Amid violence, Syria’s Kurds speak up

[Aslan]

Syria returns to capture the headlines of Arab media on Sunday, alongside coverage of a horrific series of terror attacks in Baghdad.

“Regime aircraft bombard Raqqa and the Latakia hinterland,” reads the headline of London-based daily Al-Hayat, reporting on a “massacre” carried out against the city of Raqqa through an air attack that killed 13 civilians, including seven children, in the rebel-controlled eastern city.

Meanwhile, Syrian Kurdish politician Salah Muslim, head of the Kurdish Democratic Union party, tells Al-Hayat that the Iranian regime has agreed to Kurdish self-rule in northeastern Syria and on the need to fight the “common enemy”: jihadist opposition fighters. Muslim has just returned from a two-day visit to Tehran, where he met high-ranking officials at the foreign ministry and the Revolutionary Guards, at the invitation of the foreign ministry.

“Iran is an important state, and is the only state in the region which the [Syrian] regime listens to,” Muslim said.

Meanwhile, Saudi-owned daily A-Sharq Al-Awsat leads with a threat by Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barazani to intervene in Syria and defend his Syrian brethren from “the forces of terrorism,” amid reports of mass killings and arrests of Kurds by Al-Qaeda and Al-Nusra Front fighters.

Saadi Ahmad Bira, a member of Iraq’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), tells A-Sharq Al-Awsat that “the barbaric acts perpetrated against our Kurdish brothers on the Syrian side have a clear purpose: turning the conflict raging there to a racist war between Kurds and Arabs. This worries us greatly in the Autonomous Kurdish region [of Iraq].”

A Kurdish member of the Turkish parliament warned, meanwhile, that Islamist extremists have been flocking to Syria from Turkey to take part in the fighting against Syria’s Kurds, the daily reports.

Qatari news channel Al-Jazeera displays footage of a young girl who was “lucky” to be rescued from the ruins in Raqqa following a government aerial attack of exploding barrels.

Syrian oppositionists reported detonating a car bomb near a group of pro-Syrian militiamen (shabiha) and Hezbollah fighters, killing 40 of them, Al-Jazeera reports.

[Shirko]

Iran agreeing to Kurdish self rule is a encouraging but their approval is welcoming but not required. However, they might want to see the Kurds fight the Sunni extremists for them. They have to cautious to not be used as pawns by their interests.