Sebastiano TomadaSawoushka Ahmed and Kurdish fighters in Sheikh Maksoud, Aleppo, on March 30.
ALEPPO, Syria — On Saturday I trudged across the grassy ravine that separates Sheikh Maksoud, a majority-Kurdish neighborhood on a hilltop, from the rebel-held portions of the city.
Beside me were rebel fighters carrying weapons and ammunition. Civilians were coming the opposite way, whole families laden with the few possessions they could carry on their backs. Everyone was jogging across the open ground, fearful of snipers.
“The regime has told us we have 24 hours to leave,” an elderly woman, who gave her name as Umm Riyadh, told me as we crouched, panting, behind a stone wall. “They are going to bomb the neighborhood.”
At the top of the hill near the area’s main mosque, groups of rebels mingled, in newfound amity, with Kurdish fighters from the local People’s Defense Units, the armed wing of Syria’s main Kurdish group, the Democratic Union Party (P.Y.D.). Until Friday, this area had been controlled by Kurdish fighters but was frequently visited by militias and intelligence agents from the regime of Bashar al-Assad. On Friday, though, in an event that may have momentous consequences for the course of the civil war, the Kurds switched sides, and with their help the rebels overran Sheikh Maksoud, which commands strategic high ground north of the city’s center.
“We made the decision on Thursday night to help the rebels,” said Sawoushka Ahmed, a local Kurdish fighter. She explained that there had been discussions about this within the group for several weeks, as its uneasy relation with the Assad regime had deteriorated to the point that the neighborhood would sometimes be shelled and raided at night. The Kurds’ hand may also have been forced by the rebels: Earlier in the week, I had spoken to rebel commanders who said they were preparing to take Sheikh Maksoud by force.
Whatever the precise motivation, the crucial question now — which the Kurdish fighters I spoke to over the past few days weren’t prepared to answer — is whether the P.Y.D.’s shift in Sheikh Maksoud represents a countrywide change in the Kurds’ alliances. If so, it could represent a major development in the course of the war in Syria.
The realignment in Aleppo comes only one week after the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan announced, from his jail cell in Istanbul, a cease-firebetween Kurdish rebels in Turkey and the Turkish government. The unprecedented truce is widely seen as the first stage in a deal between Ocalan and Turkey’s ambitious prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that would finally end the long-running Kurdish insurgency in Turkey.
Ocalan once waged his war against the Turkish government, which began in 1984, from inside Syria. For a time the government in Damascus used him and his guerillas as leverage with Turkey, especially in disputes over water. Then in 1998, seeking rapprochement with Ankara, the Syrians forced Ocalan to leave. He was eventually kidnapped by Turkish intelligence agents in Kenya and brought to Turkey, where he is serving a life sentence.
The Syrian regime tried to reactivate the Kurdish threat in 2011 when Turkey lent its support to the rebels seeking to overthrow Assad. It provided safe havens in Syria for various guerillas, including Saleh Muslim, the exiled head of the P.Y.D. (which is the local affiliate of Ocalan’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party). The regime also pulled back government forces from Kurdish areas in the north and northeast of Syria — by the Turkish border — allowing the Kurds to govern themselves in exchange for their remaining neutral in the government’s conflict with the rebels.
The Assad regime had apparently hoped that the presence of Muslim’s group, like Ocalan’s in the 1990s, would dissuade Turkey from escalating its support to the rebels. But last week’s reversal in Sheikh Maksoud suggests that Erdogan’s recent overtures to Ocalan are already bearing fruit in his struggle with Assad.
Although the Kurdish groups in Syria are not very significant militarily, their cooperation would free the Turkish government’s hands by allowing it to increase its support for the rebels in Syria without fear that the Assad regime could stoke the Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey in response.
It remains to be seen whether the Kurds’ newfound cooperation with the rebels in Aleppo is part of a larger realignment by the P.Y.D. But if over the weeks ahead government forces are pushed out of their remaining bases in Kurdish areas, like oil-rich Hasakah in the northeast, then the fall of Sheikh Maksoud on Friday will have marked the beginning of a dramatic shift in Syria’s civil war.
Matthieu Aikins is a magazine writer living in Kabul. You can follow him on Twitter.
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/could-syrias-kurds-change-the-course-of-the-civil-war/
