First published at Tempest.
After a major military confrontation between the Syrian Transitional Government (STG) and the Kurdish led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the two forces agreed to a ceasefire on January 20, 2025. Days later, they struck an agreement for the integration of SDF into STG’s military and administrative institutions. The STG will establish a military division made up of three SDF brigades in addition to a brigade in Kobani (also known as Ain al-Arab), a town on the border of Aleppo province.
The STG will gradually integrate all of the SDF-controlled areas, taking over the institutions of Rojava, formally named the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. (AANES). Resultingly, the STG will take over all border crossings and entry points to the area. It has promised to retain the AANES’ civilian employees.
The agreement includes arrangements for civil and educational rights for the Kurdish community and guarantees the return of displaced persons to their homes. It has started to be implemented with the entry of symbolic numbers of the government’s security forces in some major cities previously overseen by the SDF such as Qamichli and Hasakah. In addition, Damascus appointed a Kurdish governor, Noureddin Issa, who comes from the city of Qamishli and lost his son during the SDF battle against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), for Hassaka governorate. Despite the agreement, the STG has maintained its siege of the city of Kobani.
These events are the product of Syria’s history starting with independence, passing through the eruption of the Syrian revolution in 2011, Bashar al-Assad’s counter-revolution, t he fall of the regime, and the ongoing consolidation of a new one under interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa. Throughout, the country’s rulers have divided and ruled its people by pitting religious, ethnic, and national groups against one another. In particular, they have manipulated the division between Syria’s dominant Arab majority and the oppressed Kurdish minority. That has been key for the country’s elite to maintain their rule over the working class and peasantry. The rulers of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq have done the same.
Thus, the liberation of oppressed Kurds and the emancipation of the region’s popular classes are bound together. In order to resist their ruler’s divide and conquer strategy, the region’s working classes must oppose Kurdish oppression. Only by doing so can they emancipate themselves. In the process, workers can also prove that they, not imperialist and regional powers, are allies of the Kurdish people. Apart, they will remain divided, oppressed, and exploited. Together they have the potential to win collective liberation.
Arab nationalism and Kurdish oppression
In southwest Asia’s process of decolonization and national liberation, the Kurdish people were denied their own nation. Instead, in the postcolonial settlement, they were divided up between Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Their struggle for self-determination therefore cuts across several states. In Syria, the first Kurdish parties were established in the 1950s to advance their national rights. The parties adopted socialist ideologies, despite the fact that the tribal elite were well-represented among their leaders.
The formation of these parties was triggered by two main causes. First, Kurds grew frustrated with the Syrian Communist Party (SCP), which they had initially joined en masse. The SCP demonstrated disinterest in, and even opposition to, any official recognition of Kurdish national rights in Syria. Even worse, they supported the Iraqi Ba’athist regime’s military campaigns against its Kurdish population in the 1960s.
Second, and even more importantly, Kurds faced a dominant Arab nationalist politics throughout the region that refused to recognize their rights. That intensified their determination to form parties of their own. In Syria, both the United Arab Republic, between 1958 and 1961, as well as the Ba’ath Party state after 1963 scapegoated the country’s Kurdish population. They portrayed Kurds as agents working for foreign powers, particularly U.S. imperialism and Israel. Kurdish officers were notably dismissed from their posts in the Syrian army, while the Ba’ath Party arrested members of Kurdish political organizations.
Thus the Syrian state implemented discriminatory and repressive state policies against the Kurds. For example, it implemented an “Arab Belt” plan in 1962 that established a cordon sanitaire (a type of protection zone) between the Arab and Kurdish populations around the northern and northeastern edge of the Jazira region, along the borders with Turkey and Iraq. Mouhamad Talab Hilal, the head of the Jazirah political police and architect of the “Arab Belt,” notably wrote in his plan that “the inhabitants of the (newly established Arab) farms must have military training and weapons exactly like the Jewish settlements established in Palestine.” A “special census” of the Jazira population in 1962 stripped approximately 120,000 Kurds of their citizenship and declared them “foreigners,” leaving them and their children without fundamental civil rights while condemning them to poverty.
Hafez al-Assad, who seized power and set up his regime in 1970, continued such discriminatory policies, setting up a system of institutionalized racism against Kurds. Between 1972 and 1977, Assad implemented a policy of settlement in predominantly Kurdish regions of Syria. His regime resettled approximately 25,000 Arab peasants, whose lands had been flooded by the construction of the Tabqa Dam, in the Upper Jazirah. There, the regime built “modern villages” adjacent to Kurdish villages.
In 1986, the regime cracked down on public celebrations of Nawruz, the springtime new year festival observed by Kurds, Iranians, and other peoples. It did so because it had become an occasion for the Kurdish community and political groups to demand their national, cultural, and democratic rights in Syria. Celebrations of Nawruz were seen as an act of resistance and affirmation of national rights, in a country whose state was actively oppressing its Kurdish population. The regime forbade any signs of Nawruz celebrations in two Damascus suburbs. When people defied the ban, security forces attacked participants to the celebration, killing one young Kurdish man and injuring many others.
