Öcalan, the PKK leader and shout: “With our soul, with our blood, we are with you, oh leader!”

Yet it would be wrong to say that Kurds in Qamişlo and even these critics of PYD do not support the work of PYD, because they do.

PYD has been gaining the respect of the people in West Kurdistan for their control and protection of the Kurdish areas. I was told that they ordered people to stay in line when buying sugar, drove around town to protect it and helped those who had been cheated in financial matters. I personally heard a speaker at a PYD protest declaring that they now offered free lessons in the evening for those students who needed help to pass their exams.

Some would perhaps say that their methods have been ruthless and violent. But a recent report from Reuters told the same story about the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo who also used violent methods to keep the area under control.

In times of war parties like PYD and military forces like YPG are needed; they are especially vital for West Kurdistan.

[b]An official from the Barzani administration in Kurdistan said: “Some people have to keep law and order. PYD and others were available to do that for daily security.”
[/b]
The people of West Kurdistan are still a people of habits and their habit is to support Barzani. That is why a statement like this is important for them to fully accept PYD’s control of West Kurdistan and that is why the creation of the Supreme Kurdish Council and PYDs willingness to co-operate with KNC is welcomed.

But PYD itself has changed, people have told me. Even those who have spoken to me about PYD with contempt have admitted that the party is not behaving like it used to. PYD has changed.


“Kurdistan has been established!”

In July the first Kurdish city was declared liberated by the Kurds and soon the control of several other cities were taken over by Kurds yet there are those (even Kurds) who deny the liberation of the cities. But everything is relative and liberation in West Kurdistan is not the same as liberation anywhere else.

What have happened so far in West Kurdistan is indeed a liberation; if not a total and complete physical liberation of the Kurdish areas, then at least a liberation of the mind and I had considered this form the hardest part of the revolution in West Kurdistan but the people surprised me.

I remember the twentieth of July when my uncle, who had been very skeptical of the liberation of Kobanê the day before, out of a sudden came up to me and said: “Kurdistan çe bû yê. Kurdistan has been established.”

That moment I truly felt that all Kurds had risen up as one and proudly lifted their heads to say: “Never will we be treated as second class citizens.”

The news about yet another liberated Kurdish city reached us again and again and I saw how Kurds started believing in a future self-governed West Kurdistan. The Kurds in Qamişlo now are in stark contrast to who they were about a year ago.

But they did not dare believe in a free West Kurdistan with their whole heart because during my last days in Qamişlo we noticed that the presence of Syrian regime soldiers had increased and according to the Kurdish Youth Movement, the numbers have increased even more since I left Qamişlo on the twentythird of July.

If Qamişlo comes under Kurdish control, it will make even the most skeptical Kurd believe in a free West Kurdistan fought for by the united Kurdish parties in the Supreme Kurdish Council and the people.

A member of the council said that the Kurds of West Kurdistan had risen up to say: “I am a Kurd” and that this was not well received by the world.

But it does not matter. If no one will help the Kurds fight for their rights, they will do it themselves.


Who am I? asked the Kurdish poet, Cigerxwîn, buried in Qamişlo.
Who am I?
I am uprising and volcano,
I am my enemy’s enemy
I am a friend of the freedom fighter.

http://kurdishrights.org/2012/08/09/whe ... u-syria-3/

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This person is a journalist. This is his facebook page with alot of up-to-date information about West Kurdistan.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wladimir- ... 2491623968

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The Washington Institute for the Study of American Research on Turkey's policy towards the Kurds in Syria summarized to: Lets wait and see

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Abdelbaseet sayda interview on Gali Kurdistan TV NOW.

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"We are not lovers of the weapon, but we are advocates of freedom and the dignity of a continuous struggle until victory"

[alan131210]

WEST KURDISTAN, -- After the liberation of the Kurdish cities from the tyranny of Syrian regime in West Kurdistan, the first Kurdish school opened by Kurdish Language Organisation.

The Kurdish Language Organisation has managed to open the first Kurdish school within the frame of its goals and establishment to provide studying in the Kurdish language.

”This is the very first Kurdish school in West Kurdistan and it is another progressive step we are making within our dreams. We are very excited and the school will be protected,” said Tamuz Shamali a member of the organisation, in the opening of the school.

The school is in the Qude village in Efrin region and named as Shehid Refhat.

More than 3 million Kurds live in Syria where they were deprived of the most basic right such as education in mother tongue or access to Syrian identification card, including passport.

Kurds in this part of Kurdistan rose up peacefully and democratically in 19 July and took control of the Kurdish cities heralding the beginning of a de-facto Kurdish state in West Kurdistan.

http://nrttv.com/dreje.aspx?Jimare=19888

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Abdeel baseet sayda on Gali Kurdistan says: "West Kurdistan cannot achieve autonomy because it is different than South Kurdistan. The reason is because Southern kurds had two strong parties and two great leaders (Kak Masoud & Mam Jalal). They fought and gave many martyrs. Whereas in West Kurdistan, the geographical location doesn't allow the same thing and it is different and there are no strong parties that can rule that region".

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In any assessment of the potential winners and losers from the political chaos in Syria, the country's Kurdish minority could be among the winners.

The Kurds make up a little over 10% of the population. Long marginalised by the Alawite-dominated government, they are largely concentrated in north-eastern Syria, up towards the Turkish border.

Aaron David Miller, a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, believes that the Kurds could be one of the main beneficiaries of the demise of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

"Syria is coming apart, and there's not much chance it will be reassembled with the kind of centralised authority we saw under the Assads."

For the Syrian Kurds, whom he describes as "part of the largest single ethnic grouping in the region that lacks a state", there is "an opportunity to create more autonomy and respect for Kurdish rights".

