Former ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, reveals to FP that such assistance has been conditional on the support of the two left-wing Kurdish parties - the PYD in Syria and PKK in Turkey - for the joint effort by the US and Turkish governments and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to overthrow the Assad regime in Damascus. Despite having designated the PKK as a “terrorist” organization, secret talks between the US and the left-wing Kurdish parties to this end have been held over the past two years.
The YPG is the armed wing of the PYD and recently entered into a military alliance with the FSA against the Islamic State. But the two parties have themselves so far refused to become embroiled in the Syrian civil war since neither the Assad government nor the widely disparate forces comprising the opposition recognize the Kurdish right to an autonomous homeland in the region.
The PKK and YPD have also had strained relations with the autonomous Kurdish regional authority in Iraq under Massoud Barzani, which maintains close commercial and diplomatic ties to the US and Turkey and supports the opposition in the civil war. The article describes how the Americans initially tried to assist Barzani in undermining the PYD as the representative of the Syrian Kurds before acknowledging the futility of that approach “at some point in 2012, (when they) chose to open the back channel to the PYD.”