In Syria, Turkey is escalating the very “terrorism” it pretends to be fighting. Erdoğan and his jihadist SNA proxies are artificially prolonging an atrocious war for their own political agendas, aiming to crush democratic self-determination and women’s freedom in north-east Syria. Progressives around the world must no longer stay silent.

By Martin Winiecki

Dec 20, 2024

Ten years ago, the Kurdish struggle against Da’esh’s genocidal onslaught on Kobane became a global symbol for the defense of humanity and the resistance against fascism. The world held its breath as Kurdish women militias belonging to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in this small town next to the Turkish border heroically defied a hitherto unstoppable terrorist group. However unlikely it may have seemed, the Kurds ultimately succeeded to push back the jihadists — a crucial turning point that would turn out to be the beginning of Da’esh’s end.

Right now, history repeats itself but this time, the world isn’t paying much attention. Once again, Kobane finds itself besieged by hostile military forces about to assault. The attackers may carry a different flag but have similar mentalities. Turkey and its jihadist mercenaries of the so-called “Syrian National Army” (SNA) are exploiting the collapse of the Assad regime trying to achieve what Da’esh couldn’t: to eradicate Rojava, the internationally under-reported democratic, feminist and ecological revolution in Syria’s north-east.

Turkey’s illegal assault on north-east Syria

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) lightening offensive and overthrow of 54 years of ruthless dictatorial Assad rule have opened a new chapter for Syria. As Syrians celebrate in the streets, as families reunite with political prisoners freed from Assad’s notorious torture chambers, as exiled Syrians start their way home and as we face the grueling extent of the old regime’s state terrorism, there’s hope to finally end one of this century’s most atrocious wars.

But much is yet uncertain. The HTS, an Al-Qaeda overshoot with links to Da’esh and a terrorism classification in the West, has made efforts to rebrand itself as “freedom fighters” committed to human rights, civilian freedom and international cooperation. But how credible this is will need to be seen. Some of HTS’s leaders are talking about imposing Sharia law with Iran-style morality police, fueling worries they plan to turn the country into another Afghanistan. Much will depend on whether HTS is open and able to bring Syria’s different political, ethnic and religious groups around the same table and find a political solution together.

It’s probably no exaggeration to claim that the Rojava revolution is one of the planet’s most significant current experiments in building a post-capitalist society. And this is exactly what makes it so dangerous in the eyes of all groups with totalitarian or colonial ambitions.

Yet, whether this is possible depends not only on HTS’s willingness but also on whether the foreign powers meddling in Syria will allow the war to end. Whereas Assad’s departure has put Iran out of the game in Syria and immensely weakened Russia’s position, Israel and Turkey have each in their own way benefited from and opportunistically exploited this period of transition and instability.

And both have done so in disregard of international law.

While many Western progressives have rightly blasted Israel’s rogue bombing campaign of Syrian military bases as a bizarre and unacceptable violation of international law, there’s more silence towards Turkish attacks on north-east Syria and confusion about the role of the Kurds.

Turkey has illegally interfered in and occupied parts of Syria for years. Back in 2018, Turkey and its Jihadist SNA allies attacked the SDF just briefly after they’d defeated Da’esh. Turkey invaded and effectively annexed the majority Kurdish areas of Afrin and in 2019, of Serekaniye and Gire Spi. Amnesty International accuses Turkey of war crimes, including forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. In the occupied areas, the inhabitants suffer from what the United Nations calls a “grim” human rights situation, rife with ethnic cleansing, forced displacements and seizures of land and properties. Despite a ceasefire agreement, Turkey has perpetually continued its warfare with consistent drone attacks and regular intensive assaults. Last winter, Turkish airstrikes destroyed 80% of north-east Syria’s civil infrastructure through surgical targeting of electricity and water plants, food storages, medical infrastructure, etc.

Since November 27, with the world’s attention on HTS and Damascus, Turkey and the SNA escalated aggressions against north-east Syria. Aided by heavy Turkish airstrikes, the SNA quickly conquered the Shebha, Tall Rafaat and Manbij regions around Aleppo. 170,000 families were forcibly displaced, creating a new refugee crisis. SNA mercenaries have been denounced for serious human rights violations and war crimes in the newly occupied areas including summary executions, forced displacement, and the looting of civilian properties, torture and abduction of women, sparking protests and strikes in Manbij.

There have been heavy clashes at the Tishreen dam, a major hydroelectric power plant in the Euphrates River, near Manbij, causing serious damage. A break of the dam would likely provoke further humanitarian disaster, an energy blackout and water shortage for much of north-east Syria.

SNA troops have also attacked SDF units at the Qerekozak bridge at the border between Turkish-occupied Afrin and the Kobani region under SDF control. The US negotiated a ceasefire in Manbij but the SNA and Turkey didn’t abide by the agreement.

