Syrian Kurds Hope to Establish a Federal Region in Country’s North

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BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian Kurdish parties are working on a plan to declare a federal region across much of northern Syria

, several of their representatives said on Wednesday, to formalize the semiautonomous zone they have established during five years of war and to create a model for decentralized government throughout the country.

The move, still under discussion by Kurdish and other parties in the area, would fall well short of declaring independence, and it would most likely rile the Syrian government and the main Arab-led opposition group. They have both declared their opposition to federalism, seeing it as a step toward carving up Syria.

It would also be likely to intensify Turkish concerns over the growing areas of Syria along its border that are controlled by a Syrian-Kurdish militia. Turkey considers Kurdish groups its most dangerous enemy after years of conflict with its own Kurdish population.

But Russia has said it supports such a system. The United States has also pushed for decentralization, and it has presided over the establishment of an autonomous regional government in Iraq.

The Syrian Kurdish plans come as a new round of peace talks is underway in Geneva, talks that both Russia and the United States have pushed for in their efforts to broker a political solution to the Syrian civil war. Both of the global powers have backed Kurdish aspirations. Russia has lately been advocating Syrian Kurds to have a greater role in the talks. The United States has supported Iraq’s Kurds for decades, and it has been arming and offering air support to Kurdish-led Syrian groups to fight against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Kurdish officials said that federalism, not just for their areas but for all of Syria, is the only way to keep the country from disintegrating. They emphasized that the entity would not be called a Kurdish region but rather a federal region of northern Syria, where Arabs and Turkmen would have equal rights.

“Federalism is going to save the unity of a whole Syria,” said Ibrahim Ibrahim, a spokesman for the Democratic Union Party, or P.Y.D., the leftist Syrian Kurdish party that plays a leading role in the Kurdish areas of Syria.

He cautioned that the details of the federal region were still being discussed and that there was no date for announcing it.

The zone would include all of the areas controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a group led by and largely made up of Kurdish militias, but also including Turkmen and Arab fighters, said Idris Nassan, a Kurdish politician in the Syrian town of Kobani, near the Turkish border.

Several dozen Kurdish parties and other organizations from the area, including Arab and Turkmen representatives, have met in Hasaka, in northern Syria, to decide on the details of a formal declaration, Mr. Naasan said.

The United States views the Syrian Democratic Forces as its most effective ally on the ground in its fight against the Islamic State. But Arab opposition groups, including some of the rebel factions also supported by the United States and its allies, view them with suspicion because of the de facto nonaggression pact they have long had with the Syrian government.

The group’s main fighting force is the Y.P.G., the Kurdish abbreviation for the People’s Protection Units, which Turkey sees as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., a separatist Kurdish group declared a terrorist organization by both Turkey and the United States.

Nawaf Xelil, a former spokesman for the Democratic Union Party, the Syrian Kurdish leftist group that organized the Y.P.G., said that the autonomous region would be for all of northern Syria and would guarantee equal rights for Arabs and Turkmen.

Asked what would happen to areas of northern Syria currently controlled by insurgents — Islamic State in eastern Aleppo Province and, to the west, a range of groups from the Qaeda-linked Nusra Front to United States-backed rebels — he said that the aim was to “liberate” those areas.

Any Kurdish drive to seize those areas would be certain to bring a response from Turkey, which sees a segment of insurgent-held northern Aleppo Province as a buffer zone, preventing the Kurds from unifying the two blocks of Syria they already control. The Syrian Democratic Forces have taken some of the area from insurgent groups, which view those advances as conquering rebel areas on behalf of the government with the help of Russian airstrikes.

A Turkish official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in accordance with protocol, did not comment about the buffer zone, but affirmed that Turkey was still in favor of a single, unified Syria and rejected any notion of a federation. He said all parts of Syrian society should decide the future structure of the country along with a new constitution as part of a political process.