On May 30, 1945, as French forces bombarded Damascus in the final months of World War II, a rumor swept through the city’s Kurdish quarter, on the slopes of Mount Qasioun: The Syrian government had collapsed, and President Shukri al-Quwatli had fled the capital.
Seizing the moment, young Kurdish Damascenes took up arms, ostensibly in self-defense, and some even raised the Kurdish tricolor flag — a symbol devised in 1920 by the Istanbul-based Society for the Rise of Kurdistan. Inspired by the short-lived Kingdom of Kurdistan (1921-1925) in Sulaymaniyah, in modern-day Iraq, the Kurds in Syria saw this as an opportunity for greater freedom. Yet the Syrian authorities were quick to respond. Foreign Minister Jamil Mardam Bey rushed to the Kurdish neighborhood, braving French shelling, to deliver an impromptu speech. Addressing the Kurds as “the glorious sons of Saladin,” he invoked the legacy of the 12th-century Kurdish sultan who had fought against the Crusaders and was buried near Damascus’ Great Umayyad Mosque. His words temporarily quelled the unrest, but Kurdish separatism would resurface at various points throughout the rest of the 20th century.
Fast forward to the outbreak of the Syrian revolt against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, when young Kurds took the initiative once again. They raised their flag in Kurdish areas east of the Euphrates River, hoping that if Assad collapsed, they would finally be able to revive their ancestral dream. At this point, Syrian Kurds numbered approximately 2.5 million — 10% of the total population of Syria and 5% of the total Kurdish population worldwide. But this time, Assad did not send his foreign minister to soothe their fears and talk to them. Instead, he rounded them up and threw them in jail, prompting the Kurds to take up arms and, eventually, form the militia that has now grown into a full-fledged army, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). With support from the United States, Syrian Kurds carved out their own autonomous region, which they call Rojava, or Syrian Kurdistan.
Five months after the toppling of Assad in December 2024, it is clear that his successor, transitional President Ahmad al-Sharaa, will hear nothing of Kurdish autonomy or statehood. But it is equally clear that he does not want to fight the Kurds, seeing that as an uphill battle that will damage his newly established revolutionary legitimacy and turn the West against him. Rather than fight them, al-Sharaa has opted for a political approach, reaching an agreement with SDF leader Mazloum Abdi on March 10, 2025, which calls for a merger of the latter’s forces with those of the newly established Syrian army. The accord also promises to restore oil wells presently under Kurdish control to the authority of the Syrian government in Damascus, while guaranteeing that state revenues are spent generously on the Kurdish territories.
This agreement is unlikely to solve Syria’s “Kurdish question,” which, for more than a century, has dominated relations between Syrian Arabs and the country’s Kurdish minority.
Many Kurds have held positions of authority in Syria, both before and after the country’s independence in 1946. Some have attained senior political positions and become wealthy. But as the Ottoman period gave way to the modern era, questions about the Kurdish minority’s place in Syria came to the fore. For some, the answer lay in Arabism, the nationalist struggle that defined the 20th century, and in Syrian Kurds being full citizens inside a Syrian republic. For others, it lay in Kurdish nationalism and pursuit of a state of their own. This duality has existed within some of the most prominent Kurdish families, down to the present day.
The most notable Kurd of the early 20th century was Abdul Rahman Pasha al-Yusuf, an Ottoman aristocrat and emir of the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca since the 1890s. Hailing from a Kurdish family originally from Diyarbakir, in modern-day Turkey, he was among the most powerful men under Sultan Abdulhamid, although he never assumed an official position at the court in Istanbul. He was also among the richest, owning the entire shore of Lake Tiberias in Palestine; three villages in al-Ghouta, the agricultural belt around Damascus; five villages in the countryside of Idlib; and 25 in the Golan Heights. In post-Ottoman Syria, he was elected as a legislator for Damascus in the country’s first parliament, known as the Syrian National Congress.
The most prominent Kurdish family in Syrian politics, however, was the Barazi clan, which immigrated to the central city of Hama at the turn of the 18th century, coming from Ayn Arab in northern Syria and Urfa in southeastern Turkey. One clan member, Aslan Agha al-Barazi, took part in the armed rebellion against the French in the 1920s. Another, Najib Agha al-Barazi, served as a lawmaker for Hama in the Syrian parliament in the 1930s.
Yet the member of this large and illustrious family who had the most central role in the upheavals of the Cold War era was Husni al-Barazi, who would go from agitator to prime minister, ending his life in exile. His biography is a good example of the complex relationship between Syrian and Kurdish nationalism.
Barazi was among the early founders of the secret anti-Ottoman al-Fatat Society, created in Paris in 1911. He was minister of the interior under the French Mandate, only to be arrested for his connection to Syrian rebels staging a military uprising against the French from Jabal al-Druze.
