The British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond shakes hands with a Kurdish Peshmerga fighter during a welcoming ceremony held at a training camp supervised by British officers in Erbil, northern Iraq yesterday (AFP)
In a step considered by followers of developments in political and military affairs in Syria as a possible prelude to partition, Syria’s Kurds announced the establishment of a federal system in areas under their control in northern Syria yesterday, an idea that both the regime and the opposition reject.
The head of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) Salih Muslim told Asharq Al-Awsat that “Those meeting in Geneva and those who are opposed to this step should understand what we have achieved over the past years, especially in regards to liberating our areas from the regime and ISIS alike. We emphasise that the announcement of the new system will reform the relationships between the components of society in these areas and we will not be a copy of the Iraqi Kurdistan”.
A vote to approve the establishment of a federal system in the three Kurdish areas that are self-governed was held at the end of a constitutive meeting to organise self-management which lasted for two days in the town of Rmelan in northeast Syria. Around two hundred people attended the meeting. A 31-member constituent committee to organise the federal system was formed and Mansour Al-Salumi (an Arab from Tell Abyad) and Hadiya Yusuf (a Kurd) are the joint presidents of the committee.
The National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces said in a statement that there is “no place for any pre-emptive projects that hijack the will of the Syrian people” and warned against “any attempt to form entities, regions or administrations that hijack the will of the Syrian people”. The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) quoted a source at the Syrian Foreign Ministry who confirmed that “proposing the issue of a union or a federal system would constitute an encroachment on the unity of Syrian land and has no legal value”.