It was raining my first day in Qamişlo. Small puddles were forming in the streets. My aunt pointed at them and said: “Look at the bubbles. We call them spring bubbles.” From that day I was aware that even though it was June and summer in Syria, spring had come to West Kurdistan these fateful months in 2012.

Kurds and The People of Syria

Only one and a half year ago the Kurds in Syria did not exist. Today, Turkey is threatening to send its army into Syria because it fears that the now very much existing Kurds are seeking to found a self-ruled Kurdistan.

Prior to the uprising the Assad regime shifted between two standpoints towards the Kurds in Syria, said a member of the newly formed Supreme Kurdish Council that is a union between all Kurdish parties in West Kurdistan (North Syria). Either the Kurdish people did not exist or it was seeking to create division in Syria.

Another member of the council said during an interview with the West Kurdish TV-channel, Ronahî TV: “The Baath party has always told the Syrian people that Kurds want to create divison in Syria. That is why Kurds have never been able to have fruitful discussions with the people of Syria.”

Kurds in West Kurdistan and Syria have not been seeking to cause disunity during the many years of oppression because the Kurds had until recently been lulled into a deep sleep by their oppressor but also by themselves. They thought passivity, they thought sleep was the safest way to survive in Syria and it seemed impossible to wake them.

I saw this myself when I was in Qamişlo the last months of 2010, I saw this myself before I left in January 2011 when the uprising in Tunisia took place. I asked people in Qamişlo: “Will you demand your rights too, will you rise against Assad too?”

“Never!” they answered.

But the Kurds of West Kurdistan and especially Qamişlo make up a contradictory people. Before the liberation of several Kurdish cities they were living deads but with a consuming, burning fire deep beneath the thick, thick skin. This fire ultimately led to their uprising together with the rest of Syria and to their calls for the fall of the dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

Still many have claimed that the Kurds have not been a part of the Syrian uprising.

This is not true. The Kurds have been demonstrating in solidarity with the Syrian people since the first day but this support is dismissed as not being enough.

They fail to understand how great a support this is when considering one important detail that I heard repeated several times by several people during my stay in Qamişlo, one important event that still haunts the people of Qamişlo: the Kurdish uprising in March 2004.

Read the rest on KurdishRights.org.