QAMISHLI, Syria — The cleric had been missing for nearly a month when his family had a taste of relief: A man who identified himself as a government official approached the missing man's sons on the street and said, "You will hear happy news of your father."
A few days later, state security agents took the sons to see the cleric. His thick beard, a badge of his religious devotion, had been hacked off. His body bore marks of torture -- broken teeth, badly burned skin. The cleric was dead.
The security agents told the sons that criminals had confessed to killing Sheik Mohammed Mashuq Khaznawi and burying him in a shallow grave. But his family didn't believe them.
"The Syrian authorities fabricated an ugly play and gave us the corpse," said Sheik Morshed Khaznawi, the slain cleric's 30-year-old son. "In the end, the Syrian authorities have complete and total responsibility for what happened and for assassinating the sheik."
In early June, the sons brought his body home to Qamishli and laid the remains to rest wrapped in the Kurdish flag, a defiant symbol of a people without a country. Since then, Khaznawi's torture and death have become a rallying cry for an increasingly restive Kurdish people.
The death of the mild-mannered sheik robbed Syria's Kurds of a charismatic, grass-roots champion for their demand for equal rights in the predominantly Arab country. But with many Syrian Arabs fearing that the Kurds would manage to cleave Syria and found a Kurdish homeland, the government saw Khaznawi as the figurehead of a volatile separatist threat.
With the fall of Saddam Hussein, Sunni Arab rule over the majority Shiites and Kurds in the heart of the Arab world also came to an end. The U.S.-led invasion has inadvertently upended traditional notions of minority rights throughout the region.
Excitement was particularly keen in the Kurdish heartland, the swath of desert, lush mountains and ancient riverbeds straddling Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. After years of harsh poverty, crippling discrimination and second-class status, Syrian Kurds were galvanized by the liberation of their Iraqi brethren. Riots and demonstrations erupted last year in Qamishli and spread throughout the country. Hundreds of Kurds have been held incommunicado and reportedly tortured.
The sheik was at the center of the struggle in the tumult last year. He called for rights; he spoke out against the imprisonment and torture of Kurds. And then he disappeared.
