Strategic Arab-Kurdish Alliance: Syria's Support of Kurdish Organisations during the Cold War

Abstract

All major Kurdish political movements interacted with foreign states in search of resources and support. Besides superpowers, it was the Arab nationalist regime of Syria that cooperated with foreign Kurdish radical groups in the most stable way as well as instrumentalised them. The paper fills the gap in scholarship by focusing on Damascus' relations with the Iraqi Kurdish groups in the 1950s – 1990s and noting their significance for Syria's alliance with Kurdish militants from Turkey. What drove them, how the dynamics of these relations changed, what role did this cooperation play in Kurdish politics and which consequences it had? The most active phase of these relations included the 1970s and the 1980s. The Assad regime's Kurdish policies were closely related to Syria's rise as a regional power enabled by its tapping into external resources. These were provided by a number of states driven by Cold War developments. The paper focuses on the question of Kurdish own agency in such interactions: how the Kurdish groups succeeded or failed in avoiding dependency on the Syrian regime. The research relies on Iraqi, Iranian, Turkish and Soviet media reports and political documents of the time, archival records, memoirs.