IRBIL, Iraq: Syrian Kurdish groups opposed to Bashar Assad will try to unite this month to explain their autonomy demands to Arab groups trying to topple the Syrian leader, activists said Thursday.

While security forces have clashed daily with protesters and insurgents demanding Assad’s downfall in mainly Sunni Arab towns, Syrian Kurdish areas have remained relatively calm, despite many Kurds’ long-standing opposition to the government.

Syrian Kurdish exile leaders say they do not trust the Arab opposition to heed their demands for self-rule in the mainly Kurdish northeast region.

Kurdish groups representing Syria’s largest ethnic minority are also divided among themselves, with some factions backed by Iraqi Kurds, and another by Turkish Kurd rebels of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), independent analysts said.

“There will be a national conference of all the Kurdish parties to form one front,” said Mahmoud Mohammad Bave Sabir, a leading member of the Democratic Union Kurdish Party of Syria, one of the oldest Kurdish opposition groups.

“The aim of the conference is to press the demands of the Kurds in Syria and to open a dialogue with the Arab opposition,” he told Reuters.

A date for the meeting has not been set, but it will be held this month in Irbil, capital of the semi-autonomous Iraqi region of Kurdistan, the activists said. All the main Syrian Kurdish parties, plus intellectuals and independent organizations, have been invited.

“The Arab opposition does not care about the Kurdish cause,” said Sarbast Nabi, a Syrian Kurdish politics professor at Salahaddin University in Irbil. “All they have promised is to deal with us as Syrian citizens.”

Kurds say they have been sidelined from the opposition Syrian National Council, an exile group that was set up in Turkey to coordinate a 10-month-old uprising against Assad.

“The Arab opposition is made up of Islamists and Arab nationalists who do not accept Kurdish demands for a democratic, pluralist, secular state where the rights of all minorities are recognized,” Nabi said.

Syrian Kurdish groups are also wary of Turkey’s influence on Syrian Arab dissidents based in Istanbul, given Ankara’s historic hostility to demands for autonomy for its own large Kurdish minority.

In 2004, Syrian Kurds fought deadly clashes with security forces for days after an incident at a football stadium in the main Kurdish city of Qamishli. At the time, they said they received no support from Arabs now leading the opposition.