ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Syrian Kurds proposed a system of governance and cooperation between the two areas of Syria still out of Damascus control and offered Turkey the role of guarantor, but Ankara turned down the idea, an official from the Kurdish-led administration in northeast Syria said on Friday.
“We wanted to have a dialogue with northwest Syria to establish a decentralized system for both northwest and northeast regions of Syria to allow self-governance for both regions and Turkey act as a guarantor, but Turkey did not agree,” Riyad Derar, co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council’s (SDC) Consultative Office, told Rudaw on the sidelines of a conference organized by the SDC in Brussels.
The decentralization proposal was made in 2021, but “since Syria’s fate was tied to Turkey, they couldn’t make independent decisions and were awaiting Turkey’s approval,” Derar said.
Northwest Syria is under the control of Turkey-backed rebel groups. Half of Idlib province, as well as parts of Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia provinces, are the last rebel-held bastions in the country after President Bashar al-Assad seized back swathes of territory over the course of the brutal Syrian civil war.
Kurds, meanwhile, carved out an area of control in the northeast. They established their own armed forces and political entities, including the SDC, and announced an autonomous entity called the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) – also known as Rojava.
“Turkey does not want the two regions to work with each other on anything,” Derar said, adding that the international community should pressure Turkey to bring peace to the region.
Throughout the Syrian conflict, Ankara has supported rebel forces opposed to the rule of Assad, including some with links to al-Qaeda and other extremist groups. Turkey has also launched repeated incursions into Syrian territory, most notably against Kurds in Afrin in 2018, and continues to occupy large swathes of the country’s north.
Clashes between Turkey-backed rebel groups and Kurdish-led forces have been ongoing since the initial years of the civil war, with periodic flare-ups still occurring.
Syrians rose up against the Assad regime in March 2011, leading to a full-scale civil war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, left millions more in dire need of humanitarian assistance, and much of the country’s infrastructure in ruins.
More than 13 million Syrians, half the country’s pre-war population, have been displaced since the start of the civil war, and more than six million are refugees who have fled the war-torn country, according to United Nations figures. Millions of Syrians are living in Turkey.
Zinar Shino in Brussels contributed to this article.
