“I swear to God that if another country had invaded Syria it would have been much better. We all would have fought to the death for our country. But this…”
While young Kurdish conscripts of Syria have had a different experience during the Civil War than most other Kurds – as those living in the Kurdish part of Syria have been relatively spared from the worst fighting – they share the general sentiment that the ongoing war is not theirs. For those unfortunate enough to have their scheduled conscription period fall at the advent of the civil war, those between the ages of 20 and 23 depending upon deferments, the last two years have been an unforeseen nightmare.
After being impressed into service they were trained and deployed to the battlefields of western Syria, pursuant to the standard Army procedure of deploying soldiers away from their homes. Fear and information control inside the army, sustained through intense isolation of enlisted men, have been essential tools in maintaining a minimum of discipline and compliance in soldiers lacking any true loyalties to the regime.
At the start of the uprising in 2011, the regime offered full citizenships to tens of thousands of Kurds whose families had lacked full citizenship rights for generations, in a desperate attempt at winning an internal ally. That policy change merely revealed to most Kurds the cynical nature of the regime and gave them no guaranties of any peacetime favor from Assad. Yet the other belligerent factions presently on the battlefield offer nothing of interest to young Kurdish deserters, to include the PYD, which most see as a self-serving reincarnation of the PKK unacceptably linked to the regime. This has produced a generation of young Syrian Kurdish men waiting on the sidelines for something worth fighting for.
Initially, in the first months of the war, the main factor that kept young Kurdish soldiers from deserting was to preserve their personal future in Assad’s Syria. As a cohesive future in Syria began to appear less likely with the uprising turning to civil war, their prime motivation became self-preservation and the fear of retaliation against their families even if it meant complicity in war crimes. Delegation of authority to junior officers above them in the Syrian Army at war has allowed rampant petty brutality. Murder, torture, rape, and theft became endemic to small unit operations. Eventually, for those lucky enough to survive, an imminent sense of their certain death often coincided with a fortuitous opportunity to allow them to successfully desert. Most of them chose to seek asylum in Northern Iraq, knowing that it means they will never be able to return to a Syria still ruled by Assad.
This research is based on a series of interviews conducted in the northern part of Iraq, where the Syrian refugee community currently makes up about 3% of the population. This conference will develop upon the following themes:
- The status of Kurds in the Syrian military during the Civil War
- Their perspective through the development of the conflict – from the initial training, to their operational deployment: suppressing protests, searching houses, conducting arrests, running check points, and direct combat
- The complex psychology and circumstances of desertion
- Integration into refugee life – particularly at Camp Domiz
- How their perspective differs from other Syrian Kurds refugees on the situation in Syria
This conference is complemented by rich personal narratives from the deserters themselves.