Paris Killings Highlight Kurdish, Regional Issues for Turkey

One of the greatest effects of Syrian developments on Turkish public opinion has been to show that the Kurdish problem, which is the number-one item on the country’s agenda, has dimensions beyond being an internal problem of Turkey. Especially when some Kurdish settlements in Syria along the Turkish border were quickly abandoned in summer 2012 to the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) by the Assad regime, the government and Turkish public realized the probability of the emergence of a second Kurdish entity south of Turkey's borders, in addition to the one in Iraq.

The example for Syrian Kurds to emulate was that in Iraq following the collapse of the central Arab nationalist regime. They would go the way of Iraqi Kurds and demand a federal Syria. Since the location and topography of “Syrian Kurdistan” and the number and density of Kurds was different from Iraqi Kurdistan, they would ask for a self-rule in the shape of “autonomy,” if not a federation. But they couldn’t return to their former life.

Two "Kurdistans” below its southern border would inevitably get Turkey into hot water in two ways:

1. If changes to the Iraqi and Syrian maps result from regional developments, two "Kurdistans” would merge to a single entity — that is, an independent Kurdistan state would emerge.
2. Whether an independent Kurdistan larger than that in federal Iraq emerges to the south of the Turkish border, or the Kurds continue to survive in a federal or autonomous structure without any change in the borders of Iraq and Syria, it's unthinkable that it would not reflect on Turkey, where more than half of the Kurds in the world live and where a very dynamical Kurdish political life exists.

Either the separatist tendency of the Turkish Kurds would grow stronger toward an independent Kurdish state, or Turkish Kurds wouldn’t agree anything less than the status of their kin in Iraq and Syria.