BEIRUT: A powerful Kurdish party announced plans Wednesday to declare a federal region in northern Syria, a model it hopes can be applied to the entire country. The idea was promptly dismissed by Turkey and also the Syrian government team at UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva.
The declaration was expected to be made at the end of a Kurdish conference that began Wednesday in the town of Rmeilan, in Syria’s northern Hassakeh province.
The development comes as the Damascus government and Western- and Saudi-backed rebels are holding peace talks with a UN envoy in Geneva on ways to end the devastating civil war, which this week entered its sixth year.
The main Syrian Kurdish group, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and its military wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), have so far been excluded from those talks so as not to anger Turkey, despite Russia’s insistence that they be part of the negotiations. Ankara views the group as a terrorist organization.
Nawaf Khalil of the PYD told The Associated Press that his party is not lobbying for a Kurdish region but an all-inclusive area with representation for Turkmen, Arabs and Kurds in northern Syria.
Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Syria, making up more than 10 percent of the prewar population of 23 million. They control a border area stretching from the predominantly Kurdish town of Al-Malikiyah in the east, near the Iraqi border, to Afrin in the west, interrupted only by a stretch of territory that the Daesh group controls.
Syria’s Kurds have dramatically strengthened their hold on northern Syria during the civil war, carving out territory as they battled to drive out Islamic militants and declaring their own civil administration in three distinct enclaves, or cantons, under their control: Jazira, Kobani and Afrin.
Around 200 Kurdish representatives from those three cantons, known collectively as Western Kurdistan, or Rojava, were meeting in Rmeilan Wednesday to discuss the move.
A federal region could be a first step toward creating an autonomous region similar to the one Kurds run across the border in Iraq, where their territory is virtually a separate country.
Syria Kurds to declare federal region in Syria
Syria Kurds to declare federal region in Syria
Iraq executes a former senior officer under Saddam for the 1980 killing of a Shiite cleric
- Al-Sadr was a leading critic of Saddam’s secular Baathist government whose dissent intensified after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran
- The cleric’s execution in 1980 became a symbol of oppression under Saddam
BAGHDAD: Iraq announced on Monday that a high-level security officer during the rule of Saddam Hussein has been hanged for his involvement in the 1980 killing of a prominent Shiite cleric.
The National Security Service said that Saadoun Sabri Al-Qaisi, who held the rank of major general under Saddam and was arrested last year, was convicted of “grave crimes against humanity,” including the killing of prominent Iraqi Shiite cleric Mohammed Baqir Al-Sadr, members of the Al-Hakim family, and other civilians.
The agency did not say when Al-Qaisi was executed.
Al-Sadr was a leading critic of Iraq’s secular Baathist government and Saddam, his opposition intensifying following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, which heightened Saddam’s fears of a Shiite-led uprising in Iraq.
In 1980, as the government moved against Shiite activists, Al-Sadr and his sister Bint Al-Huda — a religious scholar and activist who spoke out against government oppression — were arrested. Reports indicate they were tortured before being executed by hanging on April 8, 1980.
The execution sparked widespread outrage at the time and remains a symbol of repression under Saddam’s rule. Saddam was from Iraq’s Sunni minority.
Since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, authorities have pursued former officials accused of crimes against humanity and abuses against political and religious opponents. Iraq has faced criticism from human rights groups over its application of the death penalty.
