Assad Envoy to Kurdistan: Damascus is a Friend of the Kurds

 

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Syrian President Bashar Assad remains a friend of his country’s large Kurdish minority and wants to keep their relatively calmer regions out of the civil war, said an envoy from Damascus visiting Erbil last week.

Omar Ose, a Kurdish member of the Syrian parliament who is close to the embattled Syrian president, said Assad “is aware of my visit to the Kurdistan Region and he is glad that I am here. In this visit I will explain the Syrian situation to Kurdistan’s leadership as it is.”

According to Ose, who said he had met Assad twice, the president is intent on keeping the Kurdish areas out of a war that has been raging since March 2011, in which up to 120,000 people are believed to have died.

“President Assad from the very beginning warned the Syrian army to stay away from confronting or killing the Kurds,” Ose said.

He cautioned that neighboring Turkey is practicing a more hostile policy towards Syrian Kurds than Damascus.

“Now the Turkish government plays a very bad role against Syria and Syrian Kurds,” he said. “It supports terrorist groups to target the Kurds. All Turkey wants is to displace the Kurds, just like now.”

Ose acknowledged that the Kurds have acted wisely by not getting involved in the war, but that they made a mistake in declining Assad’s call for negotiations at the outset of the revolution.

“A year and a half ago he (Assad) sent a plane to the Qamishlo airport to bring the Kurdish leadership to Damascus, but the Kurdish leadership made a historical mistake and refused Assad’s invitation,” Ose explained. “Back then the Kurdish leadership believed that Assad would collapse in a couple of weeks, so why meet with him.”

In an effort to reach out to regional leaders about his country’s crisis, the Syrian president invited Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani to Damascus last year, which the latter declined.

According to Ose, Assad understands the delicate position of the Iraqi Kurds and therefore “he was not upset by (Barzani’s) refusal.”

Though Syrian Kurdish parties treat the mainstream opposition with suspicion and refuse to join the war against the regime in Damascus, Ose believes some Kurdish groups are now contemplating joining the opposition, which he sees as “a major mistake.”

“The current Syrian regime is much better than the opposition for the Kurds,” he warned. “It is in the interest of the Kurds if Assad stayed in power.”

“President Assad knows the situation of Kurdistan,” said Ose. “He understands that Kurdistan has good relations with Turkey, America, and Europe.”

Ose said that the Syrian president perceives the Iraqi Kurds as friends and that he warns them of the calamitous consequences of the possible fall of Damascus.

“He (Assad) told me ‘when you visit Kurdistan tell the Kurdish leadership that we are not against you. We are friends and in the same front.’ He also said ‘tell them that if Syria collapses then it will be Iran’s turn, then after Iran it will be Kurdistan Region’s turn.’”

Several weeks ago when reports surfaced of the massacre of Kurdish civilians in Syria by armed Islamist groups, President Barzani vowed to protect the Kurds, by possibly sending Peshmarga forces across the border. This act, said Ose, would have been acceptable to Damascus.

“Assad does not have problems with Peshmarga forces going to Syria to protect Syrian Kurdistan,” Ose maintained. “But that should be done in a coordinated way, and shouldn’t cause a Kurdish-Kurdish war.”

In last year’s elections, said Ose, he won 130,000 votes, most of them from Damascus’s Kurdish community to secure a seat in the Syrian parliament.

On the situation of Syria’s Kurds, Ose said, “The Kurds ask for democracy, but they do not treat each other democratically.”