He then served as prime minister from April 1942 to January 1943, and also established the Al-Nass newspaper in Damascus, which gained widespread notoriety during the Cold War for being staunchly anti-Soviet and pro-American. Barazi wrote its front-page editorial, trashing socialism, Marxism, the Soviet Union and Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. His words were too much for Syrian intelligence: In 1957, the pro-Nasser head of military intelligence, Col. Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj, ordered the closure of Al-Nass and the arrest of Barazi on charges of “high treason.” The ex-premier happened to be in Turkey when this happened, and spent the remainder of his years between Istanbul and Beirut, where he died in 1975 without ever having returned to Syria.
Barazi stands as an example of the tension between Arab and Kurdish nationalism. During his active years in Syrian politics, he never referenced his Kurdish roots, always portraying himself as a Syrian and Arab nationalist. But this identity did not seem to survive in exile, for when he sat down with professor Yusuf Ibish of the American University of Beirut in the late 1960s, recording his memoirs on tape, he showed clear sympathy for the Kurdish nationalist movement and for the Barzani clan that was then leading its rebels against the Baath Party regime in Iraq.
This same duality of Arabism and Kurdish nationalism can also be seen in the life of Barazi’s cousin, Muhsen al-Barazi (1904-1949), a brilliant legal mind with a doctorate in international law from the University of Lyon. A professor of law at Damascus University, Muhsen al-Barazi was appointed bureau chief to President Quwatli in 1943, also acting as his speechwriter and adviser and, ultimately, as secretary-general of the Syrian presidency. Rarely out of government during the 1940s, he served as minister of education in 1941 and then as minister of interior, foreign affairs and health. Barazi had the president’s ear and, in 1946, lobbied on behalf of another fellow Kurd named Husni al-Zaim, a discharged military officer who was struggling to join the newly formed Syrian army. Zaim was a Damascene Kurd who had served in the French Army of the Levant during the mandate, but had been arrested and dismissed after charges of embezzlement during World War II. Barazi talked Quwatli into returning Zaim to uniform service, making him commander of military police and then chief of staff of the Syrian army during the Palestine War of 1948.
It was in that capacity that Zaim launched his coup d’etat, arresting President Quwatli on March 29, 1949. Muhsen al-Barazi helped Zaim draft a new constitution and, in return, was appointed premier in June 1949, only to be executed by firing squad, along with Zaim himself, following Syria’s second coup just months later, on Aug. 14, 1949. That is just about all that Syrian history books say about him, with the exception of a very interesting and forgotten passage in the 1977 memoirs of Munir al-Rayyes, publisher of the Damascus daily Barada. Rayyes was a hard-line Arab nationalist and future supporter of Nasser. In his memoirs, he claims that Muhsin al-Barazi had been secretary of the secret Kurdish society, Xoybun, which was founded in Bhamdoun, Lebanon, in 1927, and credited with carrying out the 1930 Ararat rebellion in eastern Turkey. Rayyes claims that Barazi’s “Syrianism” and closeness to Quwatli were merely cover for his true intentions, which included “ceding half of Syria and three-quarters of Iraq in order to create Greater Kurdistan.”
Rayyes adds that Barazi had penned all of Xoybun’s literature, serving as the “secret philosopher” of the Kurdish nationalist movement in Syria. The hard-boiled journalist wrote to Quwatli to complain and then paid him a personal visit, asking how an Arab nationalist like himself could trust a Kurdish separatist like Barazi. This man, he said to the president, “was overseeing the systematic Kurdish emigration from Turkey to Syria, to make the population of al-Jazira region entirely Kurdish. That is where over half of our agricultural wealth is located, Mr. President.” He prophetically added: “If al-Jazira becomes Kurdish then there will no longer be a country called Syria.” Quwatli dismissed his worries, saying, “Don’t worry; al-Jazira will forever remain Syrian,” to which Rayyes snapped sarcastically, “Just like Palestine will forever remain Arab, right?” He then wrapped up the meeting and said, “One day, you will wake up to find that al-Jazira, and the entire Syrian north, have become part of Kurdistan.”
Quwatli just shrugged; he knew little about Kurdish nationalism. Indeed, it was under his watch that Syria gained its first Kurdish political party, the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria, formed by Abdul Hamid Darwish and Osman Sabri in 1957. Their goal was to promote and preserve Kurdish cultural rights, rather than autonomy, but they were nevertheless severely suppressed by Nasser during the short-lived Syrian-Egyptian union, when the two countries became the United Arab Republic, from 1958 to 1961. This wasn’t anti-Kurdish per se: Nasser tolerated no political parties, no matter what their program, and when Syria ceded from the union in 1961, Nasser waged a fiery campaign against its new leaders, accusing them of being enemies of Arabism and agents of Israel. That, among other things, prompted Syria’s new president to add the word “Arab” to the country’s name (which had previously been the “Syrian Republic”) and then to stage a controversial census in the al-Jazira region on Aug. 23, 1962. Its declared objective was to deal with the hundreds of thousands of Kurds who had illegally entered Syria from Turkey, while the unspoken objective was to stress Syria’s Arab identity and increase its Arab population. Overnight, 120,000 Kurds were stripped of their Syrian identity (20% of the overall Kurdish population in Syria). Some were registered as “ajanib” (“foreigners”), while others were recorded as “maktum al-qayd” (“unregistered”). As far as Syrian officialdom was concerned, these Kurds no longer existed and could not buy or sell property, nor receive birth or death certificates. Six decades down the road, that problem has not been solved. Nor has the matter of Kurdish statehood.
