When insurgent forces took over Syria, they pledged to unite the nation’s disparate armed teams right into a unified nationwide military.
The most important problem for them by far has been in northeastern Syria, an autonomous area run by the nation’s Kurdish minority the place suspicion of the brand new management runs deep.
In previous years, the rebels and the Kurds fought one another. However with the rebels now governing Syria, they’re working to kind an alliance and merge the highly effective Kurdish-led army into the brand new nationwide pressure.
Interviews with dozens of individuals within the northeast in late March revealed that Kurdish mistrust of the brand new authorities is rooted partly in the truth that the previous rebels now in cost had been as soon as affiliated with Al Qaeda. Some Kurds are additionally cautious as a result of the brand new authorities is backed by Turkey, which has tried for years to undercut Kurdish energy in Syria.
“How can we belief this new authorities in Damascus?” requested Amina Mahmoud, 31, a Kurdish resident of the northeastern city of Kobani.
Her skepticism is shared by different members of Syria’s numerous vary of ethnic and spiritual minorities, who fear that the brand new authorities is not going to shield, embody or signify them.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., agreed on March 10 to combine its army and different establishments, together with its prized oil and gasoline fields, below the central authorities’s management by yr’s finish. It was a serious breakthrough for the brand new Syrian president, Ahmed al-Shara, in his efforts to unify a rustic nonetheless wrestling with violent turmoil.
Within the final month, the Kurds started to cut back their army presence within the main northeastern metropolis of Aleppo and the 2 sides exchanged prisoners even because the rhetoric on either side has turn into extra confrontational, underscoring the lengthy historical past of tensions.
Initially, the merger deal had been applauded within the northeast — an space with a combined inhabitants of Arabs and Kurds that’s administered by a Kurdish-led regional authorities. The Kurds, who make up about 10 p.c of Syria’s inhabitants, significantly welcomed a provision within the accord stipulating that they’d have the identical rights as different Syrians.
However doubts rapidly surfaced.
Members of the regional authorities described the settlement as merely a primary step. Vital particulars have but to be labored out, corresponding to whether or not the S.D.F. will be a part of the nationwide army as a bloc or have a unbroken function in securing the northeast.
“Al-Shara and the brand new authorities wish to management all of Syria,” stated Badran Kurdi, a Kurdish political determine who took half within the merger negotiations with Mr. al-Shara. “And naturally they’re dreaming about controlling all of our areas. But it surely’s very troublesome.”
Ali Ahmed, 55, a Kurd from the northeastern metropolis of Hasakah who teaches chemistry, referred to as Mr. al-Shara “a terrorist.” He spoke as his household loved a picnic within the countryside to rejoice the spring competition of Nowruz, the Persian new yr.
“We all know him,” he stated.
He was referring to the interval from 2013 to 2016, when Mr. al-Shara led Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Entrance. Throughout these years, the Nusra Entrance fought a variety of battles in opposition to the S.D.F. over management of a number of northeastern cities. Mr. al-Shara now speaks of reconstruction and inclusion.
As Mr. Ahmed regarded throughout a haze of greening fields towards the Turkish border, barely 10 miles away, he stated that Mr. al-Shara’s shut ties with Turkey solely added to his doubts.
However not all Kurds see the deal as a adverse.
One senior member of the Kurdish political management, Salih Muslim, stated that regardless of the gap between the 2 sides, he sees this as a historic alternative for Kurds to achieve recognition from the federal government.
Inextricably woven into each dialog, nonetheless, had been questions on whether or not the deal will cease Turkey’s assaults on Syrian Kurds.
Turkey hyperlinks Kurdish fighters in Syria’s northeast to the Kurdish militants inside Turkey who’ve been preventing the federal government for greater than 40 years. For the previous a number of years, Turkey has been launching air assaults on Syrian Kurdish-forces throughout the border and has additionally supported Syrian proxy forces in opposition to the Kurds.
