Mashaal Tammo

Mashaal Tammo, also Mash'al Tammo (Arabic: مشعل تمو, romanized: Mashʿal Tammo, Kurdish: مشەل تەمۆ, romanized: Mişel Temo; 1958 – October 7, 2011) was a Syrian Kurdish politician and activist who supported the interests of the minority of the Kurds.

Tammo was released in 2010 after spending more than three years in jail. Founding the liberal Kurdish Future Movement party he angered both the government and rivals in the Kurdish community. His outspoken vision towards a pluralistic democratic Syria, in which Kurds would take part just the way all other Syrians do, dismissed any kind of regional autonomy as demanded by most other Kurdish parties. This even led him to dissociate his party from the Syrian Kurdish political scene. When he met with representatives from the major Kurdish parties in Syria following his release from prison, he announced to them that "he did not belong to the Kurdish movement, but was a part of the Syrian revolution." When the other politicians asked him to reconsider, he refused to do so and withdrew the Future Movement from the Kurdish Patriotic Movement umbrella alliance. Though he later tried to rejoin the alliance, the other parties blocked any such action.

He was also a member of the executive committee of the newly formed Syrian National Council, a broad-based front bringing together opposition figures inside and outside the country in an attempt to unify the deeply fragmented dissident movement.