Rojava on the Brink

Photo Essay Fragility and Resilience: Glimpses of Rojava Angéline Desdevises

I recently returned to Rojava, as Syrian Kurdistan is known, for the first time since the collapse of the Assad regime. Throughout years working in the Kurdish-led, multiethnic federation, famed for its key role in defeating ISIS, I had never before witnessed such widespread trepidation. Everyone is waiting to see whether Rojava’s governing body, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, can reach an understanding with the new Islamist regime in Damascus under Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which is ideologically opposed to the AANES’s stated vision of women’s and minority ethnic autonomy. From Kurdish refugees sheltering in prisons abandoned by Bashar Assad’s security forces to Arabs liberated from ISIS yet dissatisfied with the AANES, the fate of millions hangs in the balance. 

Amid this political limbo, war still rages. Turkey has long bankrolled and profited from Islamist militancy in pursuit of its own anti-Kurdish agenda, and is determined to prevent the AANES from reaching any accord with the HTS, which it backs. Ankara has taken advantage of the post-Assad power vacuum to displace around 100,000 Kurds, while also seizing territory. Intense Turkish airstrikes are killing Kurds and Arabs alike, targeting civilians and wiping out power and water supply throughout the region. The AANES holds thousands of ISIS affiliates in camps and detention centers. These militants pose an additional threat as they eagerly await a takeover by HTS or Turkey’s own network of Islamist militias. 

It is not surprising, then, that Assad’s collapse has left Syrian Kurds with profoundly mixed emotions. In the de facto Syrian Kurdish capital of Qamishlo, a shopkeeper named Azad describes rushing to tear down a statue of the hated dictator amid a fresh wave of Turkish airstrikes. “Assad’s fall made us feel free,” he says, speaking beside the statue’s razed stump, newly adorned with pictures of Kurds killed by the dictator’s forces. “We have no problem with HTS. We all want stability. Turkey is the problem.” 

But despite Assad’s often brutal repression of Kurdish political movements, language and culture, the AANES had established a frosty but generally nonviolent détente with the dictator. His overthrow in December has upended a delicate balance of power that is forcing the Rojava’s political and military leaders to seek a similar understanding with HTS. Across Rojava, the green-and-yellow Kurdish livery now flies next to the flag of Syrian independence, used by both pro-democratic protesters during the anti-Assad uprising and Damascus’ new authoritarian rulers. The novel combination symbolizes the complexity of the political balancing-act facing the AANES’s leadership. 

“We’re coordinating with HTS and are in agreement that a conflict is not in our interests,” says Rohilat Afrin, commander-in-chief of the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), the all-female Kurdish fighting force that spearheaded ISIS’s defeat. “We want a new constitution which will protect minorities, youth and women, and put all Syria’s resources into the service of its people, including the oil.”

Afrin says she believes the AANES can offer a functional blueprint to a country wearied by war. 

“It’s not logical to give up on the democratic system we have built over the past 13 years just because Assad has fallen,” she says, choosing her words carefully. The veteran commander has led her forces through more than a decade of war and expresses confidence in Rojava’s ability to weather the latest crisis. But she recognizes that the autonomous region faces its gravest crisis to date. The new Syria is already bathed in Kurdish blood.

Afrin’s YPJ first made global headlines a decade ago, breaking an ISIS siege on the key Syrian Kurdish city of Kobane. A decade on, this small settlement on the Syrian-Turkish border is directly in Turkish crosshairs. Vapor trails spiral as Turkey’s fleet of lethal drones circles ceaselessly overhead, while locals scurry from work to home under flimsy steel awnings erected to shelter them from view. Districts left ruined by ISIS have been freshly seeded with mines in a likely futile attempt to slow an anticipated ground invasion. “Our children have gotten so used to the drones, they complain if they don’t see them! It’s like a TV show now,” says a garage worker named Bassam.

