Syria’s “interim president” Ahmed al-Sharaa on Sunday created a seven-member committee to draft a new national constitution.
Syrian Kurdish groups grumbled they have been “sidelined” from this process by a regime that is not sympathetic to the Kurds, despite its promises of “inclusivity.”
Sharaa is the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Islamist insurgent group that began as a spinoff of al-Qaeda. Syrian dictator Bashar Assad was overthrown and driven into exile when HTS launched a surprisingly swift push to capture Damascus in December.
Sharaa and HTS have sought to rebrand themselves as a more civilized and inclusive brand of Islamists, distancing themselves from their al-Qaeda roots and desperately attempting to convince Western powers to lift sanctions imposed against Syria under Assad. Sharaa claims he will voluntarily relinquish power in a few years, when Syria is ready to hold elections.
Although HTS promised to include all of Syria’s many religious and ethnic groups in their new government, several of those groups feel ostracized and threatened, including the Kurds, Druze, and Alawites. All three were left out of Sharaa’s highly-touted “national dialogue summit” last week.
As Kurdish news service Rudaw pointed out on Sunday, one of the seven “experts” tasked with “drafting a constitutional declaration to regulate the transitional phase” is reportedly Kurdish — but the expert in question, Bahia al-Mardini, has no affiliation with any of Syria’s Kurdish political parties.
Mardini is a journalist with a law degree who lived in the United Kingdom until Assad was overthrown, according to France24 on Sunday. Four other members of the committee named by France24 had academic backgrounds.
Furthermore, Sharaa’s decree stated the constitutional committee would operate in line with recommendations made during the “national dialogue conference” last Tuesday, which the Kurds were frozen out of. Dozens of political parties active in the Kurdish region of northeastern Syria issued a statement last week denouncing the conference as “meaningless” because it did not include them.
“This is not the first time Ahmed al-Sharaa has sidelined us,” sighed Kurdish Democratic Progressive Party secretary Salih Darwesh.
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