Kurds of All Denominations Could Ultimately Destroy the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq
December 22, 2015
Vice News - Amid the chaos in Syria, the country's Kurds have managed to
resist the advances of the Islamic State and carve out a zone of
unprecedented autonomy in their own lands.
Over the past year,
the
YPG Kurdish militia beat back the Islamic State (IS) and nearly tripled
the size of Kurdish-controlled territory in Northern Syria, all the
while helping shrink the size of the IS caliphate by around 14 percent.
That's
according to a new report by the IHS Jane's, a private intelligence
company that analyzes international security issues, and has
been tracking the ground war in Syria.
As a result,
the Kurds are essentially in control of their own
mini-state — which they call Rojava — that runs across the
Turkish-Syrian border. Administered by the
Democratic Union Party (PYD)
the political arm of the YPG,
the government in Rojava has reached an
understanding with the Assad regime that allows the Kurds to govern
their own territory, while beating back IS from the borders.
"The
Kurds have had autonomy thrust upon them," explained Michael Gunter, a
professor of political science at Tennessee Tech University, and the
author of Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War, a
recent study of Kurdish politics in Syria. "There's no way they will go
back to a subservient position of not controlling their own lands
anytime in the future."
