On 6-7 September, 2014 tens of thousands of Kurdish people in Turkey’s southeast took to the streets protesting the AKP’s Syria policy as a response to the folding of events in the Kurdish town of Kobane. The Kurds of Turkey were shouting in the streets “Kobane is Diyarbakır,” and asking the government to open the borders to send the Iraqi Peshmerge forces to help the Syrian Kurds in their fight against IS(IS).What was striking in these protests were the intermingling of the issues of Kurds are facing in Syria, Iraq and Turkey. This event was widely acknowledged as a turning point in the regionalization of Kurdish identity and a creation of Kurdish national consciousness. This paper argues that the increased regionalization of the Kurdish identity was possible in part because of the Turkey’s’ contradictory and inconsistent policies towards the Syrian conflict.
