Excerpt, National Interest:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/jim-jeffreys-terrible-syria-solution-could-create-more-chaos-67212Jim Jeffrey's Terrible Syria Solution Could Create More Chaos
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Why the Syrian Kurds Don’t Trust Assad
To understand why Jeffrey’s Syria and Kurdish policies are so destructive, it is important to understand Syrian, Turkish, and Kurdish history. First, it is crucial to understand why Syria’s Kurds cannot trust Assad. In 1982, Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, cordoned off the center of Syria’s fourth largest city Hama and destroyed it after an operation to capture a Sunni insurgent leader went awry. The ensuing massacre killed at least ten thousand people although Assad liked to brag that the death toll was much higher. In Beirut to Jerusalem, author Thomas Friedman coined the term “Hama Rules†to describe Assad’s absolute brutality to crush an enemy.
That was only half the story, however. Assad did not simply seek to crush the Muslim Brotherhood; he sought to co-opt it and find a new modus vivendi. He struck a devil’s bargain with Syria’s Sunni Islamists: They were free to conduct their jihad, but only in his service or outside Syria. In March 2004, for example, Assad unleashed Arab Islamists alongside Baathists in his efforts to crush Kurdish identity in northeastern Syria. Simultaneously, Bashar al-Assad allowed Syria to become the main highway for foreign fighters seeking to enter Iraq to conduct terrorism and wage insurgency against both U.S. forces and the Iraqi government. In 2009, none other than Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s corrupt, sectarian and pro-Iranian prime minister, blamed Syria for facilitating terrorism in Iraq. This history explains why Syrian Kurds today both distrust the Assad regime and the Sunni Arab opposition.
