Syrian Kurdistan
Syrian Kurdistan or Rojava is a region in northern Syria where Kurds form the majority. It geographically surrounds three noncontiguous enclaves along the Turkish and Iraqi borders: Afrin in the northwest, Kobani in the north, and Jazira in the northeast. The term started to become more widely known as Kurdish nationalist groups and parties started to use it in 2013 to describe the political entity later known as "Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria". However, this usage was officially dropped in 2016 in favor of a more inclusive name to the heterogenous area under PYD control.
Kurdish nationalists consider Syrian Kurdistan as one of the four Lesser Kurdistans that comprise Greater Kurdistan, alongside Iranian Kurdistan, Turkish Kurdistan, and Iraqi Kurdistan. A significant part of the Kurdish community of Afrin was displaced during the Turkish-backed Operation Olive Branch in 2018.
Etymology
According to the International Crisis Group and Kurdish studies expert Robert Lowe, the term "Rojava" gained common usage among Syrian Kurdish parties in 2013 to refer to the PYD-controlled areas of Syria. As for the term "Western Kurdistan", the Kurdish author Mehrdad R. Izady in 1992 mentioned the term in the context of "western Kurdistan in Turkey and Syria".History
Origins, Middle Ages, and Ottoman Syria (1516–1920)
, widely considered to be the largest stateless ethnic group, are an Iranic ethnic group inhabiting a mountainous region known as Kurdistan that spans parts of several sovereign states in West Asia, primarily southeastern Turkey, parts of northern Syria, northern Iraq, and western Iran. Although Kurdish origins and migration remain the subject of scholarly investigation and controversy, and several different groups throughout history have lived in Kurdistan, Kurds are traditionally considered to have descended from Indo-European tribes migrating westward toward Iran in the middle of the second millennium BCE. In antiquity, Kurdistan was ruled, in turn, by the Assyrian, Median, Greek, Roman, and Persian empires. After the advent of Islam in the 7th century CE, Kurdish tribes in Upper Mesopotamia and western Iran resisted advancing Muslim armies, but ultimately most Kurds converted to the Shafi'ite school of Sunni Islam. Kurdish cultural and political power re-emerged over the next three centuries, as Kurds in Kurdistan lived semi-autonomously within the Islamic caliphates.The decline of the Abbasid Caliphate in the 10th century led to the rise of Kurdish dynasties, including the Ayyubids. Since the 11th century, the medieval Crusader castle Krak des Chevaliers in the Syrian Coastal Mountain Range has been known as the "Fortress of the Kurds" or "Castle of the Kurds". The founder of the Ayyubids, Saladin, famous for unifying Muslims and recapturing Jerusalem from Crusaders in 1187, expanded his empire into Syria and beyond. According to Ibn Hawqal the region of Jazira was the Summer pasture of Hadhabani Kurds.
A group of Kurdish soldiers remained in Damascus after Saladin was buried there in 1193, establishing an enclave in the city known as the "Kurdish quarter", which was a center of Kurdish culture and language into the 20th century. The Ayyubids lost Syria to the Mongols in the mid-13th century, who were quickly driven out by the Mamluks after the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, who in turn were defeated by the Ottoman Empire in the early 16th century.
Sharafkhan Bidlisi's 1596 epic of Kurdish history from the late 13th century to his own day, the Sharafnama, describes Kurdistan as extending from the Persian Gulf to the Ottoman vilayets of Malatya and Marash, a wide definition that counts the Lurs as Kurds and which takes an extreme expansionist view of the south. Lying to either side of the Gulf–Anatolia line were the vilayets of Diyarbekir, Mosul, "non-Arab Iraq", "Arab Iraq", Fars, Azerbaijan, Lesser Armenia, and Greater Armenia. Ahmad Khani's 1692 epic Mem û Zîn offers a similar conception of geography. In the 19th century poetry of Haji Qadir Koyi, literary Kurdistan extended across the north of later mandatory Syria, including Nusaybin and Alexandretta on the Mediterranean Sea's Gulf of Alexandretta.
At the beginning of the 17th century, land on either side of the Euphrates was settled by Kurds forced to migrate there at the Ottoman Sultans' behest from lands elsewhere within the empire. The area on the river's right bank was the main focus of settlement, especially around Kobanî. In the 18th century, some of the Kurdish tribes of Greater Syria remained closely related to those of neighbouring areas of Kurdistan, but some others were assimilated with local Arab tribes. The German cartographer and Explorer Carsten Niebuhr, visited Jazira in 1764. Published a map showing his itinerary and mentioning five Kurdish tribes.
French mandate for Syria (1920–1946)
had a significant impact on the Kurds.The victorious Allies partitioned the defeated Ottoman Empire, dividing its Kurdish-inhabited areas among new nation-states such as Syria, Turkey, and Iraq.
In 1916, before the war had been won, Britain and France made a secret deal to divide the Middle East, known as the Sykes–Picot Agreement,
which influenced Middle East borders for a century and came to symbolize the victimization and manipulation of Kurds by British and French imperialists.
The first encounter between the French Armed Forces and Kurds in Syria came in late 1919 in the Kurd Mountains, which the French were able to pass through without much difficulty. In the Jazira, French troops were resisted more effectively.
