BIG READ | Beauty and beastliness in Syria’s Rojava

Of all the feared epicentres of a threatening World War 3 — the Russo-Ukrainian conflict spilling over into Europe, or Iran and the US igniting a powder-keg in the Middle East, or China and the West coming to blows over Taiwan — the least appreciated is a restarted war in Syria.

After Saturday’s high drama in which veteran Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his military chief-of-staff were assassinated in US-Israeli missile strikes, Tehran may seem a more likely trigger, but the two sides were already at war in Syria.

There, a unique combination of extremely complex processes unleashed by the civil war touched off by the Arab Spring in 2011 has seen the country partly occupied by Russian and allied Turkish and Iranian forces and proxies, and the US and allied Israeli and proxy forces.

In perhaps no other conflict since the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s have we seen autocracies and democracies directly glare at each other over the gun sights — and shots have indeed been traded — as a bewildering array of the basest and most beautiful of human social experiments have played themselves out against a backdrop of deliberately designed instability.

For baseness, we need look no further than Islamic State (Isis), which descended to such extreme levels of barbarism towards their own people that even Jabhat al-Nusra, founded in 2012 as the Syrian franchise of al-Qaeda, was appalled; and for beauty, we need to examine the struggle against the jihadist fanatics led by the Kurds, a tough-as-nails mountain people.

In January 1916, a secret pact, nicknamed the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which was endorsed by Italy and Russia, was signed, establishing what would become post-war spheres of influence for Britain and France in the Middle East after their defeat of the Ottoman Empire. A notorious transverse line was drawn in the sand, dividing the region into a British southeast and a French northwest: the Kurdish lands fell on both sides of the line.

“Though subsequent massacres and genocides failed to eliminate Kurds as a people from their homeland, the systematic dismantling of Kurdish political autonomy and the erasure of a territorial entity named Kurdistan closely mirrored the fate of Armenians in the region,” writes Prof Özlem Goner, author of the 2017 book Turkish National Identity and its Outsiders.

In the seismic ruptures following the Russian Revolution and the end of World War 1, the Kurds attempted several times to establish their own nation-state.

Hope was offered in 1920 by the Treaty of Sèvres between the Ottoman Empire and the victorious Triple Entente powers in which the empire was stripped of its non-Turkic possessions, in that a large wedge of North Kurdistan east of the Euphrates River would be allowed to decide in a plebiscite whether to gain independence from the new rump state of Turkey.

But the treaty inflamed Turkish nationalist sentiment and was not ratified, with forces under Kemal Atatürk establishing a new regime in Istanbul and conquering North Kurdistan; a Kingdom of Kurdistan established in South Kurdistan in Iraq in 1921 was, like a brief predecessor, a British client; ultimately, the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 extinguished any avenue for Kurdish independence, and following an anti-colonial revolt, the Kingdom of Kurdistan was forcibly dissolved by British forces in 1925.

The only purely independent attempt in this period was the rebel Republic of Agirî (Ararat) in the mountains of Armenian northeastern Turkey, centred on Mount Ararat, which survived from 1927 to 1931, but it failed to gain the support of the League of Nations and was crushed by the Turkish military.

Leaving Lenin

With their heartland divided between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, and with their people consequently reduced to oppressed minority status in each country, Kurdish dreams of autonomy were revived by the formation in 1978 of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), initially an orthodox Marxist-Leninist outfit, dedicated to establishing a Kurdish national state.

In 1984, the PKK launched a guerrilla war in North Kurdistan (in eastern Turkey) — notably from the outset including women’s military formations in its forces. It would be tarred and feathered as terrorist by Turkey and the West.

In 1998, the PKK came under heavy repression from the Syrian Baathist regime, its guerrilla camps were shut down (most fighters relocated to South Kurdistan in Iraq) and PKK ideologue Abdullah Öcalan was expelled from Syria; the following year, he was abducted by the CIA in Kenya and deported to Syria. There, he was tried and initially condemned to death, a sentence that was commuted to life after he ordered the PKK’s forces to withdraw from Turkey.

