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• On the other hand, the PYD founded in Syria in 2003 by the PKK has been enjoying de facto autonomy just across the border from Turkey since 19 July 2012 when the increasingly beleaguered Assad regime pulled most of its troops out of the Kurdish areas in order to concentrate on maintaining its position in the centre and west of the country.
• Indeed, in March 2012, Murat Karayilan, the PKK military leader holed up in his Qandil mountains sanctuary on the Iraqi-Iranian border, declared that, ‘If the Turkish state intervenes against our people in Western Kurdistan, all of Kurdistan will turn into a war zone.’2
• Firstly for them not to co-operate with the regime. […] The second is for them not to form a de-facto foundation based on ethnic or religious bases. […] The third is for them not to engage in activities that could endanger the security of the Turkish border.
• During the days of the French mandate (1920–46), France of course played an important role. Among many French actors, two noted scholars of Kurdish studies, Pierre Rondot and Roger Lescot, also gave covert aid to the Kurds, working specifically with the Bedir Khan brothers.
• This situation illustrates that the Arab majority was not always simply paranoid about the minorities existing within their states. Jordi Tejel even argues that the Syrian government issued the notorious Decree 93 that stripped 20 per cent of the Kurds in Syria of their citizenship in 1962 in part because of transnational influences involving the m...