The Kurdish question took on new dimensions under President Hafez al-Assad in the 1970s. Assad hosted Iraqi Kurdish politicians who opposed the Baath regime in Baghdad, including Jalal Talabani, a left-wing Kurd who founded the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Damascus in 1975, with Syrian support. Assad also welcomed Masoud Barzani, leader of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan (KDP), which represented the traditional Kurdish landowning families. In 1980, Assad extended his hospitality to Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which was waging an insurgency against Turkey. Ocalan’s presence in Syria was a strategic move to pressure Turkey over water rights in the Euphrates. He remained in Syria until 1998, when escalating tensions with Ankara forced Assad to expel him. During his stay, Ocalan established military camps near Damascus and in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, then under Syrian control.
Arab nationalists were baffled by this alliance between a regime ostensibly rooted in Arab nationalism and Kurdish leaders striving for autonomy. For Assad, the Kurds were a tool to unsettle his rivals: Presidents Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Suleyman Demirel in Turkey. Whether the Kurds achieved statehood was of little concern to him, as long as it occurred in northern Iraq or southeastern Turkey — not in northern Syria or northwestern Iran, though those too were both regions that Kurds envisioned as part of a Greater Kurdistan. Assad’s gain would, eventually, backfire spectacularly, given that these very same Kurdish fugitives inspired the Kurds of Syria to voice their own demands, which started with cultural rights and grew into calls for autonomy and then, eventually, for Kurdish statehood.
As Kurdish politics seeped into Syrian discourse, Assad ensured that no Syrians joined Ocalan’s army in Turkey or the parties of Talabani and Barzani in Iraq. Those who did were arrested for promoting ethnic agendas, a taboo in Baathist Syria. To counterbalance this, Assad co-opted prominent Kurds in the religious establishment, such as Mohammad Said Ramadan al-Bouti, dean of the Faculty of Islamic Shariah at Damascus University, and Grand Mufti Sheikh Ahmad Kaftaro. Both supported his regime during his bloody crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, which culminated in the Hama Massacre of 1982. Bouti even led prayers at Assad’s funeral in 2000. He was killed in 2013 during the Syrian conflict.
Assad could not balance these opposing forces forever. The creation of semiautonomous Iraqi Kurdistan after the 1991 Gulf War, led by Talabani and Barzani, inspired Syrian Kurds to demand more political freedoms. Assad, who had opposed Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, struggled to explain how former guests of Damascus were now leading a project Syrian media labeled as “imperial” and “backed by Israel.” Assad had participated in the 1963 crackdown on Kurdish separatists in Iraq, as commander of the Syrian air force. Yet he now insisted that Syrian Kurds had no connection to the separatist movement, even erecting a bronze statue of Saladin in Damascus on the 800th anniversary of his death in 1993, emphasizing Kurdish integration into Syrian identity.
Friction between Kurds and Arabs would erupt soon after Assad’s death, in the early years of the rule of his son and successor, Bashar. On March 12, 2004, during a soccer match in the Kurdish city of Qamishli, Syrian Arabs raised photos of the recently deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. This greatly offended Kurdish members of the audience, who despised the Iraqi dictator for his chemical weapons massacre in Halabja in March 1988, amid the Anfal campaign of February-September 1988, which killed an estimated 50,000-100,000 Iraqi Kurds. Syrian Kurds were furious, disrupting the match, tearing down a statue of Hafez al-Assad and storming the local branch of the Baath Party. This marked the first major act of defiance against the Bashar al-Assad regime and set the stage for Kurdish involvement in Syria’s 2011 uprising.
The Kurdish struggle in Syria — from fleeting moments of defiance under French rule to the rise of Kurdish nationalism — reflects a century of shifting alliances, repression and resilience. Though the Kurds have repeatedly seized opportunities to assert their identity, external pressures and regional power dynamics have consistently thwarted their aspirations for statehood. The recent agreement between Damascus and the SDF may offer a fragile compromise, but history suggests that Kurdish ambitions, once awakened, cannot easily be extinguished. Whether through autonomy, integration or continued resistance, the Kurds remain an indelible force in Syria’s fractured landscape, their fate still entangled with the whims of greater powers and the unresolved legacy of their past.
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