Umit Bektas/Reuters
Turkish troops headed towards the Syrian border on Monday.
LONDON — There are mounting concerns in Turkey that the conflict in neighboring Syria has opened a Pandora ’s Box from which an autonomous and potentially hostile Kurdish entity will emerge.
With global attention focused on events in Aleppo, which rebels vow to turn into the “regime’s grave,” Turkey has sent troops, armored personnel carriers and missile batteries to the border with Syria after chunks of Syria fell into the hands of Kurdish militias.
“Turkish officials now fear that Syria could become a beachhead for Kurdish militants bent on wreaking havoc inside Turkey,” according to my colleagues Sebnem Arsu and Jeffrey Gettleman.
“Turkish officials have indicated that they will not hesitate to strike in Syria should Kurdish militants stage attacks against Turkey from there.”
A majority of Syria’s 2.5 million Kurds — around 10 percent of the country’s total population — inhabit the northeastern wedge of Syria between the Turkish and Iraq borders. They have an ambivalent relationship with Syria’s overwhelmingly Arab rebel movement which they see as unsympathetic and even hostile to Kurdish aspirations.
Syrian forces have reportedly withdrawn from areas of Syrian Kurdistan, effectively handing them over to P.Y.D. militias who have raised the flag of the P.K.K.
Turkish concerns are focused on the apparent ascendancy in the region of the Democratic Union Party (P.Y.D.), a Syrian Kurdish movement regarded as an offshoot of Turkey’s banned Kurdish Workers Party (P.K.K.).
Turkey has fought an intermittent war on its own territory against the P.K.K. separatists since the 1980s. As Sebnem and Jeff write: “The Turkish government considers Kurdish separatists to be the greatest national security threat.”
The P.Y.D. has been playing a double game in the Syrian conflict. While the country’s marginalized Kurds were generally wary of being sucked into the expanding internal war, the P.Y.D. stood accused of siding with the Bashar al-Assad regime by cracking down on rival Kurdish movements.
In recent weeks, Syrian forces were reported to have withdrawn from areas of Syrian Kurdistan, effectively handing them over to P.Y.D. militias who proceeded to raise the flag of their P.K.K. ally.
Ertugrul Özkök, writing in Turkey’s Hürriyet, suggested that, while Arabs were fighting each other in Syria, it was actually the Kurds who were winning as part of a “Kurdish Spring” that represented “one more step on their path to an independent state.”
That might turn out to be somewhat hyperbolic. Although the P.Y.D. this month formally turned its back on the Assad regime by entering an agreement with rival Kurdish opposition movements, suspicion is still rife within the Kurdish camp.
Abdulhakim Bashar, a senior official of the Kurdish National Council (K.N.C.), an umbrella group for movements that agreed to the pact with the P.Y.D., said the group still had to prove itself.
“P.Y.D. must cut off all its previous relations with the Assad regime and prove it by deed,” he said in an interview with Michael Weiss of the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank.
Despite the alliance with other groups, the P.Y.D. was still applying its own policies in Kurdish areas through its People’s Protection Armed Forces, Dr. Bashar said.
Other Kurdish officials were even more direct. One, who asked not to be identified because of fear of P.Y.D. retaliation, told Rendezvous there was still a Syrian military presence in the region and there were suspicions the P.Y.D. was still co-operating with the Damascus regime.
“Their militias are on the streets all the time and they are intimidating the local people,” the official said.
The formal reconciliation between the P.Y.D. and other Kurdish movements was reached at Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan under the auspices of Masoud Barzani, the regional president.
The Iraqi Kurds have good relations with Ankara and the region has blossomed into Iraq’s most prosperous region in part because of its economic ties with Turkey.
Mr. Barzani has acknowledged that Syrian Kurds have received military training in Iraqi Kurdistan. But he said that was a measure intended to prevent a power vacuum in Syrian Kurdistan in the event of the collapse of the Assad regime.
“Certainly we want to see a change in the Kurdish situation in Syria, but this is something for them to decide upon,” he told Al Jazeera. “It’s their role and we believe that they can play a positive role in building a new Syria that will be democratic and pluralistic.”
Mr. Barzani is likely to adopt similarly soothing language when he meets Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, in Erbil on Wednesday.
Some commentators, even at home, believe Turkey’s concerns are overblown.
Hugh Pope, Turkey director of the International Crisis Group, told Rendezvous, “Turkey should remain calm, since no Kurdish faction wants to provoke it.
“And if Turkey is now worried about the empowerment of Syrian Kurds, and knock-on effects on its own Kurdish community, the best defensive action it can take is to firmly return to solving its own internal Kurdish problem.”
“The public is on the brink of madness,” Asli Aydintasbas wrote in Hürriyet. “The confusion about Syria has caused ‘Kurdish phobia’ to irresponsibly surface in our media.”
“Ankara should not take a stand against the Syrian Kurds: It should take them by its side and walk together with them,” Ms. Aydintasbas wrote.