A month before, they had already attempted to kill him…
As a result, the assassins stormed his apartment (located in Qamishli, in the Kurdish north east of Syria) and opened fire.
Mashaal Tammo, 53, founder and leader of the Kurdish Future Movement Party, a liberal organization, was killed.
His son, Marcel, and a party activist, Zahida Rashikilo were wounded in the attack.
Tammo’s politics were inclusive, his goal being to forge a democratic and pluralistic Syria. Not everyone in the Kurdish community shared his views…
He was also a member of the executive committee of the recently established Syrian National Council. The umbrella organization seeks to unite the disparate strands of the Syrian opposition movement.
Released after having spent over three years in jail for his political activities, Tammo had been organizing protests against the Assad regime in Qamishli.
The Syrian Arab News Agency, an official organ, claimed that Tammo was killed by an armed terrorist group. It elaborated by stating that those responsible were gunmen in a black car who fired at his car.
Tammo’s funeral was held the next day, on Saturday.
Some 50,000 people thronged the streets of Qamishli to pay him tribute, but also to vent their anger at the Assad regime.
All of Qamishli is out today. The funeral is turning into a massive protest, Mustafa Osso, a lawyer and Kurdish activist, told AP.
A general strike was also organized in the city on this day of mourning.
The crowds chanted, leave, leave; others demanded Assad’s execution.
Some also shouted Azadi, the Kurdish word for freedom.
Now Tammo has become a flame of the revolution, Abdul Ghafar Mohammed, a Qamishli resident, told CNN (Tammo‘s first name, Mashaal, means flame in Arabic…).
Predictably, Syrian troops fired into the crowd, killing five mourners.
The targeting of a prominent member of the Syrian opposition, of Kurdish origin, could prove an ominous development, however.
The Kurds, accounting for some 10% of Syria’s population of twenty million have long been a neglected minority, victims of discriminatory policies…
They cannot learn the Kurdish language in their schools, nor operate their own radio stations. Many have even been denied Syrian citizenship. At the outset of the uprising last spring, however, Assad promised to reverse course on this issue, in an obvious attempt to mollify them…
In essence, the Assad regime is no friend of the Kurdish people…
And yet, the Kurds have failed so far, to support wholeheartedly the anti-Assad opposition movement.
This long oppressed minority (also oppressed in Turkey, and until recently, in Iraq) is suspicious of Arab intentions generally and has little faith that a post-Assad regime would treat the Kurdish people more benevolently…
There is a mutual lack of trust between the two sides; the Kurds are worried. They already feel excluded from the decision making process and they fear for the future, a Syrian opposition leader told AP.
The killing of Tammo sparked outrage in Syria’s Kurdish province and may alter the political calculus of its political leaders…
This blood is precious to them (Kurds), they will not give up until the regime is overthrown and until the execution of Bashar al-Assad, one of Tammo’s sons, Fares, told Aljazeera.
My father’s assassination is the screw in the regime’s coffin. They made a big mistake by killing my father, he declared to the NYT.
Assad may indeed rue the day his security forces killed Tammo, should the Kurds now opt to support vigorously the anti-regime movement.
There’s a real potential for it (the security situation) getting out of hand, Peter Harling, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, and who is based in Syria, told Anthony Shadid of the NYT.
Why then, make the potentially tragic and lethal mistake of killing a prominent Kurdish leader?
Is Assad still in control of the security apparatus, or did he grant it carte blanche to crush the movement as it saw fit?
What is clear however is that the regime has decided to confront the opposition movement solely with repressive, military means.
The security solution essentially amounts to giving a free hand to the security services to dramatically raise the levels of violence in an attempt to restore the wall of fear. In doing so, the regime has undermined its own ability to think and act politically. This is sheer violence, with no limits, a « solution» that has every chance of creating many new problems, Harling added.
Also on Friday, another prominent opposition figure, Riad Seif was arrested next to a Damascus mosque, but not before he was so severely beaten that he had to be hospitalized.
As far as the regime is considered, it is acting in self-defense.
Syria is the target of terrorist threats, its deputy foreign minister told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Friday.
He brazenly repudiated Western condemnations of the Assad regime’s behavior.
The culture of human rights is a disease. We have to take into considerations that the conduct of some of those developed countries is not honorable in the area of human rights. Syria has been subjected to a series of criminal attacks…accompanied by an unprecedented media campaign of lies and allegations, he added, according to AP.
The regime, quite clearly has neither the intention of changing strategy nor of seriously taking into consideration the Syrian people’s demands for change.
Even Russia, which last week, along with China , vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning the violence, calling for an end to the repression and hinting at possible sanctions, at an unspecified future date, seems to be slowly coming to this conclusion….
If the Syrian leadership is unable to undertake these reforms, it will have to go, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev declared Friday.
Last month, the day after he narrowly averted an assassination attempt, Tammo declared the following: we’re living in chaos, and the regime is pushing us toward even more chaos. But we’ll never stop, according to the NYT.
As a result, the violence in Syria does seem to be escalating.
Razan Zeitouneh, a Syrian activist, director of the Syrian Human Rights Information Link, who was this year’s recipient of the Anna Politkovskaya Award granted by the Group RAW in War, corroborated this view (for some background on Anna, see here, and on the prize, here).
The situation is getting more and more violent every day. Now the average number of people killed by the security (forces) and army is about 20 daily. The army still surrounds many cities and villages, every day new areas and new cities are raided by the security (forces) and the army. Hundred of people get arrested daily, the cases of (people) getting killed under torture is increasing, day after day. Kidnapping people from the street and killing them is also increasing, especially in the city of Homs. In spite of all of that, the protests are still going on, she told RFE/RL.
There is no doubt that the protesters and our revolution will eventually win. If we don’t believe that we will win, we couldn’t continue under all this violence by the regime. We couldn’t bear all these crimes against our people. I’m sure that every single Syrian believes that the revolution will win in the end, she concluded.
Let us hope that victory will be achieved quickly and that the West does its utmost to support the Syrian opposition any way it can, and continues to apply pressure on Syria’s few remaining friends, in particular China and Russia.
They must be made to realize that Assad’s days are numbered and that supporting the Syrian people is not only the wise thing to do, but also the right thing to do…
(the above photograph of Qamishli residents mourning Mashaal Tammo is by Safin Hamed AFP/Getty Images)
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