Turkish airstrikes are a daily occurrence, killing over 100 civilians since December. Its drones and U.S.-supplied F-16 fighter jets have repeatedly targeted peaceful protesters and ambulances in what Human Rights Watch describes as potential war crimes. During my visit to the city, Turkish missiles struck a vegetable market, killing 12 civilians. Khalil Abdi, an Arab farmer, rushed to the hospital to learn his 13-year-old nephew was among the dead. “That market was a civilian place, there are no military targets there,” he said in disbelief, speaking beside a relative’s hospital bed as the wounded poured in.

Turkey claims its attacks are intended to root out Kurdish militants. But the market massacre is part of a strategy of deliberately destroying water stations, power plants and bakeries across Rojava. On the ground, Turkey bankrolls an unruly network of HTS-allied militias. Some of the commanders — sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for war crimes against Kurds and women — have been given positions in the new Syrian regime. These forces regularly target frontline pumping stations, killing workers, while fierce clashes are ongoing around the key Tishreen Dam, cutting off hydroelectric power to millions in northern Syria. “Our colleague was shot in the stomach five days ago. We are scared, but what should we do? People need water,” said energy worker Mustafa Hussein, as he nervously watched the frontline over the swampy Euphrates.

The attacks have left Kobane without electricity or water for nearly two months. Riding through a claustrophobic neighborhood with a truck distributing emergency water, driver Barzo Ahmed is constantly interrupted by locals thrusting their hands through the window, begging for a top-up. “We work ’round the clock and still can’t get to everyone — it’s chaos,” he said.

The water shortage is also affecting the only hospital treating casualties of the Turkish airstrikes, medical personnel say. “Turkey’s policies are the same as those pursued by the Assad regime,” added Mesud Bouzi, co-chair of Kobane’s energy department. “They starve the people of food and water until they want to leave.”

Abdi, the bereaved uncle, is among those considering quitting the region. 

Throughout years of Turkish offensives, hundreds of thousands of refugees have been displaced on a primarily ethnic basis, fleeing deeper into AANES territory, elsewhere in Syria or abroad. One ad hoc refugee shelter in Qamishlo has been forged from a former garrison used by Assadist forces. Iron-barred rooms formerly used to hold detainees have been sprung open to house a fresh wave of internally displaced people (IDPs).

Ridwan Osman was driven from Aleppo as the war began, and again in 2018 by a Turkish invasion. (The date of his initial expulsion is tattooed on his forearm.) He made a new home for his family in an IDP camp, set up a small shop and started rearing doves, only to be displaced once again as Assad fell and Turkey advanced. “Turkish-backed forces were shooting dogs in the road to intimidate us as we fled,” he recalls. “There were burned corpses everywhere. Several children and elderly people died due to the cold.” 

Ridwan now occupies a dank basement room in the former regime building, together with his family of seven. As with several of the newly displaced Kurds I met, his familiar complaints over Western failure to curb Turkey’s attacks are streaked with bitterness over the AANES’s inability to secure him a safe return home.

Despite repeated Turkish assaults and economic isolation, the AANES had long guaranteed Syria’s highest standards of living, rule of law and stability. With Assad gone, the delicate balance of power that allowed for these conditions has begun to tip away from the federation. The AANES aims to establish a “brotherhood of peoples” granting a share of federal power to Kurds, Arabs and regional minorities alike. While the senior leadership is still Kurdish, Rojava’s population and armed forces are majority Arab, with Arab communities expressing their autonomy on a number of key social and economic issues.

“All Syria’s ethnic and religious communities participate in the AANES,” said Hussein Othman, an Arab who co-chairs the AANES’s executive council. “We want to join the political process for a new and democratic Syria together.”

Despite this admirable political commitment, 14 years of intercommunal violence have left many locals privately suspicious of other ethnic groups. Nationalist Kurds oppose the AANES’s efforts to build a multiethnic federation and harshly criticize Arab communities seen as more sympathetic to militant Islam than secular, democratic values. Meanwhile, many Arabs would welcome HTS’s authoritarian rule as bringing national unity, stability and normalization, allowing for easier foreign travel. (The Syrian passport has long been among the worst in the world, while the AANES’s lack of diplomatic recognition means it cannot issue its own.)

