I wish I could be optimistic about Syria’s future. Even as we celebrate the fall of a dictator who ruled Syria through brutal oppression, we cannot welcome those who are taking his place. Especially not if we care about the Kurds, and about the island of multi-ethnic peace and women’s freedom that now goes under the unwieldy name of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, but which people still know as Rojava.
Kurds were especially oppressed under the version of Arab nationalism practised by Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez; but now, even as Kurds celebrate the regime’s downfall, their future in Syria again hangs in the balance. Their security is on high alert for attacks by a resurgent ISIS.
Tens of thousands of twice-displaced Kurdish families are fleeing from areas overrun by Turkey’s violent mercenaries, who combine a twisted Islamism with sadistic gang violence. And the Autonomous Administration’s Manbij canton — which is majority Arab but home to many different ethnic groups and was liberated from ISIS by Kurdish forces in 2016 — is being attacked by these same Turkish-backed gangs, and pounded by Turkish warplanes.
What is happening in Syria cannot be understood separately from the mass upheavals that followed the United States’ war on terror, or from the US and Israel’s war against Iran, but this is not simply another American project. The US has intervened in Syria — they always intervene — but they intervene through their support or otherwise for the different forces acting on the ground.
In the case of Syria, the most dangerous and negative force has been, and continues to be, Turkey. Turkey’s actions are dictated by Turkey’s — or rather, President Erdoğan’s — interests, and are facilitated by the US and their allies, according to what they perceive to be their own state interests, though events may turn out very differently from anticipated. Turkey continues to prove a dangerous threat for the Kurds, but also for the whole region and beyond.
What Turkey wants
Turkey’s actions in Syria are the product of an aggressive and intolerant ethno-nationalism that was built into the Turkish Republic at its inception, a century ago. This feeds revanchist dreams of Turkish aggrandisement, and thrives on hatred of non-Turkish minorities, especially the Kurds who make up one-fifth of Turkey’s population. Repression of Kurdish identity has been a constant, and the existence of an autonomous administration in Kurdish areas across the border is deemed intolerable.
The only way that the Autonomous Administration actually threatens Turkey is by proving the possibility of a different form of society that respects minority differences and prioritises local control; but Erdoğan claims that their destruction is necessary for Turkish security. He has talked about establishing a so-called “safe zone” across the north of Syria, which would appropriate most of the Kurdish towns and cities and the best agricultural land.
He even , before occupying part of it in 2019. Turkey’s occupation of these areas brings them closer to realising the greater Turkey envisaged by the 1920 National Pact (Misak-ı Millî), which was overtaken by the Treaty of Lausanne, which set Turkey’s borders in 1923.
Turkey’s actions in Syria are dictated by the dual aims of increasing Turkish power and control, and destroying any hope of Kurdish autonomy. Erdoğan also wants to secure an area to which he can “return” the 3.5 million Syrian refugees currently living in Turkey, and so diffuse popular resentment against the government for allowing the refugees in. His aim had been to use the refugees, from all parts of Syria, to replace the Kurdish population in his “safe zones”.
Turkey against the Kurds
In Turkey, anti-Kurdish racism is used to promote Turkish unity and win popular support. It is promoted from the top and pervades every level of Turkish society, and it has become the driving force behind Turkey’s interactions with their neighbours. In Iraq, Turkey has contained Kurdish autonomy by appealing to the personal ambitions of the Barzani family, who dominate the politics of the Kurdistan Region, and turning them into de facto vassals of the Turkish state.
But in North and East Syria, these tactics wouldn’t work. Instead, Turkey has tried to destroy the Autonomous Administration since its conception. They have tried to do this through direct attacks by their own military, and also by supporting the Islamist militias that have thrived in the wake of the Iraq war and the chaos of Syria’s civil war — including ISIS.
, and allowed thousands of foreign fighters to pass through to join ISIS in Syria. They have been, and still are, . Other violent Islamist groups, they have supported more openly and more directly. In the early stages of Syria’s civil war, they were not alone in this. The United States before deciding that these were not capable of achieving regime change and that the immediate danger came from ISIS. US support for the Kurds, as they repeatedly underline, is only as a force against ISIS.
Although Turkey signed up to the Global Coalition to defeat ISIS, their interventions in Syria have been almost entirely directed against the Kurds and the multi-ethnic Autonomous Administration. Turkey’s first invasion into Syria, in 2016, was undertaken with US support to ensure that it was , so destroying the Autonomous Administration’s hopes of linking their western canton of Afrîn with the rest of their region. Turkey invaded and occupied Afrîn itself in 2018, after a green light from Russia, and the northern strip between Serê Kaniyê (Ras al-Ain) and Girê Spî (Tal Abyad) after President Donald Trump’s partial withdrawal of US forces in 2019.
To carry out these invasions, Turkey used the Islamist militias, at first under the banner of the Free Syrian Army and then of the Syrian National Army (SNA). The militias were transformed from fighting Assad to become mercenaries for Turkey against the Kurds and the Autonomous Administration (as well as against each other). They acted as Turkey’s ground troops and were put in day-to-day charge of the occupied areas.
Many of the residents of these areas fled, but those who remained have faced a hell of looting, kidnapping, arbitrary arrests, and extreme sadistic and misogynistic violence. This has been combined with forced Turkification, including in the schools, by the Turkish state, which is in overall control. In place of the Kurds and other former residents, Turkey has built settlements for the families of their mercenaries who include people from many different countries and especially from places with Turkic roots, such as Uzbeks and Uyghurs.
The only thing stopping Turkey invading Syria again, was the presence of Russian and US troops, but that did not prevent them from carrying out constant smaller attacks — calculated to drive people away from border villages — and targeted drone assassinations. Nor did it stop Turkey from undertaking major air attacks targeted at basic infrastructure, which have knocked out much of the region’s electricity supply and devastated the economy.