Reports from within north-east Syria speak of widespread fears of massacres and a resurgence of Da’esh. With tens of thousands of Da’esh fighters still held in north-east Syrian prisons and sleeper cells operating, the Turkish attacks over the years have already jeopardized the SDF’s efforts to monitor and contain Da’esh. Many of the imprisoned jihadists are Western citizens whose home countries refuse to repatriate and prosecute. The heavier the Turkish/SNA onslaughts, the greater the risk of a full-blown Da’esh resurgence, as the SDF is forced to defend its against Turkish attacks.

But many Kurds don’t even see much difference between the SNA mercenaries and the Da’esh. As Foza Yusuf, a Kurdish political leader, warns, “What Da’esh did to the Ezidi women in 2014 will happen to the women of north-east Syria if we don’t resist. Da’esh, however, didn’t have the support which the SNA enjoys. We know that extremist forces always begin by targeting women and minorities but we also know that they won’t stop there; they become a threat to the self-determination and dignity of others.”

To accommodate Turkish security concerns, the SDF offered Turkey to turn Kobane into a demilitarized zone. So far, US attempts at brokering a diplomatic solution haven’t born fruits. To the contrary, the Turkish military has amassed ground troops opposite the border at Kobane, leading US government officials on Tuesday to warn that a Turkish ground invasion of Rojava might be imminent.

What does Turkey want in Syria?

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s explicit plan is for Turkey to permanently occupy a 30 kilometer-wide strip along the 600km border between Turkey and Syria and to carry out large-scale population engineering: displacing native populations and forcibly moving (up to one million) mostly Arab Syrian refugees, into the area, as Turkey has already done in Afrin.

The reason for these unremitting aggressions, however, isn’t “Kurdish terrorism,” as the Turkish state, NATO and their allies continually claim. What is usually omitted from reports about north-east Syria is the fact that it’s been home to a remarkable experiment of democratic autonomous self-governance.

Since 2012, around 5 million people — Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmen, Ezidis and others — have been organized within the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), commonly known as Rojava (Kurmanyi for “west” Kurdistan), demonstrating how a multi-ethnic society can peacefully coexist.

The DAANES functions on the basis of “democratic confederalism,” a radical model of grassroots decision-making, in which people self-organize in popular assemblies at the local, regional, canton and overall levels to address needs as closely to where they occur as possible. Workers and farmers produce through self-directed and co-owned cooperatives. The revolution is striving for food sovereignty through regenerative methods. Their governance system is oriented towards equity among different ethnicities and genders — minorities are entitled to speak first in assemblies and women make up at least half of the leadership. Practices of restorative justice and women councils are trying to transform social conflicts through inclusion and reconciliation, rather than punishment and force. As award-winning journalist Debbie Bookchin says, “The Rojava revolution at its core really is a women’s revolution. The fact that women’s liberation is key to every aspect of society there isn’t just unique to the Middle East but the whole world.” The Kurdish women’s movement goes beyond Western mainstream feminism in that it doesn’t just aim for uplifting women into seats of power but overthrowing the entire patriarchal power structure and restoring community as a social basis of human coexistence.

It’s probably no exaggeration to claim that the Rojava revolution is one of the planet’s most significant current experiments in building a post-capitalist society. And this is exactly what makes it so dangerous in the eyes of all groups with totalitarian or colonial ambitions. As the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan writes: “The real power of capitalist modernity isn’t its money and its weapons, [but] its ability to suffocate all utopias […] with its liberalism.”

The oppression of the Kurds goes back well over a century. With a population of roughly 40 to 45 million, the Kurdish people the world’s largest ethnic group without its own state.

In the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, when European colonial powers drew the map of a post-Ottoman Middle East, they divided the Kurds among four ethnocentric nation-states: Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. Subsequently, Kurdish people suffered 100 years of continuous and ongoing genocidal colonial erasure to assimilate them and other minorities into respective Turkish, Arab and Persian culture with no right to speak their language, practice their culture and to have political self-determination.

As is true for other liberation struggles from Mexico to Palestine, the colonial powers framed the Kurds’ anti-colonial resistance as “terrorism” worthy of ruthless elimination and collective punishment. The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) raised arms against the Turkish state in 1984 aiming to break out of oppression and to establish an independent socialist Kurdish homeland, but after significant setbacks and many lives lost the movement changed its strategy. Nine times, the PKK offered the Turkish state a peace process to politically end the armed conflict.

It also changed its vision of collective liberation. As Nilüfer Koç of the Kurdistan National Congress explains, “The Kurdish Freedom Movement realized that being stateless can actually be an opportunity to establish structures of democratic autonomy that allow different ethnic groups to live together peacefully beyond the constraints of nation-state, patriarchy and capitalism. When we look at the current dramatic events in the Middle East, including in Palestine, we see that we urgently need an alternative to the violence of ethnocentric nation-states and the Kurdish Freedom Movement offers such a model.”

With the implosion of Assad’s control over north-east Syria in 2012, the Kurdish Freedom Movement stood ready to put these ideas into practice.