At the same time, Assad co-opted certain segments of Kurdish society, particularly the elites in the growing Kurdish opposition in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in order to serve his regime’s foreign policy objectives. The Assad regime incorporated religious leaders like Muhammad Sa’id Ramadan al-Buti and Ahmad Kuftaro, the Grand Mufti of the Republic between 1964 and 2004. It also appointed several Kurdish figures to high-ranking positions, such as Mahmud Ayyubi, who was Prime Minister from 1972 to 1976, and Hikmat Shikaki, who was head of military intelligence from 1970 to 1974 and Chief of Staff from 1974 to 1998. However, it made these appointments on the condition that these officials refrain from displaying any Kurdish ethnic identity or advocating Kurdish rights.
Assad extended this policy of co-optation to Kurdish political parties. It established a kind of alliance with the Turkish-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, became an official guest of the regime in the early 1980s as Syrian and Turkish tensions escalated. The PKK was permitted to recruit members and fighters, reaching between 5,000 and 10,000 members in the 1990s. It was allowed to launch military operations from Syria against the Turkish army. The PKK had offices in Damascus and several northern cities, as well as in Lebanon when it was under Syrian influence. There some PKK fighters fought against Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. During this period, PKK militants seized control of small portions of Syrian territory, particularly in Afrin.
Other Kurdish political parties also collaborated with the Syrian regime. Among these were Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which had been in Syria since 1972. In 1979, Masoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) also operated in Syria and collaborated with Assad’s regime. Both were focused on using their base in Syria to organize Kurds in Iraq.
The regime allowed these parties to operate in Syria on the condition that they did not organize and mobilize Kurds within Syria. The Syrian state instrumentalized these parties as a tool of its foreign policy in pursuit of its regional ambitions. Inside the country, it used them to displace the Kurdish question onto other countries, especially Iraq and Turkey. The Kurdish parties that accepted this bargain rejected struggles waged by Kurdish organizations in Syria against Damascus, which they considered a diversion from what they considered the “real struggle” for the “real” Kurdistan in Iraq and Turkey.
The end of collaboration
Relations between Kurdish political parties and the Syrian regime began to deteriorate in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As relations between Turkey and Syria improved, the regime abandoned its alliance with the PKK. It expelled PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan’s in 1998. He was soon imprisoned in Turkey, where he has languished in jail ever since. The regime repressed the party’s militants inside the country.
In response, PKK activists who remained in Syria attempted to create a new political entity with the dual objective of defending themselves against state repression and providing social support to its thousands of members and sympathizers. They founded the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in 2003 in Syria. It was part of the PKK’s strategy to establish local branches in countries neighboring Turkey. The PYD reoriented its political project on Syrian Kurds. It aligned itself more closely with the political programs of other Kurdish political parties, demanding cultural and political rights for Syrian Kurds and calling for the democratization of the country.
Hafez al-Assad and then his son and despotic heir, Bashar al-Assad, also abandoned collaboration with Barzani’s KDP and Talabani’s PUK from 2000 onward. As the Assad regime attempted to normalize relations with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, it broke relations with these parties and ended its interference in Iraq’s Kurdish affairs. That alone shows their cynical and instrumental attitude toward these Kurdish parties.
Once it ended its policy of cooptation, the regime began to brutally repress the Kurds in Syria. In 2004, it crushed a Kurdish popular uprising that had erupted in the city of Qamishli and spread to predominantly Kurdish areas of the country like Jazirah, Afrin, and also neighborhoods in Aleppo and Damascus. The protests were rooted among working class youth who had broken free from the control of Kurdish political parties, which had traditionally favored peaceful struggle. The protestors attacked symbols of the regime and public buildings. The security forces responded by killing several dozens of demonstrators and arresting 2,000.
In the wake of the repression of this “ Kurdish Intifada,” Kurds formed new political parties and movements. For example, they established the Kurdish Youth Movement in Syria (known by its Kurdish acronym as the TCK) in March 2005. It would later go on to become one of leading Kurdish forces in the revolutionary uprising in 2011.
Conflict between Kurds and Bashar al-Assad’s regime again exploded between May and June 2005. In response to the regime’s disappearance of the Kurdish Sheikh Muhammad Machouk Khaznaoui, 10,000 Kurdish demonstrators marched in the city of Qamishli to demand the truth about the fate of the Sheikh. After the announcement of Khaznawi’s death as a result of torture, Kurds staged further mass protests. The regime attacked these, arresting and detaining many more activists. Faced with such repression, Kurdish political parties and Kurdish youth groups continued to organize against their oppression and the regime’s anti-democratic policies.
The Syrian state has not only denied Kurds their rights but locked the vast majority of their people in poverty. For instance, the northeast region of Jazira, which is home to large numbers of Kurds, is one of the country’s most impoverished areas. Yet it boasts 90 percent of Syria’s reserves of oil and gas and produces important crops, chiefly wheat and cotton. But it lacks the industry, infrastructure, and institutions to transform these raw materials into consumer goods. It does not have adequate oil refineries. It does not have mills and factories to turn wheat into food products like pasta or to process fruit into jams or other crops into canned foods. Thus, despite being called Syria’s breadbasket, it has suffered underdevelopment that has trapped its local population in poverty.
