"I am sick, I cannot sleep," says Hervin Ose, fighting back tears as she remembers her friend and fellow Syrian Kurdish activist, Mashaal Tammo. "Till now I cannot believe he is not here. Sometimes I even try to call him, sometimes I wait for him to call me."
On Friday Oct. 7, Hervin met Tammo at a friend's house in Qamishli, a Kurdish-majority town in northeastern Syria, just across the border from Turkey. "He had a sadness about him," she recalls, speaking via Skype. Tammo, one of the few Syrian Kurdish leaders to have openly called for the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, had recently escaped an assassination attempt. Now he spoke as if he was going away on a long trip. "My message is finished in this life," he told her. Before taking his leave Tammo even snapped a few pictures of his friend. "I wondered," says Hervin. "He'd never taken a photo of me before."
It was the last time she was to see him alive. Hours later, according to reports, masked assailants gunned down Tammo inside his Qamishli home, leaving his son and another Kurdish activist wounded. Hervin, who insisted on being quoted by her real name — "I am a wanted person already... I am tired of being afraid," she says — has no doubts as to who ordered her friend's murder. "Bashar," she says, "he made this decision."
The day of the funeral, after going to see Tammo's body at the morgue, Hervin joined tens of thousands of people — as many 100,000, she says, though most observers put the figure at 50,000 — on the streets of Qamishli. It was, by any count, the largest protest in the northeast since the beginning of the popular uprising against the Assad regime. It too ended in bloodshed when Syrian security forces began to spray the mourners with gunfire, killing at least two people.
Although protests have been taking place in the north since the early spring, they now show signs of escalating, observers say. (Since Tammo's funeral, they have continued every day, one activist told me.) According to Henri Barkey, a Lehigh University professor and former State Department official, the fresh wave of demonstrations may well mark the Syrian Kurds' long awaited entry into the popular revolt against Assad. "After Tammo's murder, [the Kurds] are now a party to the conflict," says Barkey. As he sees it, "increased mobilization" in the Kurdish northeast, one of the poorest and least developed regions of Syria, now appears to be imminent.
Of course, were Syria's Kurds to rise up en masse, the numbers of protesters would be much higher, acknowledges Hervin. (Syria is home to 2 million Kurds, or about 10% of the population.) What stands in the way, she says, is the disconnect between a number of local political parties and the people on the street, particularly young Kurds. "The young people understand the responsibility they have, they understand that the Syrian revolution needs their help," she says. "The normal people support, they have joined ... but the parties haven't made up their mind."