By now, Rojava’s governance model has spread beyond Syria’s Kurds to other ethnic and religious groups in Syria and Iraq and reinvigorated Kurdish political and cultural organization within Iran and Turkey — posing a serious threat to Erdoğan’s ever more dictatorial domestic rule. The rise of fascism requires the eradication of utopian imagination.

The revolution won’t be televised

The Turkish state couldn’t wage its colonial war against the Kurds without the active support of NATO and regular weapons deliveries by the United States, Germany, the UK, Spain and other countries.

But when Da’esh, a decade ago, rapidly grew its terrorizing rule, the US found themselves in the awkward position of having to support Turkey’s arch enemy — and on top of it, an army of anarchists! — simultaneously.

Because of its military cooperation with the US, many progressives and anti-imperialists are reluctant to stand with or even touch Rojava. In reality, the US plays an opportunistic Machiavellian double game with the Kurds, which misleading international media reporting has largely concealed.

Yes, the United States lends the SDF military assistance in its fight against Da’esh. But the usual framing of the SDF as “US backed Kurdish fighters” hides a number of simultaneous truths: The United States uses its leverage over the SDF to undermine Rojava’s grassroots democratic structures. The US neither supports the DAANES diplomatically nor works for their inclusion in a political solution for Syria’s future. They’re also Turkey’s largest arms supplier, delivering the very weapons with which Turkey assaults the SDF and populations in north-east Syria, and thus unsurprisingly, the US usually fails to hold Turkey accountable for its war crimes.

When international media portrays current hostilities in north-east Syria as “territorial disputes between Turkish-backed rebels and US backed Kurdish fighters,” it suggests an equivalence of power that simply doesn’t exist. SNA fighters are advancing onto Rojava with the help of relentless airstrikes by NATO’s second largest army, while the United States — the SDF’s supposed patron — controls much of north-east Syria’s airspace, letting Turkey bomb the Kurds with impunity, and while American ground troops stand by watching.

Furthermore, portraying the SDF as US proxies perpetuates an old racist trope of Kurds being agents of foreign imperialist interests, with no political agency of their own. But make no mistake: The SDF and DAANES have a very strong, outspoken anti-imperialist, anarchist agenda which the US opposes to its bones. It’s no coincidence that very few international media outlets will be ready to openly acknowledge the revolutionary politics of north-east Syria.

We mustn’t fall for a lazy and purist anti-imperialism that refuses to engage with the complexities of building and maintaining actual alternatives on the ground.

The people of north-east Syria have been able to maintain their unlikely revolution for over 12 years because of their own struggle and self-defense, not because of any imperial patron.

Nevertheless, Western politicians are starting to realize that the current Turkish onslaught on north-east Syria threatens to bring Da’esh back to life. On Tuesday, United States Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) threatened to impose sanctions against the Turkish state should Ankara fail to reach a ceasefire with the SDF and ensure the creation of a demilitarized zone in north-east Syria.

Kurdistan concerns us all

Syria, and Rojava in particular, are at critical crossroads. This is the perhaps most dangerous moment of Rojava’s tumultuous history, but after Assad’s fall there’s also a historic chance to end the cruel Syrian war and enable a democratic peaceful future for all groups of the country. Immediately after HTS’s takeover of Damascus, the DAANES reached out to them proposing an intra-Syrian dialogue to work towards a shared political solution.

With all the different foreign influences meddling in Syria, what will happen there also depends on the voices of the international communities. The Turkish state, so much is certain, is wielding its growing influence over HTS to prevent any cooperation with DAANES that could lead to a future for an autonomous Rojava.

At this crucial moment, progressives and all those committed to collective liberation need to make their voices heard, loud and clear. Those of us in NATO member countries particularly have a responsibility to stand up against the Turkey’s illegal military actions which we co-sponsor with our taxpayer money. The silence towards Turkish war crimes and the regular omission of both the colonial root causes of this conflict and the radical political vision of the Kurdish Freedom Movement enable Turkey’s oppressive actions to continue.

We need to use our platforms to amplify the messages from within Rojava. Radicals around the world need to learn about democratic confederalism and the Kurdish women’s paradigm. And while you might be as skeptical towards electoral politics as I am, we need to talk to our elected representatives to pressure them to push Turkey for an immediate cessation of hostilities in Syria, to stop sending arms to Ankara, impose sanctions and to politically recognize the DAANES.

What is at stake in north-east Syria is more than just the fate of the Kurdish people and the future of Syria, but whether humanity is able to break out of the patriarchal, capitalist, colonial dead-end and build effective alternatives before it’s too late. When we recognize that no struggle can be isolated so long as all struggles run up against the same global system of power, shared struggle and the construction of grounded living alternatives are the natural expressions of our will for life.

Or as the Kurdish women’s movement says, “Jin jiyan azadi” — we’re rising for “life, woman, freedom.”