Syrian deputy foreign minister Faisal Mekdad, Damascus, Syria, March 10, 2018. Photo: SANA via AFP
DAMASCUS,— Syria’s deputy foreign minister Faisal Miqdad on Thursday attacked U.S.-backed Kurdish led forces saying they had betrayed their country and accused them of a separatist agenda that gave Turkey a pretext to violate his country’s sovereignty.
Asked about whether Damascus should resume dialogue with the Kurdish-led forces that were facing a Turkish assault to oust them from northeast Syria, Maqdad said these “armed groups had betrayed their country and committed crimes against it.”
“We won’t accept any dialogue or talk with those who had become hostages to foreign forces … There won’t be any foothold for the agents of Washington on Syrian territory,” Maqdad told reporters in his office in Damascus.
A Syrian Kurdish official said earlier this week that the Kurdish-led authorities in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) in northern Syria may open talks with Damascus and Russia to fill a security vacuum in the event of a full withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Turkish border area.
A top commander was also quoted as saying one option for the Kurds was to hand back territory to the Syrian government.
The powerful Kurdish YPG militia was helped by the Syrian government to take control of mainly Kurdish inhabited cities in the early days of the conflict, as Damascus turned its attention to quelling popular protests against President Bashar al Assad’s rule that turned later into an armed insurrection.
The Syrian Kurdish YPG never fought the government during the war, and even accommodated the Syrian government’s presence in its main Kurdish city of Qamishlo and has a lucrative illicit oil sales business with Damascus.
Damascus, however, is loathe to cede the Syrian Kurds the level of autonomy they seek. The government earlier this year threatened the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces with military defeat if they did not agree to a return of state authority.
The Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD and its powerful military wing YPG/YPJ, considered the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and U.S. has provided them with arms. The YPG, which is the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF forces, has seized swathes of Syria from Islamic State.
The Kurdish forces expelled the Islamic State from its last patch of territory in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz in March 2019.
11,000 Kurdish male and female fighters had been killed in five years of war to eliminate the Islamic State “caliphate” that once covered an area the size of Great Britain in Syria and Iraq, Kurdish officials said.
Syria’s Kurds have established a semi-autonomous region in northeastern Syria during the country’s eight-year war.
In 2013, the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD — the political branch of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) — has established three autonomous Cantons of Jazeera, Kobani and Afrin and a Kurdish government across Syrian Kurdistan in 2013. On March 17, 2016, Kurdish and Arab authorities announced the creation of a “federal region” made up of those semi-autonomous regions in Syrian Kurdistan.
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