As we have noted before, demographics are one of the key differences between Iraqi and Syrian Kurds and a main reason their models have diverged so sharply. Urban settlement is one of the clearest examples. Cities shape how wars are fought, drive intellectual production and productivity, and form the foundation of any viable entity. Syria has only three Kurdish-linked cities with populations over 100,000, and two of them are highly mixed despite their large Kurdish populations. Afrin is the only solidly Kurdish city of that size, while Qamishli and Hasakah are mixed. Iraq, by contrast, has at least nine solidly Kurdish-majority cities over 100,000, plus two mixed ones. The gap widens further down the scale. Extending the count to towns of 50,000 to 100,000 adds only six in Syria, while Iraq has more than 26 towns over 50,000, most of them solidly Kurdish. As we argued in a previous piece, this helps explain why the governing models in Syria and Iraq have diverged so clearly, and not only with regard to the Kurds.

Even the Syrian towns we have classed as Kurdish-majority sit within mixed surroundings. In Derik (al-Malikiyah) and Girkê Legê (al-Muabbada), Kurds likely make up over 70 percent of the population, yet both towns have a sizeable Arab presence, particularly in the surrounding countryside. This pattern holds across most Kurdish-majority areas in Syria. In Iraq, the Kurdish areas are too demographically consolidated for a Syrian-style model to apply.

Urban settlements matter on several levels. Economically, they underpin the viability of any region. Intellectually, larger cities generate more output and perhaps a population more ready to sustain a polity. Militarily, alongside topography, they make war far more difficult and costly, so the larger the cities, the weaker a central government’s incentive to launch a military campaign. This is one reason such a campaign is much harder to contemplate in Iraq. In Syria, the SDF-led administration sought to hold on to Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor partly because it needed a larger population and greater geographic depth to be viable as a region. Once those areas were lost and it was pushed back to a small pocket in Hasakah province, its viability fell sharply, especially as the province’s two largest cities, Hasakah and Qamishli, are highly mixed and unlikely to be dominated by any single group.