ABSTRACT
Violent surprisings that erupted in the northern Syrian Kurdish enclaves and the Kurdish areas in Aleppo and Damascus marked the emergence of Kurdish antiestablishment protests on the Syrian political scene in March 2004. The Syrian government was previously unaware of the Kurdish capacity for action and was surprised by the scale of these protests. The visibility of the “Kurdish problem” in Syria was heightened by worldwide media coverage causing these events and the protests that followed (and which continued until 2005) to resound, giving even greater importance to the Kurdish factor.1