Kurds thus suffer national and economic oppression. But the vast majority of Syrian Arab opposition parties have opposed the Kurdish right to self-determination or ignored the Kurdish national question entirely. At best, their political programs promise to grant full citizenship to those Kurds who have been denied it. The only major exception to this terrible norm was the Communist Action Party in the 1970s and 1980s. It supported the Kurd’s right to self-determination in Syria and the region. It developed a whole program that recognized the democratic, social, and cultural rights of the Kurdish people of Syria.
The Kurdish question in the Syrian revolution
In the face of this repression and betrayal, Kurds joined the Syrian revolution in 2011 along with the majority of the country’s population. Like everyone else, Kurdish protesters organized themselves into Local Coordination Committees . However, collaboration between Arab and Kurdish coordination committees gradually weakened before ceasing altogether because of growing divisions between them and within the movement as a whole.
Two factors led to this. First, profound disagreements over strategy and politics divided Kurdish and Arab opposition groups. Second, ethnic tensions developed between Arabs and Kurds, dividing the initially united national uprising. These factors split the Arab forces, who were increasingly led by Islamic fundamentalists armed forces, and the Kurdish resistance, mainly led by the PYD. Both separately adopted a military strategy against the regime.
Kurds criticized Arabs for tacitly using or supporting anti-Kurdish rhetoric from the beginning of the uprising. Arabs in turn accused Kurds of being “separatists” for seeking their national rights; some went so far as to accuse Kurds of betraying the Syrian revolution. However, the vast majority of Kurdish protesters never limited themselves to purely “Kurdish” demands such as securing Syrian citizenship to undocumented Kurds.
Many Kurdish political activists stated clearly that they saw themselves as part of the broader popular protest movement throughout the country and as full and active participants in building a new Syria for all. They integrated traditional Kurdish demands for self-determination in a common struggle against the regime.
In predominantly Kurdish areas, the PYD gained increasing control thanks to the initially tolerant attitude of the Syrian regime. Assad was eager to split the resistance along ethnic lines so he allowed the PYD to establish Rojava in the northeast of the country. For its part, the PYD capitalized on divisions among the various regional and international powers involved in Syria to win support for its project. Notably it secured aid from the United States (and to a lesser extent, Russia) to advance its political project. However, this support from foreign powers has waned over time.
The Syrian opposition and the Kurdish question
The Kurdish national question has thus been a key element in the evolution of the Syrian revolutionary process, its movement formations like the coordinating committees, as well as the traditional opposition groups and coalitions. In fact, one of the reasons for the defeat of the original 2011 uprising was the failure of the movement to consolidate solidarity between religious and ethnic groups, especially between Arabs and Kurds. At the start, all groups expressed hope for unity, offering the chance to address the Kurdish national question in a liberated Syria. But that opportunity was squandered.
The Syrian National Council (SNC), dominated by liberal and Islamic forces, refused to accept or engage with Kurdish national demands. At the first conference of opposition circles in exile in Turkey in mid-July 2011, Kurdish representatives walked out after the Arab forces rejected their request to change the country’s name from the Syrian Arab Republic to the Republic of Syria. This rejection, even if only symbolic, demonstrated that the opposition remained committed to Arab nationalism and Arab dominance in Syria.
That disrupted relations between the SNC and the Kurdish National Council (KNC). The KNC is a coalition of Kurdish political parties close to the leader Massoud Barzani, who was the former president of the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq. The first chairman of the SNC, Burhan Ghalioun, rejected the KNC main demand for a federal system in a post-Assad Syria, calling it “delusional.” Ghalioun also angered Syrian Kurds by comparing them to “immigrants in France.” In response to the SNC’s continued rejection of their demands, Kurdish activists staged demonstrations on March 30, 2012, dubbing it “Kurdish Rights Friday.”
Tensions further escalated after the SNC published its “National Charter: The Kurdish Question in Syria” in April 2012. The document removed passages recognizing a Kurdish nation in Syria that had been included in the final declaration of the Friends of Syria meeting in Tunisia a few months earlier. This led to the KNC’s withdrawal from unity talks with the SNC, after which they accused Turkey of unduly influencing SNC policy. At another opposition meeting in Cairo in July 2012, the Syrian Arab opposition dealt another blow to the KNC by rejecting its demands to include a reference to the “Kurdish people in Syria” in the conference’s framework and agenda.
Faced with the SNC’s continued denial of Kurdish national rights, Kurdish youth committees, groups, and parties staged numerous demonstrations and actions. They carried banners supporting Kurdish demands and affirming the existence of the Kurdish people in Syria.
The KNC then joined a new Syrian coalition in exile, the National Coalition of Opposition and Revolutionary Forces (known as the Coalition), in August 2013, hoping it would recognize Kurdish national rights. The Coalition, however, maintained a position similar to the SNC’s toward Kurdish parties and interests. The KNC’s inclusion in the opposition’s High Negotiation Committee, established after the Riyadh Opposition Conference in December 2015, did not lead the Arab opposition to end its denial of Kurdish rights.
The SNC and the Coalition also opposed the PYD. They went so far as to characterize it as an enemy of the revolution. George Sabra, former chairman of the SNC and Coalition, stated in January 2016 that the PYD was not part of the opposition and asserted that it was very close to the regime. He also denounced its ties to the PKK, accepting Turkey’s classification of the party as a terrorist organization.
