For months, activists and opposition figures have been saying that Assad’s endgame is to retreat, once Damascus falls to the rebels, to an Alawite rump state along the Mediterranean where sectarian loyalists can protect their patrimonial and commercial interests. (The Assads come from the province of Latakia.) According to independent opposition figure Ammar Abdulhamid, the Kremlin is at least willing to entertain this doomsday scenario because it believes it will then retain control of its port at Tartus and its “secular” ally in the Levant (albeit one that partners with Hezbollah, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and, according to Ambassador Fares, al-Qaeda).
Now Alawites themselves are confirming that this does indeed seem to be the regime’s plan. The GlobalPost interviewed Haidar, a 30 year-old Alawite whose father is active in the Syrian security services: “The massacres in the Sunni villages are to clean the west bank of the Orontes from Sunnis and the military operations in the area are to drive Sunnis eastward.” Haidar adds that his sect is being told that there are vast oil and gas deposits along the coast that will enrich the inhabitants.
Meanwhile, while no one was looking, another autonomous region was being born in the north-east of Syria – not out of psychopathic malice but out of sheer pragmatism and geopolitical cunning. Rival Kurdish factions have tactically reconciled to form their own de facto regional government, which comes complete with its own military apparatus.
The Kurdish National Council (KNC), which represents the major Kurdish political parties inside Syria, and the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian offshoot of the PKK in Turkey (considered a terrorist organisation by Washington and Ankara), have lately signed a power-sharing agreement that will keep Syrian Kurdistan at a fortified remove from both the regime and Arab opposition forces for the foreseeable future. Heyam Akil, the London-based representative of one Kurdish party that is a member of the KNC, told me today that the deal includes the creation of security and foreign relations committees, the former to be structured as “a sort of civil defence,” and latter “in order to deal with the Syrian opposition and international community”.
Not for nothing was this agreement overseen and shepherded into existence by the President of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, in Irbil. The message could not be clearer: the Kurds are their own political and military power in a rapidly deteriorating Syria. If the world is interested, it can negotiate with them directly.
It should be added that this agreement also represents the failure of the Syrian National Council (SNC), the main opposition group, to put aside its chauvinism and marginalise its Islamist influences in order to forge a lasting relationship with the KNC, members of which had previously been kidnapped, threatened or assaulted by PYD militants. (Assad has been excellent at sowing demographic division, but the Syrian opposition has been even better at uniting demographies in their division.) And even if this agreement eventually breaks down, as an earlier one did, it’s hard to imagine the Kurds willingly ceding their new-found semi-independence to anything other than a federalist government like the one their brethren have in Iraq.
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