BEIRUT, Lebanon, Nov. 5 (UPI) -- Syrian Kurds are reported consolidating their hold on northeastern Syria along the border with Iraq after defeating jihadist groups in a three-day battle, the latest in a series of clashes since July in which the Kurds have come out on top.
This could move them a step closer to setting up their own embryo mini-state, possibly linked to the Iraqi Kurds' semiautonomous enclave across the frontier and the core of an ethnic state combining for the first time the Kurds of Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey.
The capture of the Yaaroubiyah post Oct. 26 from jihadist groups, including the formidable al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, marked a major advance for the fighters of the Kurdish People's Defense Units, or YPG, linked to the Democratic Union Party, or PYD, and a setback for the jihadists who've emerged as a major force in this multifaceted war.
But the YPG's takeover of the oil-producing region has added another layer of complexity to an already bewildering conflict. The upshot is that all this is likely to draw Turkey, Iraq and the Iraqi Kurds' enclave, which is becoming increasingly independent of Baghdad, deeper into the Syrian quagmire.
The YPG/PYD is the most potent political force among Syria's Kurdish minority, which comprises about 10 percent of the 23 million population, and has links to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, that's been fighting a separatist war in Turkey since 1984.
Kurdish forces in Syria were initially ambivalent when the Syrian uprising against the regime of President Bashar Assad erupted in March 2011 and then turned into a chaotic civil war in which about 120,000 people have been killed, with nearly several million driven from their homes.
But now the Kurds have become a potent force that's ostensibly against the Damascus regime that subjugated the Kurdish minority for decades.
Yet the Kurds seem to spend more time fighting other rebels groups than they do Assad's Iranian-backed forces, and that's how Assad wants things to stay so he can divide and conquer.
This internecine feuding between rebel groups has plagued opposition forces for much of the 30-month-old civil war and has played right into Assad's hands.
These rivalries have given him the time and space to organize, with the help of his Iranian allies and Lebanon's Hezbollah, defensive operations that leave him in control of most of the capital, Damascus, and the center of the country.
The war has largely stalemated, and while Assad may not be winning, he's not losing either.
If he can restore links between Damascus and the heartland of his Alawite minority in the northwest, with the ports of Latakia and Tartus through which Russia can supply him with arms, he'll be able to hold out more or less indefinitely.
So what the Syrian Kurds do next is crucial.
"As they fight to secure their new autonomous zone in northern Syria, the Kurds must be careful not to fall into the trap of becoming a tool of Bashar Assad against Syrian opposition forces and Turkey," warned Lebanese analyst Hussein Ibish.
"Assad did not act to prevent the Kurds from creating an autonomous region in July 2012 partly because his forces were bogged down fighting for major Syrian cities and strategic areas.
"But he was also hoping firstly to bedevil Turkey [which was backing the rebels] with the specter of a potentially threatening Kurdish presence along its southern border, and secondly to create a conflict between Arab rebels and Kurdish groups. Neither should oblige him."
Iraqi Kurdistan, which has been more concerned with securing its own future than trying to pull the region's Kurdish enclaves in Syria, Turkey and Iran into a long-dreamed of ethnic state, has being inexorably dragged into the Syrian vortex just as Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq are.
On Sept. 29, the headquarters of the Asayesh Gashti, the intelligence and counterterrorism apparatus of the oil-rich Kurdistan regional government, in its prosperous capital Erbil was blasted by five suicide attackers and truck bombs.
The highly synchronized attack in a region that had become an oasis of stability and security, able to attract foreign investment, bore all the hallmarks of a jihadist operation and spillover from Syria.
Observers see no end in sight for the Kurd-jihadist war within a war. "This is just the beginning," warned Kurdish analyst Sirwan Kajjo.