Such denunciations of the PYD by the Arab opposition became even more extreme after establishment, by the PYD in 2016, of the “Democratic Federation of Rojava–Northern Syria,” later renamed the “Democratic Federal System of Northern Syria.” Opposition member Michel Kilo echoed regime rhetoric from the 1960s comparing Rojava to Israel. He declared that Syrians would not allow the creation of such an entity on Syrian soil and went further to assert that that there is no Kurdish land in Syria, only Kurdish citizens.
Hostility toward the PYD, and more generally toward the Kurdish population and their aspirations, steadily grew within both the Coalition and the SNC, and within certain sectors of the Arab-led opposition inside the country. This was particularly evident in January 2018 when armed opposition groups assisted Turkey’s invasion of the PYD-controlled Afrin region. These groups, which included the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and fundamentalist Islamic forces such as Ahrar al-Sham and Faylaq al-Sham, had fallen under the control of Ankara.
They justified their collaboration by claiming that the Kurds were allies of the regime and that it was important to keep Syria united against separatist groups such as the PKK/PYD. Syrian fighters appeared in numerous videos during this period expressing racist rhetoric against Kurds and chanting slogans in support of Erdogan. Even worse, they looted civilian homes and shops in Afrin and destroyed the statue of Kawa, a symbolic Kurdish figure associated with the Nawruz New Year celebration. The mutilated bodies of Kurdish soldiers and civilians were posted on social media.
By the end of 2018, it was estimated that more than 100,000 people had been forced to flee their homes in the Afrin region due to the Turkish military operation and subsequent occupation. Many still remain unable to return. Syrian armed groups, backed by Turkey, continue to violate the human rights of Kurds in the region.
Tensions between the PYD and various armed opposition groups continued to escalate leading to more frequent clashes and a deepening of ethnic divisions between Arabs and Kurds. The situation has deteriorated in recent years, with numerous declarations from Syrian armed opposition groups affirming their readiness and desire to participate in new Turkish military offensives against the PYD-controlled areas in Syria east of the Euphrates River. The Coalition has also increasingly demonstrated its political submission to, and support for, the Turkish government and its repressive and warlike policies against the PKK/PYD and the Kurdish population as a whole.
Thus, the KNC failed to convince either the SNC or Coalition to recognize Kurdish rights. Both have systematically ignored and attacked the KNC despite its participation in these bodies. Faced with this situation and the various threats against the Kurdish population in Syria, Syria’s Kurds came to view the PYD and its armed wing, the YPG (People’s Protection Units), and later its YPG-led military coalition, the SDF, as their only viable defense against Arab chauvinism, Islamic fundamentalist groups, and military violence. The PYD proved that with their effective political institutions and military capacity.
The PYD and imperialism
The PYD established these, in part, by building strong relationships with the U.S. and to a lesser extent Russia. Washington cultivated ties with the PYD in its fight against ISIS in Syria. The U.S. provided military support to the SDF starting in October 2015. In its founding document, the SDF committed to combating “terrorism represented by ISIS, its sister organizations, and the criminal Ba’ath regime.”
The YPG controlled the SDF, while other groups like Syriac and the Army of Revolutionaries (Jaysh al-Thuwar) played an auxiliary role in it. The SDF became the Pentagon’s primary partner in its war against ISIS. The U.S. supported SDF units in expelling ISIS from Raqqa and its surroundings in 2017, destroying more than 80 percent of the city and causing a humanitarian crisis.
At the same time, the PYD developed close relations with Russia. In September 2015, it collaborated with Russian military intervention in support of Assad’s regime. In 2016, it secured support from the Russian air force for its attack on Arab opposition groups in the Afrin region. In that campaign, it seized a number of Arab-majority towns in northern Aleppo, including Tal Rifaat.
From 2015 on, the U.S. and Russia put enormous pressure on the PYD to conform to their priorities. Moscow demanded that the PYD collaborate with Assad’s forces against ISIS. The U.S. limited its support for the YPG and SDF to the fight against ISIS. It maintained the PYD’s sister group, the PKK, on its terrorist list and expressed strong support for Turkey’s fight against it. It also avoided providing significant economic support to PYD-controlled areas, which would have angered Turkey. It restricted aid it did provide to a relatively modest stabilization program.
Thus, Russia and the United States tried to use the PYD and its military forces for their own purposes. Both powers sought to use the PYD as a proxy force to achieve their own political goals. But neither was willing to do more than that and risk jeopardizing their relations with Turkey. That explains why both allowed Turkey to launch Operation Olive Branch in January 2018, deploying its armed forces in collaboration with Syria proxies against the PYD and Kurds in the Afrin region. That alone proves that both imperialist powers had no commitment to Kurdish self-determination.
Strengths and weaknesses of Rojava
That left the PYD in a weak position. The PYD established Rojava, the AANES, in the midst of the Syrian revolutionary process. A year into the uprising, regime forces withdrew from nine predominantly Kurdish towns and handed control over them to the PYD on July 19, 2012. The PYD claimed that its threat to attack regime forces drove them from the towns. By contrast, the SNC and some Kurdish rivals accused the PYD of making a deal with Damascus.
