WASHINGTON — The Syrian civil war and the weakening of central states in the Middle East has resulted in a new power struggle among Kurdish parties over control of the Kurdish areas in Syria, instead of unifying them. The outcome is two different Kurdish autonomous zones in Syria and Iraq that compete with each other, based on different economic models.
The New York Times earlier suggested that it could be possible that as a result of the Arab Spring, a Syrian Kurdistan could break off from Syria and merge with the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in a breakdown of the Western-imposed Sykes-Picot borders of 1916.