"They have the motivation, opportunity, and their Kurdish allies in Iraq and Turkey to encourage them. But what will hold them back is Turkey's determination to prevent a mini-statelet in Syria along with the Kurds own internal divisions," he says.

Continue reading the main story
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The Kurdish factor in the Syrian crisis will prove to be as significant as the Kurdish question in Iraq”

Prof Fawaz Gerges
London School of Economics
"It is unlikely," he believes, "that Syria's Kurds will be able to establish a separate entity in Syria. Nor will the United States, nor the international community accept that."

"At the same time, the several dimensions of the Kurdish problem - the Iraqi Kurds' growing determination to remain a separate entity; Turkish determination to avoid another mini-Kurdistan along the Syrian-Iraqi border; and the issue of the PKK, the armed Kurdish insurgents fighting the Turkish Army - will create a real flashpoint."

There in a nutshell is the scale of the problem.

The Kurds' future in Syria will have an important bearing upon what sort of country it is going to become.

Turkish worry
But the fate of the Syrian Kurds also has ramifications well beyond the country's borders. These processes are already under way.

Fawaz Gerges, professor of Middle Eastern Politics at the London School of Economics, told me that "the Syrian Kurds have already seized the moment and are laying the foundation for an autonomous region like their counterparts in Iraq".

"The exit of Assad's forces from the Kurdish areas has complicated the crisis and deepened Turkey's fears that its borders with Iraq and Syria will be volatile for years to come," he says.

"The Kurdish factor in the Syrian crisis will prove to be as significant as the Kurdish question in Iraq."

Prof Ofra Bengio, head of the Kurdish Studies programme at the Moshe Dayan Centre at Tel Aviv University, agrees.

"The Kurdish dimension is likely to become a potent factor in the near future because of the weakening of each of the states in which they live, because co-operation among the states for curbing the Kurds is non-existent, and because the Kurds have made headway in the United States and in the West, where they proved their loyalty and lack of religious extremism.

"In a word, the West might like to support them."

If a Kurdish spectre is stalking the region then it is probably Turkey that has most reason to be worried.

Even as Ankara has watched developments in Syria with unease, its own struggle with guerrilla fighters of the Kurdish PKK has flared up again - Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davotoglu insisting that the Syrian government is encouraging the PKK, to get its own back for Turkey's insistence that President Assad must go.

But it is even more complicated than this. The dominant Kurdish faction inside Syria is a close ally - some say even an off-shoot - of the PKK. It has little love for the mainstream Syrian opposition championed by the Turks.

Colonial borders
Whilst fighting the PKK on one front, Turkey is desperately trying to curb the political ambitions of Syria's Kurds by political means.

Indeed the ramifications of the Kurdish issue go even further. Prof Gerges insists that the Kurdish question "is here to stay".

"It transcends national borders and has the potential to redraw the Sykes-Pico agreement, which, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, established existing nation-state boundaries.

"Although it is too early to talk about the emergence of a greater Kurdistan, an imagined community of Kurds resonates deeply among Kurds across Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran."

It is in this sense the upheavals associated with the "Arab Spring" take on their full regional significance.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement (named not surprisingly after the two negotiators, Mr Georges Picot and Sir Mark Sykes) was a secret understanding made between France and Britain in 1916 for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.

The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held areas of the Levant into various French and British administered territories which eventually gave rise to the modern-day states of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and ultimately Israel.

Fawaz Gerges asserts that the events in Syria and their potential repercussions risk over-turning this familiar world; a broader re-ordering of the region in which Kurdish aspirations are just one part of a very complex picture.

"Many of the problems in the contemporary Middle East are traced to that colonial-era Sykes-Picot map, which established the state system in the region. The Palestine and Kurdish questions are cases in point."

"National borders do not correspond to imagined communities. Although the state system has established deep roots in the Middle East in the last nine decades, the current uprisings have starkly exposed the fragility of the colonial system imposed on the region.

"My take is that the great powers, together with their local partners, will fight tooth and nail to prevent the redrawing of the borders of the state system in the Middle East.

"For once the map is re-drawn, where would the limits be? There would be a real danger of perpetual instability and conflict," he says.



Sowing chaos?
The Kurds of Syria, of course, are not in quite the same position as their brothers in Iraq and would find it much harder to break away.

Noted Syria expert Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma says that while Syria's Kurds are a compact minority they are not a majority even in the north eastern border area with Turkey - where they constitute some 30-40% of the population.

They have sometimes tense relations with local Sunni Arab tribes who see this as an integral part of Syrian territory, reinforced by the fact that this is an area rich in oil resources vital to the Syrian economy.

Prof Landis argues that what is going on in the Kurdish north-east offers a useful pointer to President Assad's "Plan B" should his control over key cities like Damascus and Aleppo crumble.

He says that the "embattled president withdrew government forces from the north-east because he couldn't control it and wanted to focus on the most important battles in Aleppo and Damascus".

"But in the back of the president's mind, there may be the thought that empowering the Kurds is a way of weakening the Sunni Arab majority and underlining the risks of fragmentation should his government fall. It's a strategy of playing upon divisions to sow chaos," he said.

This way, says Prof Landis, "the Syrian Army - which is rapidly becoming an Alawite militia, whilst still the strongest military force - may lose control over large swathes of the country, but will remain a vital factor in determining the political outcome in Syria".

It is a bleak prospect.

Prof Landis asserts that President Assad "may lose Syria, but could still remain a player, and his Alawite minority will not be destroyed".

"That's the future of Syria," he says, with little enthusiasm. "It's what Lebanon was and what Iraq became."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19197169