The truth is probably somewhere between these different accounts. Most likely, there was some kind of tacit agreement between the PYD and Assad. The regime had allowed the party to return and re-establish bases in Syria after the outbreak of the popular uprising. Damascus needed its full armed forces to suppress the protests in the rest of the country and did not want to open a new military front. Despite its retreat from various Kurdish towns, it maintained a limited presence in cities like Qamishli and Hasakah.
The regime’s decision to surrender Kurdish majority inhabited territory was also part of its strategy to divide the popular protest movement along ethnic and sectarian lines. It also wanted to force Turkey to focus on the threat of Kurdish autonomy rather than supporting armed opposition groups. By stoking tensions and fears among these diverse populations, Damascus hoped to splinter the resistance and then crush each part one by one on their own.
The PYD opened itself up to be used in this fashion. It adopted a neutral stance toward the opposition forces and was unwilling to collaborate with grassroots organizations and activists in areas inhabited by Arab populations. The regime took advantage of the PYD’s position, accusing it of being “separatists” and “traitors” allied with the United States.
The PYD assumed de facto governing authority, managing a transitional administration in what it and the Kurds called Rojava (Western Kurdistan). Rojava comprised three non-contiguous enclaves: Afrin, Kobani, and the Jazirah region in Hasakah Province. The mixed interim administration consisted of local and legislative assemblies and governments, as well as a general assembly including Kurdish, Arab, Syriac, and Assyrian representatives.
The PYD’s stated objective was to establish autonomous administration within a federated Syria. In late September 2017, at the PYD’s seventh congress, participants reaffirmed federalism as the most appropriate solution for the region. Rojava adopted the name Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) in September 2018.
The PYD characterized the AANES project as a form of “democratic autonomy” or “self-administration.” But, despite the public emphasis on pluralism and self-government, the PYD and its affiliated organizations dominated AANES’s regional and local political institutions. When they deemed it necessary, they used authoritarian and repressive practices against their Kurdish political rivals. They also crushed Arab protests against the PYD’s discriminatory practices and repressive security apparatus.
Despite these serious faults, the PYD did enact some significant reforms in AANES. One of its major achievements was the promotion of women’s rights and participation in its government, military, and civil institutions. This is an accomplishment that even the PYD’s detractors acknowledge. That said, even this is not without contradictions. The AANES gave preferential treatment to PYD women in appointments to institutional positions.
The PYD also won significant support from Kurds and others for the AANES’s improved distribution of basic services. But no significant change in the economic structure was implemented. While the PYD has rhetorically promoted agricultural and industrial cooperatives as pillars of an alternative social economy structure, these have remained marginal and have failed to replace private property. As before, the AANES towns and region have remained dependent on oil sales and indirect taxes on trade.
In sum, the AANES project combined two contradictory elements: 1) top-down political and social institutions controlled by the PYD; and 2) significant achievements, notably increasing women’s participation at all levels as well as the inclusion, albeit symbolic of religious and ethnic minorities in AANES institutions and decision making.
After the fall of Assad
The collapse of Assad’s regime and the seizure of power by Hay’at Tahrir Sham (HTS), at the end of 2024, put the PYD and the AANES in the crosshairs of several forces. HTS established the Syrian Transitional Government (STG), immediately posing the question of its relationship with AANES. Initially the STG and the AANES pursued a diplomatic process to come to a settlement.
By contrast, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) immediately attacked the SDF. The SNA took control of the cities of Tell Rifat and Manbej in northern Syria, systematically violating human rights and displacing over 150,000 people. After these attacks, the SNA continued its military operations against the SDF at the Tishrin Dam, which supplies electricity to much of northeast Syria. The SDF has controlled the dam since 2015 when it seized it from ISIS with the assistance of US troops.
To back up the SNA, the Turkish army bombed the area around Kobani, killing untold numbers of civilians. It also targeted a grain center and damaged 300 tons of stored wheat. Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan declared during a joint press conference with Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa following the fall of the Assad’s regime, that the territorial integrity of Syria is “non-negotiable” and that the PKK “has no place” in the country. A few days later, president Erdogan declared that the SDF “will either bid farewell to their weapons, or they will be buried in Syrian lands.”
Initially, the HTS did not participate in any military confrontations with the SDF. But neither did it condemn the Turkish attacks. Moreover, its spokespeople signaled that the STG would eventually confront the PYD and SDF over the question of sovereignty in AANES. Murhaf Abu Qasra, a top commander of the HTS and current defense minister of the STG, stated that “Syria will not be divided and there will be no federalism inshAllah. God willing, all these areas will be under Syria[n authority.”
Interim President Al-Sharaa told a Turkish newspaper that Syria would develop a strategic relationship with Turkey. He added that: “We do not accept that Syrian lands threaten and destabilize Turkey or other places.” He also declared that all weapons must come under state control, including those in the SDF-held areas.
After months of negotiations between the STG and SDF, the two inked an agreement on March 10, 2025. Interim President Al-Shara signed it to deflect local and international attention from the massacres the STG’s forces had committed, about the same time, against Alawite civilians. Brokered by Washington, the agreement sought to integrate both civilian and military wings of the SDF into the state. However, no progress was made for months as the two sides remained deadlocked.
