Syria Kurds Plan Temporary Autonomous Government

Syria's Kurds are planning to create a temporary autonomous government to administer Kurdish regions in the north of the war-torn country, Kurdish officials told Agence France Presse on Friday.

"We think that the crisis in Syria will not end anytime soon, so we need to create democratic self-rule in western Kurdistan," said Salih Muslim, head of Syria's Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).

Western Kurdistan refers to Kurdish majority areas in northern Syria, including Hassakeh province in the northeast of the country and parts of Aleppo province.

"This has been our project since 2007," added Muslim, stressing nonetheless that the government would be temporary.

"This is provisional," he said. "Once there is a broad agreement on the future of Syria, we will put an end to this autonomy."

Shirzad Izidi, a spokesman for the People's Council of Western Kurdistan, another Syrian Kurdish group, confirmed the plans to form a temporary government.

"This Kurdish administration will serve as a temporary local government and will take measures to organize elections in Kurdish areas," Izidi told AFP.

"In some respects it will be similar to the experience in (Iraqi) Kurdistan."

Izidi said ideas for the formation of the government and elections were being discussed by various Kurdish parties, and that "there is an idea also to write an interim constitution so that there will be no vacuum".

Kurdish regions of northern Syria have been administered by local Kurdish councils since regime forces withdrew from the areas in the middle of 2012.

The redeployment was seen as a tactical move by the regime, freeing up forces to battle rebels elsewhere, and encouraging the Kurds to avoid allying with the opposition in order to maintain their new-found autonomy.

Since then, the Kurds have walked a fine line, trying to avoid antagonizing either the regime or the rebels, and focusing on maintaining security in Kurdish areas while strengthening control over their own affairs.

Kurds represent about 15 percent of the Syrian population, and are mostly concentrated in the northern part of the country.

Unlike their counterparts in Iraq, Syrian Kurdish leaders have not usually called publicly for a separate state, but in the wake of the uprising that began in March 2011, they have said they hope to maintain their new-found autonomy.

Their focus on their own community, and their ambiguous stance on the uprising, has earned them anger from the mainstream rebels, who view them with suspicion.

Their secular values are also anathema to the hardline jihadists of Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, two al-Qaida-affiliated groups that have been fighting Kurdish forces in recent weeks.

Earlier this week, Kurdish fighters expelled jihadists from the town of Ras al-Ain and the nearby border crossing with Turkey, and fighting between the groups was continuing elsewhere in Hassakeh province in north-east Syria.

Neighboring Turkey views the PYD, the most prominent Kurdish group in Syria's Kurdish areas, as a branch of the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), which it considers a "terrorist group".

On Friday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu warned it would "respond immediately" to any violation of its borders by Kurdish fighters, who he said posed "grave dangers".