Syrian Kurdish Leader Sherkoh Abbas calls on the U.S. to stop supporting the PYD and the Islamists in Syria. He rejects the replacement of one dictator for another and emphasized that the U.S. needs to stand behind those that support democracy and human rights within the country.
In an interview with JerusalemOnline, Sherkoh Abbas, chairman of the Kurdish National Assembly of Syria (Kurdnas), stressed that the U.S. is making a mistake by supporting the PYD in Syria because they are linked to the PKK, which the United States, EU and their allies considers to be a terrorist organization due to their history of committing suicide bombings in Turkey and they also have ties to the Assad regime. “It is wrong for the US not to support the Kurds and we welcome the recent shift in US policy but they need to support the right people in Syria who want a federal model, democracy, human rights and not people who are against those values. The US always chooses the wrong people, whether the Islamists or people they themselves call terrorists.”
“I hope that they prove us wrong and delink themselves from the PKK and Assad,” Sherkoh Abbas told JerusalemOnline. “There are many leaders in the PYD that are trying to change the organization from within, but there are key people within the PYD who are blocking this because they aren’t Syrian Kurds and have allegiances to the PKK. Those people don’t allow the Syrian Kurds to flourish like in Iraqi Kurdistan. The PYD needs to show they are not against the US, the west, Israel and don’t support terror. More importantly, they need to work within the Kurdish front. Then, they can be supported.”
Until then, he stressed the U.S. should only support the Kurdish National Assembly of Syria and the Kurdish National Council: “There are about 21 Kurdish political parties between these two assemblies. They proscribe to federalism, good relations with the west and Israel, support democracy and the free market economy. Most of the Kurds proscribe to these groups. However, the PYD gets all the weapons and assistance in the region. They block these groups from creating a Kurdish regime in Syria and at the same time deny the Kurdish issue according to Ocalan’s speech (Ocalan only seeks to create a Kurdish state in Turkey and not in Syria, Iraq and Iran). Most of the Kurds are allied with the KRG, the west, and have the same values as Americans and western people, except for the PYD.”
Sherkoh Abbas noted that the U.S. is also making a grave mistake by supporting Turkey in the framework of the struggle against ISIS: “Turkey will never support the western agenda, Israel and the Kurds. They want to change the regime in Syria as part of their neo-Ottoman ambitions which is more Islamist. They want to crush Kurdish self-determination, for they don’t want the Kurds in Turkey to ask for the same. They are more interested in protecting the memorial for an Ottoman sultan than hundreds of thousands of women and children’s lives. They don’t have any value for that, if they view a memorial as more important than the elderly, women and children. It’s a nation going in the wrong direction if they are not going in a humanistic way.”
“The US administration still thinks they are in the Cold War,” he noted. “They need to think beyond it, about what America stands for: democracy and human rights. We only ask for that; we are the only engine for that change, but the US is not helping us because the petrol-dollar influences the decisions in Washington, DC. A lot of the issues, such as the Palestinian and Kurdish ones, could have been solved years ago without the interference of the Gulf States and Iran. But yet again, they still work with the failed regimes instead of working with the people to bridge the gap between them.”
“Qatar funds a lot of Islamists in Palestine,” Sherkoh Abbas stressed. “This leads to proxy wars and never peace. It is time to allow chaos so there will be order. There is no stability; only more radicalism and more terror. It is unbelievable that these horrific things are going on. The US needs to support the alternative groups. The very same people the US trains are no better than Assad. Syria should not remove one dictator for another. Syria as Kissinger stated is a failed state and it needs to be broken down, with independence or federalism. The Christians and Yazidis are fearful what will happen, but in the future, they can have autonomy in their own areas. Don’t prescribe to the Wahhabis for help. We need a lose federation and then to see the alternatives. This is how to stop the bloodshed: to break large chunks into small ones to have each managed by one group.”
“The US administration wants to bury their head in the sand and bring another dictator. Israel needs to get out of their hibernation,” Sherkoh Abbas stated in conclusion, while calling upon both countries to change their Syria policy. “We need to be a federation where the Sunnis, Druze, and Kurds have all their rights in Syria and become an oasis in the Middle East, but bringing another dictator will never work and this will bring more bloodshed; Iran is two steps ahead of the US in managing Syrian and ISIS affairs, as are a lot of terror groups.”
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