The defeat of Rojava
That impasse ended with a series of military clashes between the STG and the SDF. Government forces initiated the conflict, advancing into the Kurdish majority neighborhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh in Aleppo. They then captured large parts of the provinces of Deir Ez-Zor and Raqqa. The STG led military offensive forcefully displaced between 150,000 and 300,000 people, according to various estimates, who have sought refuge in Kurdish majority inhabited cities across northeast Syria.
The U.S. and Turkey clearly backed this offensive. It took place just two days after a meeting in Damascus between the STG and SDF in the presence of U.S. military personnel. With the talks stalled, it’s clear that Washington and Ankara gave the greenlight to the STG to attack. Already, in the midst of these negotiations, the government was developing a plan to launch a military operation first in Aleppo and then to extend it to other SDF controlled areas. They rallied various Arab tribes in Deir Ez-Zor and Raqqa , which have been in contact with interim President al-Sharaa for some time now, in order to prepare the attack on the SDF.
Whilst the U.S. and France officially claimed to be working to de-escalate tensions between the STG and SDF, they did not apply any meaningful pressure to stop the government’s military assault. Thus, despiteWashington’s long-term partnership with the SDF in the fight against ISIS, the U.S. sold it down the river. Washington opted instead to throw its support behind the STG. This should have been no surprise. Trump had met numerous times with interim President al-Sharaa and removed the Caesar sanctions in December 2025. The U.S. wants a stable state in Syria at its service, even at the cost of selling out a one-time ally.
Its support for the PYD was always restricted to the fight against ISIS. The U.S. does not care about Kurds and their right to self-determination. The U.S. Special Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack made this explicit when he declared that the SDF’s role as the “primary anti-ISIS force on the ground” has “largely expired” and the Syrian government is now prepared to assume such security responsibilities. He added that “Historically, the U.S. military presence in northeastern Syria was justified primarily as a counter-ISIS partnership.” He continued arguing that the STG’s decision to join the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS in late 2025 has “fundamentally” transformed the situation in Syria. In effect, the U.S. has embraced STG at the expense of the SDF.
Washington’s cynical use of Kurds for their own purposes has a long history. It along with other western and regional states opposed the Kurdish referendum in 2017 in Iraq. They did so despite the fact that it was initiated by Massoud Barzani, historically an ally of the U.S., the West and Turkey. They feared it would lead to the independence of Iraqi Kurdistan, destabilizing the region and weakening their war against ISIS.
Turkey has backed the STG to the hilt on the condition that it blocks any Kurdish progress toward equal rights and self-determination. Remember, Turkey considers the SDF a tool of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which both it and the U.S. classify as a terrorist organization. So, immediately after Assad fell, Ankara pressured the SDF to dissolve and integrate into the Syrian army. Moreover, it has declared its willingness to support and even fight alongside the STGs forces against the SDF. And it did exactly that in the government’s offensive. Almost everyone believes that it provided logistical support for the STG forces and mobilized its military to shell areas of Qamishli.
By supporting HTS and its STG, Ankara has consolidated its influence over the country. It is now the most important regional power backing the new regime. It has several goals it wants to accomplish in Syria. It wants to expel Syrian refugees in Turkey back to the country; ink lucrative contracts for reconstruction and increase its exports to Syria; and dismantle the AANES. This last goal is the most important one for Turkey. It views AANES as a dangerous precedent for Kurds in Turkey to fight for their own self-determination, their own autonomous area, something it considers a threat to Turkey’s national integrity and security.
The quick defeat of the SDF and AANES by these combined forces also exposed the limitations of the PYD’s project in AANES. In particular, it failed to win over non-Kurdish populations, especially Arabs, who have repeatedly protested against discrimination, repressive security practices, and imprisonment of activists. They have also criticized the lack of effective Arab representatives in AANES institutions. This situation was reflected with many Arab local communities in Raqqa and Deir Ez-Zor calling the departure of SDF “liberation.
Instead of trying to win the consent of Arab popular classes in the areas under their control, the SDF has instead cultivated ties with tribal leaders to maintain control. These tribal leaders infamously change their loyalty to align with the most powerful political actors at the moment. They do so to advance their own material interests. Thus, as the balance of forces shifted in favor of the STG, the tribal leaders followed suit supporting its forces assault on the AANES.
Finally, the PYD and SDF’s reliance on the U.S. and Russia also made them vulnerable. Once bereft of an imperial sponsor, without a mass base beyond the Kurdish population, and with no alliance with Arab progressive and democratic forces, the SDF found itself isolated and relatively easily defeated.
More generally, the military defeat suffered by the AANES resulted in criticisms of the PYD by some Kurdish political rivals. In particular, the PYD’s argument for a “brotherhood of peoples”, with a focus on the need for solidarity between different ethnicities, came under criticism from Kurdish nationalist currents. In addition, PYD was also criticized for delaying a deal with the new central authorities in Damascus, resulting in more suffering for the Kurds. Despite this, the majority of the Kurdish populations in the areas under the control of the AANES, still consider YPG forces as their main bulwark against the central government in Damascus, and a return to an era of oppression. The YPG and figures affiliated with the PYD like SDF Commander Mazloum Abdi, therefore remain popular among large sectors of Kurdish society.
At the same time, there has been a political rapprochement between various PYD and other Kurdish political parties, especially the Kurdish national council, affiliated with the Barzani Family of Kurdistan Iraq, to try to “unify” Kurdish ranks against the multiple threats and promote Kurdish national demands in Syria.
