Surrounded and Abandoned, Rojava Faces Slaughter

QAMISHLO, Syria — Syria’s new Islamist government has launched a blitzkrieg offensive against Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish-led region of North and East Syria. For the past two weeks, government forces and allied militias loyal to Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa have surged through the region, encircling Kurdish towns and villages and threatening bloody retribution along ethnic lines.

Events began to accelerate on Jan. 11, as three successive ceasefire deals were violated by Damascus and government forces seized Arab-majority regions formerly under Kurdish control with the help of defecting Arab soldiers. In response, Kurdish civilians answered a call for mass mobilization and took to the streets in the region’s largest Kurdish-majority city and de facto capital, Qamishlo, where they launched patrols and entrenched their neighborhoods against invasion. In district communes — originally designed to serve as the basis of the region’s unique project in direct-democratic, federal governance — AK-47s were distributed to local volunteers, including the elderly and infirm.

One of those is Evin Hussein, a grandmother who grasps her AK-47 at the front of a sea of Kurdish red, yellow and green flags. “As Kurdish women, we’ve come out to protect ourselves, protect our homeland, protect our land and our honor,” she says. “We’ve taken up our weapons and we’re going to support our soldiers, and struggle to the last drop of blood.” 

Despite Washington’s track record of abandoning its Kurdish partners, the assault and subsequent abandonment have caught Kurdish leaders and the Kurdish street by surprise. In 2015, Kurdish forces famously turned the tide against the Islamic State (ISIS) advance and won the backing of the U.S.-led Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. That partnership enabled the Kurds to expand their control into vast Arab-majority regions, including the former ISIS capital of Raqqa, and build up a 100,000-strong, U.S.-trained fighting force known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

That force, like the population at large, was majority Arab. Many Arabs chafed under heavy-handed anti-ISIS security measures, and saw the Kurdish-led regions as the safest haven in Syria, especially for women and minorities. Al-Sharaa’s takeover a year ago offered ordinary Arabs the prospect of life under a unified Arab-dominated state — and militants the chance for bloody revenge against their Kurdish rivals. As the scale of the government assault became apparent, Arab forces within the SDF and tribal militias began defecting en masse, targeting retreating Kurdish fighters and forcing thousands of Kurdish families back into the Kurdish heartlands.

“We were displaced to [the Arab city of] Tabqa, and made ourselves a new home there,” says another elderly Kurdish woman, speaking in a school-turned-shelter after being displaced from her home by Islamist forces for the fourth time in a decade. “We had just about gathered enough mattresses and blankets. Now we lost everything again. We just barely escaped with the clothes on our back.”

The offensive has been made possible by geopolitical shifts in the Middle East, in particular a tacit understanding between Israel and Turkey to divide Syria into zones of influence, an outcome that suited U.S. policy and left no room for the Kurds. The ongoing operation has the full blessing of the U.S., which has around 900 soldiers stationed in the region. These forces remained in their bases as al-Sharaa’s Islamist forces overran SDF-administered detention centers holding thousands of ISIS fighters, plus tens of thousands of ISIS-affiliated women and their children, with scores of ISIS members escaping to date. The U.S. has announced an urgent evacuation program to airlift ISIS detainees out of Syrian government-controlled territory, thus tacitly admitting that al-Sharaa’s Islamist government cannot be trusted to secure the ISIS militants. This done, Washington can withdraw its troops and wash its hands of the expected catastrophe as government forces move in on Kurds and other minorities. 

Unsurprisingly, many Kurds are furious at this latest betrayal, even if they expected no better from the U.S. following decades of double-crosses. Outside a U.S. base in Tel Baydar, a group of protesters has gathered in a tent bedecked with images of the blood-stained corpses of Kurdish children. Sidem Mohammed, a Kurdish woman from nearby Qamishlo, says she has launched a hunger-strike to demand U.S. intervention. “Under the [global anti-ISIS] coalition, 11,000 of our comrades were martyred,” she says. “The coalition took on the responsibility to become our guarantors. We aren’t begging the world, give us our rights. We’re owed a debt, and we’re collecting it.”

While it was always likely that Arab-majority regions would one day revert to Damascus’ control, Syrian Kurdish leaders hoped they could reach an understanding for a peaceful transition — perhaps including the return of Kurdish-majority regions occupied and ethnically cleansed by Turkish-backed militias. A hopeful sign came last March, when al-Sharaa and the Syrian Kurdish commander in chief, Mazloum Abdi, signed an agreement for the gradual integration of the SDF into the government’s armed forces, while retaining a degree of autonomy in the north and east.

“We’re still in support of the 10 March agreement,” says senior Syrian Kurdish politician Gherib Hesso. “It is a new blueprint for a democratic society and a peaceful future with freedom, mutual cooperation and genuine brotherhood within Syria.”

That vision is now dead in the water. Syrian forces cut off water and power, and continue to seize villages despite the ceasefire, while two Turkish airstrikes hit Qamishlo overnight in a reminder of the additional threat lurking just over the Turkish-Syrian border. The Kurds are forced to rally behind the one force they can depend on: their weapons. The best-case scenario appears to be tens of thousands of desperate Kurds fighting the government to a standstill on the outskirts of their last remaining settlements. If that fails, the victorious Islamist forces can be expected to exert absolute control marked by mass arrests and killings, abuse and humiliation of prisoners and political repression.

“Our society is being massacred. How long have our children grown up surrounded by blood?” says hunger striker Sidem Mohammed. “Who wouldn’t rise up in these circumstances? We won’t take a single step back.”