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Paris Killings Highlight Kurdish, Regional Issues for Turkey

The murders of three PKK activists in Paris highlight the centrality of the Kurdish issues in Turkey, Iraq and Syria, writes Cengiz Candar.
Pro-Kurdish demonstrators march holding a banner with pictures of the three slain Kurdish activists during a protest at the Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul January 16, 2013. Three female Kurdish activists, including a founding member of the PKK rebel group, were found shot dead in Paris on Thursday, in execution-style killings condemned by Turkish politicians trying to broker a peace deal. REUTERS/Osman Orsal (TURKEY - Tags: POLITICS CIVIL UNREST)
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One of the greatest effects of Syrian developments on Turkish public opinion has been to show that the Kurdish problem, which is the number-one item on the country’s agenda, has dimensions beyond being an internal problem of Turkey. Especially when some Kurdish settlements in Syria along the Turkish border were quickly abandoned in summer 2012 to the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) by the Assad regime, the government and Turkish public realized the probability of the emergence of a second Kurdish entity south of Turkey's borders, in addition to the one in Iraq.

The example for Syrian Kurds to emulate was that in Iraq following the collapse of the central Arab nationalist regime. They would go the way of Iraqi Kurds and demand a federal Syria. Since the location and topography of “Syrian Kurdistan” and the number and density of Kurds was different from Iraqi Kurdistan, they would ask for a self-rule in the shape of “autonomy,” if not a federation. But they couldn’t return to their former life.

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