Over Öcalan’s long years in prison as the sole inmate on the Turkish penal island of İmralı, he studied widely and revised his Marxist-Leninism dramatically towards libertarian council communism. By 2007, his ideas on free popular councils had become adopted in real life in the “liberated areas” of North Kurdistan where the PKK’s Democratic Society Congress (DTK) started setting up grassroots councils in the mostly Kurdish areas under its administration, while within West Kurdistan in northern Syria, better known as Rojava, a mirror of the DTK called the PYD was established.

“Within a matter of months, a functioning council system was in place in Rojava’s cities, large and small,” in the cantons of Afrîn, Kobanî, and Cizîre where the PYD has a strong presence, “and in Aleppo”, Syria’s second-largest city and its industrial centre, write Michael Knapp, Anja Flach and Ercan Ayboga in their 2013 book Revolution in Rojava.

These early councils, under Öcalan’s formulation of “democratic confederalism”, were not ubiquitous, initially tending to be centred on Kurdish and Yezidi neighbourhoods and not Arab, Turkmen, Armenian, Syriac, Circassian and Chaldean ones, and with few operating in rural areas — but that would soon change.

As Knapp and his colleagues write, even though under the Baathist dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad the councils were illegal, by March 2011, when the Arab Spring hit Syria, “the council system was sufficient to constitute a vibrant structure parallel to the state without being in direct conflict with it”.

Under the influence of Damascus-born Omar Aziz’s 2011 text The Formation of Local Councils, the council praxis spread through the rest of insurgent Syria.

The Rojavan PYD was determined to stay out of what became a spiralling civil war, and so armed popular self-protection units (YXG) to keep the conflict at bay. As a result, Rojava became a relatively peaceful refuge for hundreds of thousands of civilians of diverse ethnicities fleeing the fighting, giving Rojava an initial total population of 2.9-million.

People’s congresses, deemed illegal by the regime, resulted in the founding in August 2011 of the People’s Council of West Kurdistan (MGRK) to promote the establishment of councils across Rojava and to act as an umbrella body for the councils that would send woman-and-man duos as mandated, recallable delegates to it.

The MGRK was a multipartisan, progressive, directly democratic organ, “open to all peoples and all democratic parties”, in Knapp et al’s words. Elections were held across Rojava and 300 delegates were elected to the MGRK representing its contributing councils. It was the only real democracy in the Muslim Middle East, and it gradually supplanted Syrian state administration, justice, security, and municipal services in the country’s north and northeast.

Council democracy

The definitive break occurred in the night of July 18-19 2012, when the YXG seized control of the roads leading into Kobanî, a city of more than 100,000 residents, many of whom, as MGRK supporters, then seized predetermined state institutions, took down the regime’s flags and ran up PYD flags. Kobanî would later become world-famous for its spirited defence against, and defeat of, jihadist attackers.

The uprising spread across Rojava, with most regime military posts surrendering bloodlessly. The YXG was reorganised as the more professional People’s Protection Units (YPG) and separate armed Women’s Protection Groups (YPG) were formed, challenging patriarchal feudalism. Male and female units soon included fighters of varied ethnicities and religions.

New layers were added to the council system: a grassroots first-tier commune layer that in the cities consisted of the residents of individual streets, and in the rural areas, entire villages, which sent mandated delegates — again, in uniquely twinned woman-and-man teams — to the second-tier neighbourhood or villages people’s councils.

Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami in their 2018 book Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, say “The region’s minority ethnicities — Arabs, Yezidis and Assyrians — are included in these grassroots forums, and 40% of commune and council members are women,” a unique situation in the Muslim world. A third, district, tier passed lower-tier decisions up to the MGRK.

In October 2013, the MGRK drafted a de facto constitution, the social contract, which was widely and fervently debated across Rojava for the next three months. By the end of the year, the MGRK consisted of the PYD and five other parties ranging from leftist to liberal in a cross-sectarian coalition.

