Thank you Very Much for this Thread, Azari.
Yesterday NPR had a piece on the Kurds of Syria.....
With A Dose Of Caution, Kurds Oppose Syrian Regime
FWIW
The gist was that the Kurds are not treated well by Assad, not allowed to have Syrian citizenship.....Don't get the right to vote or speak their own language like Israeli Arabs
............. Don't like Assad......... Think he is an Ass
Syria's Kurds, who make up an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the country's population and are concentrated in the northeast.
Most will tell you they're against a regime that has withheld citizenship for many Kurds, forbidden them to speak or teach in their own language, and treated them like second-class citizens. But they're not all willing to fight to bring down the Assad regime.
Some of the Kurds are unwilling to commit atrocities for Assad* and so they desert from Assad's Syrian Army.......
A man who goes by the name Abu Shiro says he was a soldier in the Syrian army for a year until he escaped to Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.
He says he paid bribes to stay in his barracks, rather than shoot unarmed protesters or arrest civilians and hand them to the dreaded security services.
BUT they are unwilling to join the Free Syria Army and fight Assad because the Sunni Leaders of the Free Syria Army will not guarantee rights for the Kurds.....
A growing number of Syrian soldiers have defected and joined the Free Syrian Army, leading an insurgency that seeks to topple the Assad regime.
Asked why he hasn't done this, Abu Shiro says, "It's simple. Because I'm a Kurd."
The Kurds are unsure what sort of status they might have under a new government, and therefore have been hesitant to join the fighting against the current leadership.
It's a position that infuriates many in the Syrian opposition. If you are against the Assad regime, the thinking goes, why not stay and fight, or at least stay and protest?
The reason, says Abdulhakim Bashar, who heads a Syrian Kurdish political party, is that predominantly Arab members of the Syrian opposition have refused to reassure the Kurds that they'll have it better if the current regime falls.
At Odds With The Syrian Opposition
At a recent meeting meant to unite the Syrian opposition, Kurds walked out after opposition leaders refused to promise the Kurds some special recognition in the new Syria.
"If this regime falls, and we don't have a clear program of how we'll get our rights, it could be worse than the regime itself," Bashar says.
The outsiders, US and others, are trying to pressure the Kurds to just concentrate on overthrowing Assad
BUT the Kurds fear that without guarantees, things may be worse for them after Assad than before........
Bashar says U.S. and European diplomats have been pushing the Kurds to focus on bringing down the Assad regime first, and worry about the details later
PLEASE! How dumb are our/US/UZ diplomats..... to think that the Kurds are that dumb! Come ON!
The Kurds have done the dirty work before and gotten betrayed before........ By the Turks and by US/Uz..........
Come ON!
Unless it's someone like Pol Pot...
You get the details first especially since given the history of the Muslim Brothers they are IMVHO within an order of magnitude of being as bad as Assad....
But the Kurds don't totally trust the international community either, says Robert Lowe of the London School of Economics, who has co-edited a book about the Kurds of Syria. They believe they were abandoned when they rose up against the Syrian regime several years ago.
"Kurds have suffered before. They had their own uprising in 2004. And they suffered very badly for this," Lowe says.
Dozens of Kurds were killed, and hundreds more fled the country.
Also worried about Turkish involvement in this mess..... Kurds and Turks are not always friends unless they are murdering Armenians
A Mistrust Of Turkey
What's more, says Lowe, there's the question of Turkey. Turkey has been very supportive of Syrians who oppose their regime. But Turkey has for decades dealt harshly with its own Kurdish minority.
"The Kurds of Syria are very suspicious of Turkey and are very hostile to Turkish involvement," Lowe says.
Even if Turkey acts against the Syrian regime by, say, arming the Syrian opposition, the Kurds will not trust Turkey's motives or intentions, says Lowe.
So until the Kurds know more about how their friends and enemies will act, the Kurds of Syria say they will wait and see.
IMVHO the Kurds are wise........
But need to be wiser.......
Are likely to get screwed no matter what they do or don't do........ No profit in it........
Don't wait and see........
Best to do what one Kurd did with his family........ Leave for Kurdistan in Iraq where as the piece said the Kurds are doing well for themselves**
Abu Azad and his family, which includes five children, recently walked out of Syria and ended up in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, where the Kurds of Iraq govern an autonomous zone that's grown stronger and more prosperous since the fall of Saddam Hussein as Iraq's leader in 2003.
The trip took Abu Azad's family an entire night, crossing streams and climbing mountains. Now they share a house with dozens of other Syrian Kurdish refugees. Soon they'll be living in a tent.
*Unlike the awful atrocities the Kurds did for the Turks during the Armenian Holocaust...........
**Not necessarily for anyone else AIUI........
But a good idea in general..........
Leave and live.........
Of course if you don't have a place to go............
May have to kill to live.........
Reason set up Space Colonies..........
Each crazy nut culture can have its own hollow asteroid world if they have the tech ability to maintain it......
NOTE: Found the link........... Have inserted quotes.........
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/05/150064912 ... ian-regimeFor the love of G_d, consider you & I may be mistaken.
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