The Turkish army initially saved up some drone assaults and airstrikes even after Mr. al-Shara and the S.D.F. chief, Mazloum Abdi, signed the merger accord. But it surely has now suspended the assaults.
One of many deadliest Turkish strikes because the accord hit a farming hamlet exterior the Kurdish-majority city of Kobani in March. It killed a household of farm laborers — a pair and their eight kids, the youngest 7 months previous, in keeping with Firas Qassim Lo, the farmer they had been working for, and the Syrian Democratic Forces.
Turkey denied killing the household and stated in a press release that its operations “solely goal terrorist organizations.” Turkey routinely refers back to the S.D.F. as “terrorists.”
There was no indication that anybody related to the Kurdish-led pressure was within the household’s house when it was struck.
A funeral for the household drew greater than a thousand Kurds who lined a street resulting in a small cemetery in Kobani. Every of the coffins, a photograph of the deceased taped to the surface, was hoisted onto the shoulders of native males and carried to the burial floor.
Ms. Mahmoud, the Kurdish resident of Kobani, lives in an condominium overlooking the cemetery and watched with tears in her eyes.
“Why does Erdogan do that to us? What have we achieved?” she stated, referring to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Shortly after the Kobani strike, Turkey largely suspended its assaults on the S.D.F., as did its Syrian proxy forces.
Some Christians, who observe their religion brazenly within the northeast, sounded frightened of any settlement that may enable Mr. al-Shara’s army forces to deploy there.
Their fears had been heightened final month by violence directed primarily at one other Syrian minority, the Alawites, in two northwestern provinces alongside the Mediterranean coast. The violence started when loyalists of the ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad attacked the brand new authorities’s forces.
The troopers responded, however so did 1000’s of others fighters, together with overseas fighters and armed teams nominally linked to the brand new authorities. About 1,600 people were killed, most of them civilians from the Alawite minority, which the Assad household belongs to.
Alis Marderos, 50, an Armenian Christian within the northeastern city of Qamishli, stated that the Kurds wanted to stay answerable for safety. “If the Kurds didn’t exist right here, we might have been beheaded,” she stated after attending Sunday Mass on the Armenian Orthodox church.
For years, the US has given military, monetary and political assist to the S.D.F. after deeming it the bottom pressure most able to defeating the Islamic State, the terrorist group that took over a big swath of Syrian territory through the civil battle. U.S. troops have maintained a small presence in northeastern Syria for years however started this month to attract them down.
After years of preventing, the S.D.F. managed to wrest again all of the territory captured by the Islamic State.
Some Arab residents of the northeast stated they had been happy with the deal as a result of it might convey the S.D.F. below the management of the central authorities, which they see as a wanted examine on Kurdish energy. Arabs, who’re the bulk ethnic group in Syria, had been divided, nonetheless, on the function they need the Kurdish-led forces to play sooner or later.
Sheikh Hassan al Muslat al-Milhim, an Arab Syrian from Hasakah, stated he resented the ability of the S.D.F. in a area that has a big Arab inhabitants. The American assist for the pressure made issues worse, in his view, by augmenting its energy.
“We the Arabs, up till this second, don’t like having the Individuals right here,” stated Mr. al-Milhim. He stated he had appreciated Mr. al-Shara’s method when he led the Nusra Entrance and was lively within the northeast.
“They revered us, they helped us,” Mr. al-Milhim stated. “They had been Islamist, however not radical.”
However his view shouldn’t be shared by all Arab Syrians.
Mann Aldaneh, a tribal chief of a number of Bedouin Arab villages close to the Turkish border, has heat relations with close by Kurdish villages.
He welcomed the settlement however stated he didn’t belief the brand new central authorities in Damascus to protect prisons and camps within the northeast that maintain thousands of Islamic State fighters and a few 40,000 of their relations.
That sentiment has been echoed by safety officers in neighboring Iraq and Europe as effectively.
