Explained: The Kurdish people and their renewed role in Syria

New Delhi: In the latest move of major regional significance, the Syrian government forces detained 300 Kurds and evacuated more than 400 Kurdish fighters after clashes in Aleppo. This comes after the US and allied forces carried out separate "large-scale” strikes against Islamic State targets. A Syrian interior ministry official told Agence France-Presse that about 360 Kurdish fighters and 60 wounded had been bussed to the Kurds’ de facto autonomous zone in the north-east from the Sheikh Maqsoud district.

A further 300 Kurds, including members of the Kurdish internal security forces, were reportedly detained. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said it had agreed under a ceasefire to withdraw from Aleppo after days of fighting, a major development for the region.

Kurdish forces had earlier controlled several pockets of Syria’s second city and operated a de facto autonomous administration across large swathes of land that it captured post the civil war. The Aleppo clashes, some of the most intense since the ousting of Bashar al-Assad, erupted after negotiations to integrate the Kurds into the country’s new government stalled.

Contemporaneous to this, the US and allied forces said they had carried out "large-scale” strikes against the Islamic State jihadist group in Syria last Saturday. "The strikes today targeted Isis throughout Syria” and were part of Operation Hawkeye Strike, which was launched "in direct response to the deadly Isis attack on US and Syrian forces in Palmyra”, US Central Command said in a statement.

Eventually the state-run Ekhbariya TV said the last Kurdish-led SDF fighters had left Aleppo on Sunday after the ceasefire deal allowed the evacuations. The official SANA news agency said buses "carrying the last batch of SDF members” were heading north-east. The SDF said in a statement it had "reached an understanding that led to a ceasefire and secured the evacuation of the martyrs, the wounded, the trapped civilians and the fighters from Ashrafiyeh and Sheikh Maqsoud neighbourhoods”. Both the US and EU had called for a return to political dialogue.

The Kurds are an important ethnic group, both historically and in the current context, which are native to a mountainous region spanning parts Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. They share a distinct language, cultural heritage, and historical identity. While having a significant population, the Kurds have yet to achieve an independent nation-state, a high point of aspiration of several Kurds globally.

In the case of Syria, the Kurds form one of the country’s largest minorities and are primarily concentrated in the north and northeast. For decades under the Assad state, many Syrian Kurds faced well known political marginalisation. Be it restrictions on their language or denial of citizenship to thousands much was not available to the Kurds be it in terms of self-expression or political representation.

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It was only with the advent of the Arab Spring and the subsequent spiralling of Syria in a gruesome and long civil war that Kurdish groups moved from a position of marginalisation to one of the most powerful regional actors. Kurdish political and armed organisations gradually consolidated control as the Syrian state weakened in the north. The People’s Protection Units (YPG), and later the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), established what came to be known as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava) and this started one of the most powerful recent phases of Kurdish self-administration and power sharing.

What followed was them becoming one of the leading ground forces against the Islamic State (ISIS) in a United States-led coalition. Their prime role in the battle against ISIS further strengthened the political and military might and weightage of the Kurds in Syria and the larger region as well. Syrian Kurds thus continue to hold a pivotal and highly sensitive position in Syria’s future.