In late April, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and Kurdish National Council (KNC) reached a long-awaited deal to negotiate jointly for Kurdish rights in Syria’s post-Baathist future. At a historic unity conference, the two rival Syrian Kurdish parties set out the policy program they will advance in talks with Damascus: a democratic, federal Syria where Kurds and other ethnic and religious communities would enjoy full rights.

Every major Kurdish political faction in the Middle East offered its support. Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) leader and former Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) president Masoud Barzani sent a message to the conference. So did the co-chairs of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), the umbrella organization of parties and organizations inspired by the ideas of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) founder and leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Ankara and Damascus, for their part, recoiled at one word in the multi-point unity declaration: federalism. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said “there is no room for [a federation] in the Syrian reality. We recommend that decisions that contribute to the stability of the region be made rather than those that threaten [it].” The Syrian transitional government claimed that the unity declaration contradicted its March 10th integration deal with the SDF, despite no article of that deal stipulating that the integration of the SDF and DAANES would result in any specific type of political system.

Some argue that a federal Syria is a maximalist demand included in the unity document as a negotiating tactic. It is the model of decentralization preferred by the KNC; the more powerful PYD has advocated for other forms of decentralization. Many Kurds who support the PYD are critical of the Kurdish federal experience in Iraq. Including federalism in the unity document could have served the dual purposes of satisfying the KNC and its constituents and making other Kurdish priorities look more realistic to Damascus by comparison.

Even so, it is worth understanding why many Syrian Kurds might view federalism as the legitimate best model for their country’s future. Unlike other communities in Syria and the wider Middle East, Kurds have no positive historical or contemporary experiences with centralization and strong states. Since the creation of modern nation-states in the region a century ago, non-federal systems have understood Kurdish rights in a limited, individualized sense at best and violently clawed back what few freedoms they had offered their Kurdish citizens at worst.

Individual and Collective Rights

Individuals with Kurdish ancestry, and even those who openly identify as Kurds, have risen to positions of power in the unitary states under which they live. Leaders of those countries have argued that this constitutes equal citizenship. They argue that a Kurd is not prohibited from doing anything just because he is Kurdish. Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), for example, can boast ethnically Kurdish officials like Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek and Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan as evidence that Kurds are represented by the Turkish state.

It is also true that Kurdish communities have never enjoyed collective rights and freedoms under these systems. For the vast majority of Kurds, the existence of those collective rights and freedoms is what is meant by equal citizenship. Kurds in Turkey who support greater collective rights and freedoms will point out that the presence of the aforementioned Kurdish ministers has not reversed the disenfranchisement of millions of Kurdish voters or addressed the fact that most torture and police brutality cases in Turkey target people from Kurdish-majority provinces.

The only state with a Kurdish population in which Kurds enjoy full de jure collective rights is post-2003 Iraq, a federal state. One important collective right is the right to the use of the Kurdish language in public life. Kurdish is a constitutionally recognized official language of Iraq, alongside Arabic, and the primary language of the Kurdistan Region. Kurdish parents send their children to Kurdish-language schools. When a Kurdish citizen interacts with government officials or local security forces, he or she can expect to speak to them in Kurdish.

In unitary Turkey and Iran, by contrast, it is legal on paper for Kurds to use the Kurdish language in some restricted contexts. But this is an individual right to speak or write in a language, not a collective freedom of a linguistic group to use and develop a language at the societal level. The use of Kurdish in public contexts crucial for its development is prohibited in both countries. In contexts where it is legal to use Kurdish, like private education and publishing, it is harshly repressed. Both Turkey and Iran jail Kurdish educators and criminalize Kurdish publications.

Reversals and Reprisals

Federalism is one of many types of decentralization that could conceivably address Kurdish concerns. From the Kurdish perspective, though, accepting non-federal forms of decentralization means taking on the risk of the violent revocation of powers granted to local units by the central government.

Here, Kurds remember the fate of the Iraqi Kurdistan Autonomy Agreement of 1970 and the treatment of pro-Kurdish municipalities in Turkey before and after the breakdown of the peace process in 2015.

In Iraq, the KDP under Mustafa Barzani reached a deal with Saddam Hussein’s regime that would have granted Kurdish regions of Iraq limited autonomy, ensured Kurdish participation in the central government, and recognized the Kurdish language and identity in Iraq. The Iraqi state never fully implemented the deal. Ultimately, it collapsed, precipitating years of bloody conflict.

In Turkey, the state made no formal agreement with any Kurdish entity. It did refrain from taking repressive measures against Kurdish political life while negotiations with the PKK were underway. Unarmed, legal Kurdish parties easily won majorities in municipal elections. They also organized their communities into a variety of political and social structures that coexisted with those institutions in a dual-power strategy. When peace talks failed, the government went from tolerating these structures to crushing them, imprisoning thousands of activists and elected officials, banning and closing dozens of institutions, and destroying local democratic government.

These two very different iterations of Kurdish self-governance shared one fatal flaw. Both existed due to the unilateral granting of greater powers to local units by a central government. Federal units that shared sovereignty with the central government would have been more difficult for the central government to crush.

