“I don’t believe that Damascus will want to control the Kurds by force. Damascus is not in that position. The Kurds, as I correctly understand, have no issues with Damascus,” Fyodor Lukyanov, research director of the Valdai Discussion Club and chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, told Rudaw’s Kamiz Shadadi on Thursday.
Many Syrians and foreign powers are worried that the new government may impose strict Islamic rule and threaten minority groups such as Kurds, Druze, Christians, and Alawites.
The Kurdish-controlled northeast and the Druze in the south of Syria, therefore, have remained adamant about their vision of federalism and decentralization, despite the new Islamist authorities in Damascus vehemently rejecting the prospect - at times labeling it a “red line.”
Last week, SDF chief Mazloum Abdi told the Associated Press that their vision for Syria is a “decentralized, secular, and civil country based on democracy that preserves the rights of all its components.”
Abdi stressed that the Kurds want to remain in Syria as part of a united country.
Damascus wants to bring the northeast under its control through negotiation. “We are not inclined toward a military solution,” Defense Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra told the Washington Post last week.
Kurds in Syria have bigger issues with Ankara, according to Lukyanov.
“How Turkey will act, what goals it will set for itself, that will be the determining factor,” he said.
Ankara claims that the People’s Protection Units (YPG) - the backbone of the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) - is the Syrian front for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a designated terrorist group in Turkey.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan last week ruled out federalism in Syria and said Damascus will either expel PKK members from the country or “eliminate them.”