The tensions of the post-Assad power shifts are nowhere more apparent than in Raqqa, AANES’s largest city. Despite its dark past of playing host to ISIS atrocities and a U.S. bombing campaign that leveled 85% of the city, Raqqa has become relatively calm and prosperous, especially compared to the frontier conditions in Kobane.

Burhan Mohammed is among a group of displaced Arabs that I found chatting around a coffee cart in the bustling market. All of the men lost relatives — and in one case, an eye — to the Assadist bombing campaigns that drove them to seek shelter in AANES. Mohammed praised the AANES for providing security and reconstruction following ISIS’s war, but says the administration has failed to support local agriculture or establish trade links with the rest of Syria. With Assad gone, he says he plans to return to his home in Marat al-Numan, where he has relatives living under canvas following intensive bombing. Some locals go further, condemning the AANES for imposing secular values and repressing internal dissent. In a smoky hotel lobby, I heard an Arab activist voice furtive suspicions that AANES seeks to use oil revenues to fuel Kurdish separatist ambitions. “The Kurds are trying to take everything — from the north down to Raqqa,” he claimed.  

Such claims are strenuously denied by AANES officials. “We all suffered from centralization under Assad,” says Othman, the Arab co-chair of the AANES’s executive council. “It’s not merely that we want our own autonomy — we want the whole government system to be decentralized.” But this may be too much to ask of a majority Arab population, many of whom would prefer rule by a centralized Islamist authority. HTS chief Ahmad al-Sharaa — a wanted terrorist who once headed al-Qaeda’s Syrian offshoot — is popular among Arabs, if only for his promises of stability and reintegration into the international community. Mohammed, the displaced Arab, speaks for many locals when he concludes, “We want the AANES to reach an agreement with HTS. We don’t want any more war.”

AANES’s top commander has defied Turkey and met with al-Sharaa to discuss holding a “national conference” as a key step toward unity and peace, but many obstacles remain. Notably, the HTS-dominated government is almost exclusively male, whereas the AANES is fiercely committed to women’s leadership. To this end, the AANES has established the Zenobia Women’s Union, which unites hundreds of Arab women working to resolve domestic disputes, provide economic empowerment and participate in political life. 

“HTS wants to exclude women from the military and government, but here the experience is the opposite,” says Zenobia spokeswoman Houda Isa Ali, who has called for a special referendum to gather the opinions of all Syrian women. 

Three Arab members of Zenobia were killed by Turkey and its militiamen in their December advance through AANES regions. One of the victims was shot dead by her own uncle, highlighting the risks these activists run in advancing moderate steps toward gender equality. 

Tensions between the AANES and the conservative Arab majority are most acute at al-Hol Camp, a huge desert complex that houses 7,000 generally highly radicalized foreign female ISIS members and their children, alongside 24,000 Syrians and Iraqis. Camp manager Jihan Hanna says an HTS advance would be a godsend to the hardcore ISIS supporters who have murdered scores of residents, imposed a radical interpretation of Sharia law and indoctrinated their children into deadly violence against humanitarian staff. 

“Many packed their bags, saying, ‘HTS will be here in a week, and we’re ready to go!’” she says. As we toured the camp, some children raised ISIS’s single finger salute and hurled stones; others wave cheerily. One plays with a tame dove. 

Al-Hol not only poses a grave security risk, but leaves many Syrian Arabs with the perception that AANES is illegally detaining Arab women and children in admittedly grim conditions. For its part, the AANES views the ISIS-linked detainees as a global responsibility, which it cannot handle without more foreign support. Indeed, the AANES has been striving to alleviate the crisis in the camp. Thousands of residents have returned from al-Hol to their homes in Syria and Iraq, with the help of repatriation programs coordinated between the AANES, U.S.-funded nongovernmental organizations and tribal sheikhs. The program will be accelerated and extended throughout regions newly liberated from Assad, Hanna says, meaning the camp could be emptied of most Iraqis and Syrians within 12 months. (Some prefer to remain in the camp or elsewhere in AANES territory. There is no solution in sight for the foreign ISIS members). 