Federal units would have also had a greater capacity to defend themselves, as security forces could have been affiliated to local, Kurdish-majority governments, not to Turkish or Arab-dominated central states. This could have precluded the mass violence against civilian Kurdish populations that occurred in both cases of re-centralization.

Once again, the single example of Kurdish federalism leads to more positive outcomes for Kurdish civilian life and flourishing. There have been serious political disputes between the KRG and the Iraqi central government, up to and including clashes between their respective security forces. But the era of mass state violence and persecution against Kurdish civilians is long over in federal Iraq, while it continues in unitary Turkey and Iran. Syrian Kurds will not forget that difference any time soon.

Can Syria Be Different?

In the modern Middle East, only a federal state (Iraq) has let Kurds exercise their collective rights and freedoms and refrained from violent crackdowns on Kurdish civilians. Unitary states have denied these fundamental rights to their Kurdish citizens, reversed non-federal decentralization models, and engaged in violent reprisals to punish Kurdish civilians for their participation in these decentralized structures. This has been true regardless of the internal system or geopolitical orientation of those states and the nature of the political and military structures representing Kurdish communities.

For Kurds, Syria’s old unitary state was little better than Turkey, Iran, or pre-war Iraq. As historian Sami Moubayed writes, some individual Syrian Kurds “attained senior political positions and [became] wealthy” under non-Kurdish rule, from the Ottoman era until Bashar al-Assad’s regime, without any clear resolution to the wider ‘Kurdish question.’ Before the civil war, Human Rights Watch reports, Syrian Kurdish communities endured “various bans on the use of the Kurdish language; refusal to register children with Kurdish names; replacement of Kurdish place names with new names in Arabic; prohibition of businesses that do not have Arabic names; not permitting Kurdish private schools; and the prohibition of books and other materials written in Kurdish.”

This is the context in which Syrian Kurdish calls for federalism should be understood. Contrary to rhetoric from Ankara and Damascus, they have nothing to do with an intent to partition Syrian territory or invite foreign intervention. Kurds see them as a demand for conditions within existing borders that preclude their marginalization or the use of state violence against their communities. Many would argue that, in pluralistic, federal state, Kurdish communities would have a more positive relationship with Damascus than they have ever had before: there would be no grievances for foreign powers or separatist groups to use to mobilize Kurds for their agendas.

While a federal system is one system that could create those conditions, it is not the only one. In theory, the new Syria could respect the collective rights and freedoms of Kurdish populations, allow for strong local government, and structure security forces so that they represent the communities that they protect within a unitary state.

The transitional government has taken some positive steps. The March 10th integration agreement with the SDF ruled out a military solution to Syria’s Kurdish issue and recognized the existence of a Syrian Kurdish community for the first time. Weeks later, the SDF agreed to withdraw its forces from Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyah, Kurdish neighborhoods of Aleppo, in exchange for the integration of Kurdish Internal Security Forces (ISF) with Syria’s Interior Ministry and the preservation of DAANES governing institutions. Most recently, when Minister of Education Muhammed Turko devolved powers to provincial education authorities, he said his government was “fully aware of the value of implementing administrative decentralization to meet the varied and evolving educational needs across the country.” This was the first reference to any kind of decentralization from a senior Syrian official. It raised hopes that the state might accept it in other areas.

Syrian Kurds find today themselves in a position stronger than that of Kurdish communities in the historical analogies they fear. Internally, they are well-armed and well-organized. Kurds across the political spectrum support decentralization, as do many Syrians of other ethnic and religious backgrounds. Externally, they have diplomatic relationships with countries invested in the success of a future deal with Damascus. The new Syrian state is also relatively weaker than Erdogan’s Turkey and Saddam’s Iraq were.

At the same time, Syrian Kurds have reservations. The transitional constitutional declaration, issued days after the SDF-Damascus agreement proclaimed that the state would recognize the constitutional rights of its Kurdish citizens, named only Arabic as an official language and made no mention of Kurdish identity. Syria is still the ‘Syrian Arab Republic.’

Despite constructive rhetoric from leaders on both sides, the Syrian Kurdish public may still struggle to trust a state led by the former leaders of Jabhat al-Nusra, which violently attacked Kurdish communities early in the civil war. Sectarian violence committed by transitional government forces against Alawite and Druze communities has exacerbated those fears. So have the promotions of Syrian National Army (SNA) commanders implicated in serious violations against Kurdish civilians to senior government posts.

Ultimately, in their quest to build a strong state, Syria’s new authorities risk re-creating a brittle one, so rigid it shatters when it comes into contact with unresolved Kurdish demands. Negotiations between Syrian Kurds and Damascus should aim to create state both strong and flexible enough to peacefully resolve Syria’s ‘Kurdish question’ for good. Instead of responding to calls for federalism with condemnation and threats, Syrian authorities should understand the historical experiences and modern fears of their Kurdish citizens. Kurdish authorities should think flexibly and creatively about if and how their concerns could be addressed through a variety of forms of decentralization.

Photo taken by author, Qamishlo, August 2024.