East of Dohuk, Iraq, a few hundred Syrian Kurdish men have been training for battle, marching through scrub brush and practicing rifle drills, The New York Times reported. The men, many of them defectors from the Syrian Army living in trailers dotting a hillside camp, are not here to join the armed uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s government. Instead, they are preparing for the fight they expect to come after, when Mr. Assad falls and there is a scramble across Syria for power and turf. These men want an autonomous Kurdish region in what is now Syria, a prospect they see as a step toward fulfilling a centuries-old dream of linking the Kurdish minorities in Iraq, Turkey and Iran into an independent nation. Yet that desire also threatens to draw a violent reaction from those other nations, which have signaled a willingness to take extreme actions to prevent the loss of territory to a greater Kurdistan.