The repatriations were well-received in Raqqa as a demonstration that the AANES is sensitive to local wishes. “NGOs help us find a place to live and give us a food card, while we receive [cooking] gas and [heating] oil from the [AANES] council,” said one former al-Hol resident, who is receiving NGO training that will help her to start a small sweet-making business. Hanna notes that this activity shows why the West has a security interest in continuing an anti-ISIS partnership with AANES, rather than turning the camps over to HTS. 

Instead, the opposite is happening. Rehabilitation programs have been shut down by U.S. President Donald Trump’s freeze on USAID support that is a crucial lifeline to millions in Syria. An initial three-day shutdown has already seen ISIS affiliates in al-Hol looting humanitarian supplies after guards were forced to withdraw. Beyond al-Hol, 300,000 other displaced people throughout AANES face losing lifesaving aid. The funding shutdown will pour oil on an already incendiary security situation. Food, fuel and water will no longer arrive at crucial camps, leaving them “destabilized beyond being able to continue operations,” says a senior humanitarian coordinator in AANES, who describes the policy as “murder.”

U.S. interest in AANES has always been focused on containing ISIS, but the USAID shutdown suggests even this limited aim may now be under threat. In 2019, Trump withdrew U.S. troops from AANES at Ankara’s behest, allowing an immediate Turkish invasion that killed hundreds and displaced hundreds of thousands. Turkey now appears convinced that Trump will finish what he started and hand the remaining AANES territory over to its militias. “When we meet with [U.S. forces], they just say, ‘We are monitoring the situation’,” lamented Abjar Daoud, a spokesperson for the AANES’s military wing.

In Kobane, locals constantly ask me whether the United States will once again abandon them, but AANES representatives have no illusions about U.S. foreign policy. “Turkey and the U.S. are both NATO members, here to pursue their own shared interests,” Daoud said. 

Following Israel’s decimation of Iran and Hezbollah, and Russia’s post-Assad withdrawal, the regional balance of power has dramatically tipped toward Turkey — a dangerous development, forcing the AANES to rely on Turkey’s NATO partners in Washington for its survival. YPJ spokesperson Afrin adds: “If ISIS were controlled and guarantees given over [Turkish] attacks, we wouldn’t need any external protection. We would be able to decide everything ourselves, as Syrians. But if not, [the Americans] must stay here.”

As the AANES desperately searches for ways to pressure Washington, it risks one particularly dangerous moral compromise. Israel has long paid lip service to the Kurdish cause in an attempt to relativize its own crimes against the Palestinian people. Following Assad’s collapse, Israel has again expressed its support for Kurdish autonomy in Syria, while a senior AANES representative recently held an unprecedented diplomatic phone call with her Israeli counterpart. Pressed on the issue, AANES officials stress they receive and expect no material support from Tel Aviv. Nonetheless, their diplomatic stance toward the architects of genocide in Gaza could distance the AANES from both ordinary Syrians as well as its supporters on the international left. 

As it strives to preserve its limited, hard-won autonomy, the AANES will no doubt be forced into further concessions to both HTS and the West. Yet even as global powers flock to Damascus to welcome HTS as Syria’s legitimate rulers, while turning a blind eye to Turkish attacks, people throughout northern Syria continue to hope and work for a better alternative. As I arrived at the Zenobia Women’s Union in Raqqa, local activists chanted the famous Kurdish slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom!” in Arabic, their cries mingling with the call to prayer from a nearby mosque. Against long odds, the AANES is so far defying expectations of a collapse into interethnic violence, and continuing to stitch together the wounds of war and unite highly diverse groups. Whether it can continue to do so under the flag of a new Syria remains to be seen.