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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Syria war empowers long-oppressed Kurdish minority |
| 2012-08-22 |
| Last month, while the world's attention was focused on battles raging in Syria's two largest cities, a quiet transformation was taking place in the country's oil-rich northeast where about 2 million minority Kurds live. In mid-July, regime forces began pulling back from several towns and villages near the Turkish border. They ceded de facto control to armed Kurdish fighters who have since set up checkpoints, hoisted Kurdish flags, and began exercising a degree of autonomy unheard of before. It is an extraordinary development for a community that has long been oppressed and discriminated against by the Assad regime, one that threatens to upset a decades-long geopolitical balance involving Syria, Turkey and Iraq, and challenge old regional alliances. "The Kurds are emerging as one of the major winners of the crisis in Syria," said Fawaz A. Gerges, director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics. "They have begun laying the foundation for an autonomous region like their counterparts in Iraq. It's a dream-like situation for them." Kurds see their chance to win the kind of autonomy that their ethnic brothers enjoy in Iraq. But this raises alarm bells for Turkey, one of the key state backers of the rebels trying to overthrow President Bashar Assad and a country where Kurdish rebels have been fighting a violent struggle for self-rule for the last 28 years. Turkey is increasingly worried that the chaos in Syria will open up a new base for Kurdish rebels to press their struggle for self-rule. The government in Ankara has warned it would "not tolerate" any rebel threats from Syrian territory and has staged a number of military drills across the border to put a fine point on it. The tensions feed myriad concerns that Syria's civil war could spill across borders into a wider regional conflagration. Turkey has emerged as one of the most vociferous critics of the Assad regime and serves as a base for generals of the Free Syrian Army rebel group and the Syrian National Council opposition group. In relinquishing border areas to Kurdish fighters, the Syrian regime may have had a dual motive — diverting forces from there to shore up overstretched troops fighting in the northern commercial hub of Aleppo and other parts of the country as well as sending a warning to Turkey. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #1 The Kurds see their opportunity and are "going for broke". * DEFENCE.PK/FORUMS > PKK TAKES CONTROL IN SOUTHEASTERN TURKEY, from the Turkish Army-Police. * SAME > PRSIDENT: TURKEY TO TAKE ACTION IFF PKK IN SYRIA BECOMES THREAT TO COUNTRY. versies * TOPIX > IRAN MP: TURKEY SUPPORTS AL-QAEDA AND OTHER TERRORISTS IN SYRIA. * SAME > IRAN WARNS TURKEY: SYRIA MAY UNLEASH TERROR UNLESS TURKEY STOPS SUPPORT FOR REBELS. * SAME > EXPERT: TURKEY, NOT LEBANON, NEXT TARGET FOR ISLAMIST "ARAB SPRING" AFTER SYRIA [Assad collapse]. * SAME > [Army Command-n-Staff School]US ARMY COMMAND DEVELOPS CAUCASUS-LINKED MILITARY SCENARIOS, vee continuous "GAAT" regional simulations. * |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2012-08-22 22:35 |