Syrian’s ruling authorities’ centralization of power
The STG seized AANES to pursue its objective of imposing its centralized rule over the entire country. In doing so, it demonstrated that it rejects a democratic and inclusive project for the country and its peoples, especially for the oppressed Kurdish population. Indeed, the new regime has proved its reactionary nature since Assad’s fall. It has curbed democratic rights and freedoms, violated human rights, and committed atrocities like the massacres of Alawite and Druze populations on the coast and in Sweida.
It and its allies have spouted aggressive, chauvinistic, and racist rhetoric against Kurds and the SDF. For example, Syria’s Minister of Endowments, Mohammad Abu al-Khair Shukri, issued a religious directive urging mosques across the country to pray for the success of the Syrian Arab Army’s soldiers and celebrate what he described as their “conquests and victories” in eastern Syria. He even invoked the sixth verse of Surah al-Anfal from the Holy Quran. The term “al-Anfal” was used by Saddam Hussien to justify his 1988 military campaign against Kurds in Iraq, which included chemical attacks, mass killings, and destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure.
During its offensive against ANNES, the STG forces targeted not just SDF forces but also civilians. In Raqqa, troops looted people’s homes, forced untold numbers into hiding, and displaced tens of thousands. Tabqa and villages south of Kobane also suffered looting. Meanwhile, the STG’s forces have been subjecting Kobane to a siege for several weeks now, raising alarm over deteriorating humanitarian conditions.
All this contradicts interim President al-Sharaa’s pledge to grant the Kurd’s linguistic, cultural, citizenship rights, and positions within the state. In addition to this, the return of internally displaced Kurds (IDPs) to Afrin—part of the agreement reached between the STG and the PYD—is facing challenges. The IDPs wishing to return to their homes can’t, because they are occupied by Arab families installed by Turkish authorities or Syrian forces affiliated with Ankara. Similarly, a demonstration was organised end of February in the city of Qamishli on Wednesday, demanding answers about the fate of about more than a thousand disappeared, mostly SDF soldiers, at the hands of armed factions affiliated with the Syrian government, during the latest fightings
Even more disturbing, al-Sharaa’s government has struck reconciliation agreements with some of Assad’s former cadres in the predominantly Arab areas it captured like Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. It is clear that the STG is constructing an Arab chauvinist and sectarian regime. Thus, the Syrian government has offered no plans for democratic political representation or power sharing.
Campaigns of resistance
It is not at all clear that people welcome its rule and the country has witnessed a rising tide of socio-economic protests against the government’s ongoing neoliberal “reforms,” austerity, and arbitrary measures that target workers and the popular classes. All these serve the new ruling elites like they served the old ruling elite. They only deepen the country’s deep socio-economic inequalities.
Thus, throughout northeastern Syria, teachers have been protesting on a nearly daily basis. In Raqqa, following the withdrawal of the SDF, local teachers have been protesting on a nearly daily basis. They demand permanent positions in schools in their areas and the restoration of their teaching rights, which they lost in previous years. A few weeks later, teachers in southern Hasaka Governorate also announced an open-ended strike and the suspension of classes in schools located in the areas of Al-Shaddadi, Al-Arisha, Markada, and Tel al-Shaer. They seek job security stabilization and improved living conditions.
In northern Syria, specifically in the Idlib and Aleppo countryside governorates, and to a lesser extent in the Hama countryside, teachers have been staging a widespread strike since beginning of February demanding permanent employment, the reinstatement of those who had been dismissed, and salary increases to keep pace with the rising cost of living. More than 1,700 schools in these areas closed.
The teachers dubbed their strike the “Strike for Dignity” in response to the authorities’ failure to honor their promises to raise salaries and improve working conditions. Teachers had already organized large demonstrations at the end of 2025. The independent teachers’ coalition, “Free Teachers of Syria,” announced that teachers were demanding a 200% salary increase, noting that the previously announced 100% increase, which was supposed to take effect at the beginning of the year, had not been implemented, further fueling frustration and eroding trust.
Reports also emerged of solidarity demonstrations in the Daraa and Hama countryside. The teachers announced that the strike was open-ended and that they would not return to their classrooms until their salaries were paid and basic school supplies were provided. The director of education in Idlib was removed from a teachers’ WhatsApp group after threatening administrative penalties, including dismissal, for any teacher absent for three consecutive days, sparking widespread anger among the teachers. The strike received the support of the Syrian Teachers’ Union.
In addition to this, a group of activists and residents of Deir ez-Zor province have launched a campaign under the hashtag #Enough_Deir_ez-Zor_is_Disaster, in response to what they described as “systematic marginalization” and policies that have led to the collapse of living conditions and public services in the province.
The campaign organizers issued a statement addressed to the government, asserting that Deir ez-Zor has become a “disaster-stricken” province, with more than 80 percent of its population suffering dire conditions. They hold government authorities responsible for the unprecedented economic and social deterioration of the area, despite the province’s vast oil and agricultural resources. Their demand that their province be officially declared “disaster-stricken” would require the government to implement emergency plans to improve conditions and living standards.