At the end of the fighting between the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the United Kingdom, the French Third Republic, and the Arab Revolt, the territory of modern-day Syria and Iraq had been occupied by the Allies, and a Kurdish political and territorial entity was proposed. However, since neither Britain nor France was willing to withdraw from occupied areas of the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, the territory allotted to the Kurds was to be located wholly in areas still under Turkish control at the time of the first partition of the Ottoman Empire by the Treaty of Sèvres in August 1920.
The treaty, which was never ratified, would have created an independent Kurdistan under French patronage in Turkey without including Kurdish areas in Syria, Iraq, or Iran.
The Treaty of Sèvres was opposed by the Turkish National Movement, a coalition of Turkish revolutionaries led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his Kemalist followers.
In 1921, France and the Turkish National Movement signed the Treaty of Ankara, ending the Franco-Turkish War and moving the border between Turkey and French Syria further south than provided by the Treaty of Sèvres.
Both France and Turkey cultivated relations with the area's tribes in the hope of establishing territorial claims.
The Franco-Turkish agreement was ratified by the multiparty 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which made no provision for an independent or autonomous Kurdish region, instead dividing the Kurdish areas of the Ottoman Empire between the new states of Turkey, Syria, and British-controlled Mandatory Iraq.
The new Turkish–Syrian border, set largely along the Berlin–Baghdad railway line between Mosul and Aleppo, divided both Arabic and Kurdish communities, leaving Arab enclaves in Turkey and Kurdish enclaves in Syria.
To this day, Kurds on either side of the border do not refer to themselves as "Syrian" or "Turkish"; rather, for Turkish Kurds, Syria is Bin Xhet, and for Syrian Kurds, Turkey is Ser Xhet.
South of the rail line, Syrian Kurdistan was created as "a waste product of the colonial division of the Middle East", in the words of German cultural anthropologist Thomas Schmidinger.
Under the mandate, the French had authority over three Kurdish-populated areas left on the southern side of the new line, namely the areas of the Kurd Mountains, Jarabulus, and the French Mandate territory in Upper Mesopotamia. From the beginning of the Syrian state under the French Mandate, the geographical discontinuity of the Kurdish territory, as well as its relative smallness compared with the Kurdish areas of Iraq and Turkey, shaped much of the region's subsequent history. According to Jordi Tejel, "These three Kurdish enclaves constituted ... a natural extension of Kurdish territory into Turkey and Iraq".
The new borders did not significantly impact Kurdish tribesmen in the area at the time because the placement of Kurdish communities under two different governments separated them but did not physically sever them.
However, developments north of the line in Turkey profoundly affected Syrian Kurds.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Kemalist repression and failed Kurdish uprisings such as the Sheikh Said rebellion and the Ararat rebellion resulted in many Kurds fleeing or being exiled from Turkey to Syria.
The French mandate was not popular in France, and the local High Commissioner of the Levant sought to increase the profitability of the territory by resettling Kurds fleeing Kemalists in Turkey and other refugees in Jazira, a decision that resulted in the politicization of Kurdish ethnicity in Syria.
French military efforts were hindered by propaganda favouring Turkey distributed among Kurdish and Arab tribes. Resistance to the French in the Jazira continued until 1926. By 1927, the Kurdish-majority villages of the area numbered 47.
During the 1920s, use of the Latin alphabet to write the Kurdish languages was introduced by Celadet Bedir Khan and his brother Kamuran Alî Bedirxan and became standard in Syrian and Turkish Kurdistan. Early French Syria's Kurds were predominantly speakers of Kurmanji, a northern Kurdish language. Besides the main three Kurdish enclaves, there were other Syrian Kurds outside Syrian Kurdistan; primarily these were resident in the major cities of Aleppo and Damascus, though Yazidi Kurds inhabited Jabal Sam'an and others were nomads. Just as their districts were fragmented, the Kurdish inhabitants of Syria in the French mandatory period were heterogenous, and refugees arriving from Turkish and Iraqi Kurdistan helped foster Kurdish political consciousness, engendering a "pan-Kurdism" that complemented pre-existing Kurdish identities. The immigration from Kurdish areas outside Syria increased the Kurdish component of the population in Jazira.
In 1924, a delegate from Kurd Dagh made the first petition to the French authorities for autonomy for Kurdish-majority regions in Syria.
In 1927, Kurdish exiles from Turkey in Beirut founded Xoybûn, a secular pan-Kurdish movement that became the intellectual foundation of Kurdish nationalism.
Although Xoybûn pursued a military revolt in Turkish Kurdistan, it advocated for local autonomy for Kurds in Syria.
Xoybûn was popular in Syrian Kurdistan, and in 1931, Xoybûn delegates were elected from Kurd Dagh, Jarablus, and Jazira.
The French government rejected the Kurdish petitions for autonomy.
France negotiated a Treaty of Independence with the First Syrian Republic in 1936, but the onset of World War II prevented its implementation. France was occupied by Germany in 1940, and the French mandate was seized by Vichy France. Allied forces retook Syria in 1941 and recognized the Syrian Arab Republic as independent and sovereign within the French mandate. Xoybûn had remained active during the war years but disbanded in 1946.
An academic source published by the University of Cambridge has described maps of greater Kurdistan created in the 1940s and forward as: "These maps have become some of the most influential propaganda tools for the Kurdish nationalist discourse. They depict a territorially exaggerated version of the territory of Kurdistan, extending into areas with no majority Kurdish populations. Despite their production with political aims related to specific claims on the demographic and ethnographic structure of the region, and their questionable methodologies, they have become 'Kurdistan in the minds of Kurds' and the boundaries they indicate have been readily accepted."