The Kurdish Democratic Union Party, the largest and most organized Kurdish group in Syria, plans to claim autonomy from the embattled Syrian government in the coming days. Within three months it intends to hold general elections and a constitutional referendum to formalize Kurdish administration in the densely Kurdish-populated parts of northeast Syria. Syria's Kurdish population, which constitutes about 9 percent of the country's total population of 22.5 million, is most densely concentrated in Hasakah province, where the Democratic Union Party controls about 60 percent of the oil fields.
This poses a problem for Turkey, which faces the spreading Kurdish separatism at the same time it is dealing with mounting obstacles in its current peace track with the Kurdistan Workers' Party within its own borders. Turkey's government currently lacks the means to forcibly suppress the spread of Kurdish separatism in the region, much less secure a comprehensive peace with Kurdish militants in Turkey. However, Syrian Kurds will be far more limited than their Iraqi counterparts in their ability to consolidate control over an economically viable autonomous zone. Driven by competing strategic interests, Turkey and the Syrian regime will try to play off competing factions in the Kurdish and Sunni rebel landscape, which will only augment infighting in the Syrian Kurdish region and undermine the Democratic Union Party's attempt to consolidate power. At the same time, Turkey will struggle to ensure that the Kurdish political evolution in Syria does not revive the Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey as Ankara's own peace process starts to derail.
