Syria’s Kurds to declare Federal Province

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2016/03/syrias-kurds-to-declare-federal-province.html

Syria’s Kurds to declare Federal Province
By Juan Cole | Mar. 17, 2016

Syria’s Kurds have decided to declare a federal province in the northeast of the country and along the northern border with Turkey.

Many Arab states are unitary rather than federal and for the most part provincial governors are appointed by the central government and the central state controls local education and other policy. The Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov recently suggested that one resolution of the Syrian civil war might be to move the country to a US- or Canada-style federal state where the provinces retain substantial powers and prerogatives.

Some pundits are interpreting the Kurdish move as a form of separatism, but so far it seems more like a demand for states’ rights, Alabama-style. The Kurds are frustrated that they have been excluded from the Geneva peace talks, and are in part making the point that with 10% of the Syrian territory in their control, they are too important to snub.

Kurds are the major non-Arabic-speaking population in Syria, accounting for roughly 2.2 million out of 22 million, though their proportion has likely increased because over 4 million people have fled the country. Most Syrians speak Arabic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Amharic. Kurds speak an Indo-European language ultimately related to English. The Arab nationalist Baath party that took over Syria in the 1960s tended to racialize Arabness (it is a language, not a race), and the government withdrew citizenship from large numbers of Kurds, leaving them stateless. At the beginning of the 2011 Syrian youth revolt, dictator Bashar al-Assad went to the Kurdish regions and told them he would reinstate their Syrian citizenship, but that was rather late in the day.

[DetlefK]

1. Since both the US and Russia support the syrian Kurds...

The US supports the Kurds because they are expendable boots-on-the-ground against ISIS.

Russia supports the Kurds because Erdogan hates the Kurds and is an enemy of Assad. If the Kurds stabilize a province of Syria, this could expand to stabilizing all of Syria, eventually re-establishing a stable Syria as a russian ally.