They call for the government to allocate funds from the province’s sale of oil and gas for development projects and local services as well as to rebuild bridges and main roads, the basic preconditions for people to rebuild their lives. And they want their local communities directly involved in making decisions with the advice of genuine experts, not regime toadies. They are demanding long-term development projects, not just superficial ones, to ensure that the province’s resources are used to improve people’s lives.
The key division in the fight for a new Syria
In this situation, the top priority for progressive and democratic forces in Syria is to stop the bloodbath in the country, allow for the safe return of displaced civilians, oppose the regime’s hate speech as well as its ethnic and religious sectarianism, fight to improve the socio-economic situation, and expand democratic political space. A key task in all this is to overcome the country’s division between Arabs and Kurds.
Progressive and democratic forces must wage a struggle against Arab chauvinism to forge solidarity between these populations. The Kurds have been oppressed in Syria since its founding as a nation-state in 1946. The country’s Arab rulers have denied them citizenship and their rights, especially to self-determination. On top of that, imperialist and regional powers have exploited this division in Syria and other countries for their own interest.
As a result, among all of the country’s divisions, the key one has been between Arabs and Kurds. It must be overcome in order to unite the country’s people and win their liberation. The beginning of the Syrian Revolution offered a glimpse of that possibility, when the Syrian people initially rose up calling for unity against Assad. The famous slogan was “the Syrian people are one.”
But progressive and democratic forces among Arabs and Kurds were not strong enough to consolidate and build on that initial moment of unity. Instead, the movement divided along ethnic and sectarian lines, especially between Kurds and Arabs, to the detriment of all. Only the old and new elites among the various ethnic and religious groups benefit from such division.
This underscores the fact that the Kurdish question is the central one that must be answered in the struggle for a new Syria. It cannot be based on exclusive identities such as Arabness or Islam. Instead, it must be a pluralist state and society that respects and ensures the rights of all ethnic and religious groups. Syria’s rulers have always opposed such a project and do not benefit from it. Only the popular classes have an interest and capacity to fight for such a future.
Thus, the country’s Kurdish and Arab masses’ fates are bound together. Any weakening of Kurdish rights, including their right to self-determination, opens divisions that the Syrian elite will exploit. By contrast, Arabs defending Kurdish rights strengthen unity between the peoples and therefore their capacity to fight for equality, democracy, and justice for all.The same is true in other states in the region like Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, where the Kurdish question is the central riddle at the heart of their liberation struggle. As long as their rulers and states, whether Islamic fundamentalist or secular nationalist, can scapegoat Kurds and divide the popular classes along ethnic lines, no liberation struggle is possible either for Kurds or the Turkish, Iranian, and Arab masses. Kurdish self-determination can only be won through a common struggle with the popular classes of these countries against their reactionary bourgeois rulers and their states and for a new order that guarantees the rights and livelihoods of all.In line with this perspective, progressive forces and the Left must adopt a regional strategy rooted in grassroots class struggle to liberate popular classes and oppressed peoples, including Kurds, from their rulers’ authoritarian states. Such a strategy also threatens a defeat for the imperialist backers of these states, from the United States to China and Russia, and Israel. In this struggle, the regional popular classes must embrace the demands of all those who suffer national oppression, such as the Kurd, Palestinians and others who suffer other forms of ethnic, sectarian, and social oppression.
Greater collaboration must take place between the Palestinian and Kurdish liberation movements. While acknowledging differences between the two causes, they are linked, notably by their emancipatory nature and their challenge to the regional ruling classes and the imperialist system. That is why the ruling classes have opposed the liberation struggles of both these peoples. In both cases, attempted alliances with regional and international powers have only resulted in defeat, betrayal, and unending suffering.
Such a regional strategy for liberation could create two ways to ensure Kurdish self-determination. First, the struggle could enact deep reforms within the existing nations states. Alongside effective political participation, it could ensure Kurds the right of national cultural autonomy within each country. But their state would have to recognize multiple nationalities and allow them to freely conduct their own cultural affairs, including the recognition of Kurdish languages in each state, guarantees of the Kurd’s right to speak and teach Kurdish in the schools, the institution of a Kurdish curriculum, and the allowance of the celebration of Kurdish cultural symbols. The fight for reforms must also include specific socio-economic development policies to tackle decades of de-development and economic injustices.
Second, the struggle could completely transform the state system in South West Asia and North Africa, including the overthrow of authoritarian regimes and the Israeli Apartheid state, and the subsequent establishment of a new federation of socialist states, including a potential Kurdish one. These two outcomes are not necessarily opposed, and the first outcome could open a path to the second. In both cases, progressive forces and the Left must fight to end all ethnic or religious oppression that sustains the region’s system of class exploitation.
Syria’s future hangs in the balance. Its new rulers and state have proved in just a short time that they do not represent a rupture with the authoritarianism, sectarianism, and ethnic chauvinism of Assad’s regime. They stand in the way of establishing a new democratic and inclusive country with effective political participation from below of the country’s popular classes in all their diversity. All Syrians that want democracy, social justice, and equality must face the facts about this new regime and struggle against it with all their might.
Joseph Daher is a Swiss-Syrian academic and activist. He is the author of Syria After the Uprising: The Political Economy of State Resilience (Pluto, 2019) and Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God (Pluto, 2016), and founder of the blog Syria Freedom Forever. He is also co-founder of the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists.
