When the attempted revolution broke out in 2011, Bashar al-Assad went up to Hasaka in the northeast and offered to restore citizenship to the Kurds if they would back his government instead of rebelling. The Kurds showed little interest in the offer. For them, the outbreak of revolution was a chance to stake their claim to a federal Kurdish ethnic province, which they call Rojava. Some hope that eventually it will become independent but at least they say they are willing to live under Syrian government rule. But, they insist, Syria has to be reformulated as a federal state with strong states’ rights instead of remaining a French-style unitary state.
The ambiguity of the Kurdish position, in seeking more autonomy from Damascus but declining to join in attempts to overthrow the government, is underlined by Kurdish relations with the Arab rebels. The latter moved toward Muslim fundamentalism, sometimes of an extreme sort, which turns out to have a latent element of virulent Arab racism. So the Arab rebels, especially the al-Qaeda affiliate and ISIL, attacked the Kurds. And the Kurds often made common cause with the Syrian Arab Army of al-Assad against them.
So what the YPG in Afrin is attempting to do is to revive that alliance with Damascus. It is alleging that the Arab rebels Turkey sent in to Afrin as guerrilla fighters against the Kurds are al-Qaeda, and depicting the Turkish invasion as a foreign occupation. In other words, the Kurds are ironically working the keyword political vocabulary of Arab nationalism, for which foreign colonial occupation is the supreme evil and the occupied are virtually saints.