In their attempt to undermine the Autonomous Administration, Turkey has caused serious water shortages by reducing the flow in the Euphrates and the Tigris, and by cutting the connection from the Alouk water pumping station that they captured in 2019, . And they have repeatedly set fire to crops before harvest.
In recent years, Erdoğan moved from trying to oust Assad to trying to make a deal with him. In exchange for normalising relations, he wanted Assad to join with him in the destruction of the Autonomous Administration; but Erdoğan’s proposals didn’t include the withdrawal of Turkish troops, and Assad wouldn’t agree.
Turkey and Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham
Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that spearheaded the operation that ended Assad’s rule, is not under direct Turkish control like the mercenary militias, but they owe Turkey their existence. They were dependent on Turkey for protection against Russia and the Syrian Government Forces, and, while Turkey may not have supplied them directly with weapons, they supplied weapons to militias that worked closely with them.
HTS managed to absorb or destroy rival militias so as to gain almost complete control of Idlib, the northwest Syrian province to which Islamist opposition groups retreated or were evacuated when Russia reversed their initial advances against Assad. There, their Islamist Syrian Salvation Government came to rule over three to four million people, and provided a rival ‘opposition’ to Turkey’s Syrian Intermediate Government.
Under Turkish protection, HTS were able to develop a formidable and disciplined fighting force and their own weapon production. In the last couple of years, they extended their influence into Turkish occupied areas, and Turkey became increasingly reliant on them as a much more disciplined force than their own mercenaries. However, Turkey has built up a power that they cannot control.
Nevertheless, there is no real doubt that Turkey was behind the HTS-led operation launched on November 27. It is thought that no one expected it to go so far, and that the original aim was to force Assad’s hand to make a deal. Erdoğan was still trying to make a deal until the very last moment before Assad’s fall.
Turkey’s other military operation
While HTS had their eyes on the main prize, and everyone was focused on Aleppo and the future of Assad, a second operation was launched by Turkey’s SNA, with the aim of destroying the Autonomous Administration. Their first attack was on the district of Shahba and its city of Tel Rifat, which provided a temporary home to over 100,000 people displaced from Afrîn.
Shahba was geographically separate from the rest of the Autonomous Administration, and, after failing to forge a link, the Administration and their Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) concluded that the only way to save lives was to evacuate the population. Most have been brought to relative safety, but there have been numerous accounts of murder, kidnapping, and theft by the attacking militias, and large numbers of people are still missing. The displaced families are struggling in the winter cold with shortages of everything, including basic shelter.
The SNA’s main focus of attack then turned to Manbij, which they have just captured after fierce resistance. Since the Kurds liberated the city from ISIS, they worked hard to bring together its different ethnic groups and to incorporate them into their system of local administration. Manbij is home to around 30,000 Kurds, but is not a Kurdish city. It was an important example of the peaceful coexistence that all who care about the future of Syria’s people want to see, and was run by, and defended by, the people of different ethnicities that make up its population.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights report that in a military hospital north of Manbij city after blocking their evacuation, and that they have carried out identity-based killings of Kurds as well as looting and burning Kurdish property. SNA fighters have shared videos of themselves murdering men in the hospital and capturing Manbij women. The future looks grim. The SNA on the ground were supported by Turkish planes and drones.
Turkish drones and shelling in other areas controlled by the Autonomous Administration killed 19 civilians on December 9, 13 of them children.
The power vacuum left by departing government and Iran-backed troops has allowed an ISIS resurgence in Syria’s central desert, and in North and East Syria, fears are also focused on the prisons holding ISIS fighters and the camps holding their families, which no international institutions will take responsibility for. These have long been described as a ticking time bomb. Turkey has been accused of , and the Autonomous Administration emphasises that every attack on their region makes it harder for them to guard the prisons and camps.
The Kurdish neighbourhoods in Aleppo — Sheikh Maqsoud and al Ashrafiyeh — have also been run autonomously since 2016, though physically separated from the rest of the Autonomous Administration. HTS are now in control of Aleppo, having excluded the SNA. There has been communication between HTS and the Administration’s SDF, and there have been no significant attacks on these neighbourhoods, but they are under blockade, with shortages of water, electricity and flour, and it is unclear what the future may hold now that the initial focus on removing Assad is over.
International neglect
There has been very little coverage of the situation facing the Kurds. When they are mentioned at all, they tend to be portrayed as US allies, although — as the Kurds are only too aware — the US is only interested in them and their homeland as dispensable assets in the fight against ISIS, and a base from which to contain Iran. Many politicians and journalists have repeated, unquestioningly, Turkish claims that they need to control a “buffer zone” to protect themselves from Syrian Kurdish aggression, though, as the SDF has made clear, they have never attacked Turkey and have no intention of doing so. The aggression is all from the Turkish side.
Following David Lammy’s statement in the House of Commons on December 8, former MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle tweeted: “I was concerned that Foreign Secretary didn’t mention our Kurdish led allies @SDF_Syria by name and seemed to suggest Turkey’s bombing of them was legitimate.”
Turkey’s geostrategic importance, NATO membership, European trade, and the deal to keep immigrants out of the European Union all make Western politicians resistant to putting any blocks in the way of the Turkish government. Rather than see Turkey as one of the biggest obstacles to Middle Eastern peace and as a promoter of violent Islamism and gangsterism, politicians bathe in self-deception, .
Meanwhile, the achievements of the Kurds and their allies in creating a harmonious and peaceful system that they have long put forward as are left to the mercy of Turkey’s proxies and rarely even alluded to.
[Reprinted from . Sarah Glynn is a writer and activist — check her and follow her on or . She writes a weekly review of Kurdish news for .]