Apparently pressed by the Interior Ministry, Habash signed a declaration absolving the government of guilt. The cleric's sons say Habash is protecting the regime and dismiss him as a government mouthpiece. But Habash says his conscience is clear. He believes Khaznawi was killed by "fundamentalists."
Khaznawi's sons agree that their father was threatened. But they don't blame shadowy Islamists; they blame the regime's security services, even though it is extremely dangerous for them to point the finger at the government.
"He always said, 'If something ever happens to me, it will be from the authorities,' " said Sheik Murad Khaznawi, the cleric's eldest son.
Khaznawi apparently had angered Syrian intelligence in February by meeting in Belgium with Ali Sadreddin Bayanouni, the exiled leader of Syria's Muslim Brotherhood. The meeting was a brazen act; the Muslim Brotherhood has been outlawed by the Syrian regime, and membership is punishable by death. Many analysts believe this meeting was Khaznawi's fatal mistake.
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Descended from the mountain warriors and nomads of ancient Assyria, the Kurds are a colorful fixture in northeastern Syria, working the vegetable fields, spilling from overcrowded pickups in brilliant dress, calling out in their rolling tongue.
But the history of Syria's 1.7 million Kurds -- and those in the rest of the region -- is darkened by ethnic suspicions and an ongoing struggle to find a place in often hostile countries.
Their troubles date to the 1960s, when Arab nationalism swept the region and caught ablaze in Syria. In a rush to "Arabize" the oil-rich tail of land near Turkey and Iraq, the Syrian regime settled Arabs between traditional Kurdish villages. The next blow was a controversial census in 1962 that stripped 120,000 Kurds of their Syrian citizenship.
Culture, too, came under fire. The Kurdish language was banned, and Kurdish villages lost their names in favor of new Arabic designations. Many of the restrictions have since been lifted by a regime eager to ease tensions, but the memory of oppression sticks.
"It was a lot of mistakes, one after the next, over and over," said Kurdish writer Dildal Filmez. "And in the end, the mistakes blew up like bombs."
In light of the decades of hurt and grudges, the effect of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was predictable: It destabilized northern Syria. In a part of the world where tribes and clans are much older than the nations they inhabit, the Kurds of Syria and Iraq have always lived an intertwined existence. And for decades, both lived under Arab nationalist Baathist regimes that considered their ethnicity a threat.