By January 2014, a final social contract was agreed to by 50 parties and organisations who, as Knapp et al write, “agreed to reject the nation-state and the centralised regime, and all 50 agreed to gender equality, democracy, environmental, youth, and social rights … in comparison to European constitutions, the social contract is not only progressive but one of the most advanced in the world.”

In September 2014, the US military entered Syria, and a year later, Yassin-Kassab and al-Shami write, imperialist intervention increased when “Russia launched its own massive, and decisive, intervention, but not primarily against Isis … it targeted the communities which had driven out both Isis and Assad. Before the Russian intervention Assad had lost four-fifths of the national territory.”

Based on the social contract, a regional administration called the Democratic Confederation of Rojava (FDR) was formalised in 2016; the intention is a decentralised democratic model for all of Syria, however, and not a separatist state.

After bitter fighting, on October 17 2017, the liberation of the Islamic State “capital” city of Al-Raqqa on the Euphrates River was achieved by the FDR’s Syrian Democratic Forces (HSD in Kurdish, QSD in Arabic), a dramatically professionalised expansion of the original militia.

The HSD/QSD took the territory on the south bank of the Euphrates opposite the city — almost extinguishing Islamic jihadist gains in Syria — and expanded Rojava right down the Euphrates River past the regime-controlled city of Deir Ez-Zor to the Iraqi border. This gave the FDR, later renamed the Democratic Autonomous Administration, a territory larger than Belgium, despite a US military presence around the oilfields and some urban remnants of the Assad regime, with a multi-ethnic population of 4.6-million.

Over January to March 2018, Turkey and its proxies treacherously defeated the Rojavan democratic administration in the western Afrîn Canton, which it viewed as “terrorist”. Into the gap stepped ex-Jabhat al-Nusra fighters who had broken with al-Qaeda two years previously, styling themselves Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), moderating their tone, and reaching out to ethnic and religious minorities.

Aided by Russia, Turkey went on to occupy a broad buffer zone against its old Kurdish enemy along the northern Rojava border, while by May 2018, the democratic councilist system had been rolled back in much of Syria, though two years later, about 229 councils were still operating.

But Rojava, despite being callously cold-shouldered by the West’s democracies, as they had done to the Spanish republicans before them, remained the sole lighthouse of democratic freedoms in the Muslim world.

The Syrian civil war largely came to an end on December 8 2024 after the hated Assad regime finally collapsed when forces lead by the supposedly ex-jihadist HTS seized the capital Damascus and in January 2025 its chief, Ahmed al-Sharaa, was installed as interim president.

In May 2025, the Kurdish PKK decided to dissolve, believing it had achieved its “historic mission” of ensuring the Kurdish question could now be resolved through democratic processes. Yet Syria’s March 13 transitional constitution grants the HTS regime dictatorial powers, a fact supported by the West and its opponents.

So, despite Rojava’s intention to integrate into a new democratic Syria, al-Sharaa’s regime has insisted that the Democratic Autonomous Administration be dissolved and its forces disarmed rather than integrated.

On January 6 this year, the reconstituted Syrian Army and jihadist mercenaries launched an assault on the Kurdish neighbourhoods of Aleppo, seeing the return of jihadist practices such as throwing opponents to their deaths from from rooftops and torturing and cutting the braids off captured YPG women fighters, forcing 150,000 civilians to flee, and began attacking the borders of Rojava proper.

While US forces sat on their thumbs, the Turkey-backed Syrian Army bombarded Rojavan positions and released hundreds of jihadist prisoners. An armed, democratic, and fiercely free Rojava has refused to submit to dissolution and has vowed to go down fighting.

But the West, which was happy to allow Rojava to defeat Islamic State virtually on its own with no economic assistance amid great hardship, has remained silent about regime atrocities, apparently preferring the reassertion of conservative macho power in Damascus.

There’s an old Kurdish saying that “our only friends are the mountains”. It would be tragic for the fate of the entire democratic world if they are proven right.