Archive for the ‘Kurds’ Category
A Nobel Prize for Syria?
This article was first published at New Lines Magazine.
On Aug. 25, Mazloum Abdi, the commander in chief of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led militia that had ruled swaths of northern and eastern Syria for over a decade, announced the group’s dissolution. This marked the end of the process of integrating SDF fighters into the Syrian Ministry of Defense. Three all-Kurdish brigades of the national army now serve in Hasakah and Qamishli, with a fourth in Kobani. That means Kurdish-majority areas are policed and guarded from external threats by local Kurds rather than by outsiders. Abdi has been appointed as an adviser to the Syrian presidency.
The integration process is a compromise for both sides. The dissolution of the SDF comes in concert with the winding up of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) and the “Rojava” (or “Western Kurdistan”) experiment. This is experienced as liberation for many Arabs and others in northeastern Syria, who found SDF rule oppressive, but it also represents the end of Kurdish autonomy, leaving many Kurds wounded and worried about the future. For their part, many Syrian Arabs are discomfited that parts of their country are still managed by people who until recently ran their own state project, and who don’t necessarily believe in a unified and sovereign Syria.
But still, the process has more or less worked, and the northeast is no longer at war. A Syrian solution has been arrived at, rather than an international conflict. It could have all happened very differently, and Abdi and Syria’s transitional President Ahmad al-Sharaa should be credited with avoiding much worse scenarios.
In late November and early December 2024, while al-Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebels were seizing Syria’s western cities from the collapsing regime of Bashar al-Assad, from Aleppo in the north via Homs to Damascus in the south, the Turkish-aligned militias of the so-called Syrian National Army (SNA) advanced eastward into SDF-controlled territory. Backed by the Turkish air force, the SNA took Tel Rifaat and Manbij from SDF control. In Manbij, according to a Kurdish resident I interviewed for my recent book on post-Assad Syria, SNA fighters and Arab residents together drove Kurds from their homes, which they then looted.
Motivated by homesickness as well as revenge, the SNA fighters wanted to continue. Many of them had been pushed out of their home areas in eastern Syria by the Islamic State group, then prevented from returning by the SDF. There were clear signs, too, that the Arab population of northern and eastern Syria would welcome a larger battle. As HTS arrived in Damascus, armed civilians attacked checkpoints in the city of Deir ez-Zor, and Arab fighters in the SDF defected. The city had liberated itself by Dec. 11, 2024, three days after Assad’s flight to Moscow.
The encouragements for war were plentiful. Both sides would have found powerful state backers: Turkey sponsoring Damascus, and Israel the SDF. The SDF had no wish to compromise with its archenemies. For their part, the SNA fighters were raring to go.
But al-Sharaa restrained them. Instead, he and Abdi signed the March 10, 2025, agreement to reintegrate the northeast into the Syrian state. This statement of intent was supported by the United States but opposed by hard-liners on both sides. The procedural nitty-gritty was consigned to committees. Each side understood the terms of the agreement differently. Often, the process seemed destined to fail.
Yet al-Sharaa and Abdi persevered, reining in both their respective hard-liners and cadres on the ground. For this reason, I’ve heard one Syrian journalist suggesting, and only partly tongue in cheek, that the two men deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
Perhaps they do — even Henry Kissinger won the Nobel once, so it’s not a high bar — but if they do, it’s for their intelligent reading of reality rather than for any inherently pacific orientation. Both men have risen by accurately evaluating the potentials and risks presented by their changing environments. Both have survived the vicissitudes of the long Syrian conflict by understanding that war, like politics, is the art of the possible. When fighting is likely to achieve their aims, they fight. When it’s more likely to lead to disaster, they usually refrain. Unlike Assad or Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, their judgment has only rarely been clouded by hubris.
Read the rest of this entry »A Letter Concerning Afrin
Turkish-allied Syrian rebel militia destroying the statue of Kaveh, a figure of symbolic importance in Kurdish culture
A group of western leftists wrote a letter calling for US intervention on behalf of the PYD in Afrin. Many of these people never noticed the crimes committed by Assad and his allies in the rest of Syria. Many of them slandered the Free Syrian Army as tools of imperialism when they begged (largely in vain) for anyone at all to send them weapons to defend their communities. Some signatories are genocide-deniers. If their engagement with the PYD was in some way critical, and if it was matched by critical solidarity with the larger Syrian revolution, it wouldn’t look so much like fetishisation.
Anyway. I’ve written (in haste – no doubt I’ve missed things out) what I think is a more balanced letter:
We deplore the historical persecution of Kurds (and other minority groups) by regimes in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. We call on all concerned, in particular the Syrian revolutionary opposition, to unambiguously recognise the Kurdish right to self-determination in areas where Kurds are a majority.
While recognising the extreme difficulty of acting on principle when lives are at stake, we call on both the Syrian opposition and the PYD to carefully consider their alliances with regional and international imperialists. What appears tactically intelligent may turn out to be strategically disastrous.
We condemn the Turkish state’s self-interested intervention in Kurdish-majority Afrin, as we condemn the self-interested interventions of Russia, Iran and the United States in other parts of Syria.
‘Sectarianization’
The remains of the Nuri mosque amidst the remains of the ancient city of Mosul, Iraq. photo by Felipe Dana/ AP
An edited version of this article was published in Newsweek.
In his January 20 Inaugural Address, President Trump promised to “unite the civilised world against radical Islamic terrorism which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth.”
To be fair, he’s only had six months, but already the project is proving a little more complicated than hoped. First, ISIS has been putting up a surprisingly hard fight against its myriad enemies (some of whom are also radical Islamic terrorists). The battle for Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, is almost concluded, but at enormous cost to Mosul’s civilians and the Iraqi army. Second, and more importantly, there is no agreement as to what will follow ISIS, particularly in eastern Syria. Here a new Great Game for post-ISIS control is being played out with increasing violence between the United States and Iran. Russia and a Kurdish-led militia are also key actors. If Iran and Russia win out (and at this point they are far more committed than the US), President Bashar al-Assad, whose repression and scorched earth paved the way for the ISIS takeover in the first place, may in the end be handed back the territories he lost, now burnt and depopulated. The Syrian people, who rose in democratic revolution six years ago, are not being consulted.
The battle to drive ISIS from Raqqa – its Syrian stronghold – is underway. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), supported by American advisors, are leading the fight. Civilians, as ever, are paying the price. UN investigators lament a “staggering loss of life” caused by US-led airstrikes on the city.
Though it’s a multi-ethnic force, the SDF is dominated by the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party, or PYD, whose parent organisation is the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. The PKK is listed as a terrorist organisation by the United States (but of the leftist-nationalist rather than Islamist variety), and is currently at war with Turkey, America’s NATO ally. The United States has nevertheless made the SDF its preferred local partner, supplying weapons and providing air cover, much to the chagrin of Turkey’s President Erdogan.
Now add another layer of complexity. Russia also provides air cover to the SDF, not to fight ISIS, but when the mainly Kurdish force is seizing Arab-majority towns from the non-jihadist anti-Assad opposition. The SDF capture of Tel Rifaat and other opposition-held towns in 2016 helped Russia and the Assad regime to impose the final siege on Aleppo.
Eighty per cent of Assad’s ground troops encircling Aleppo last December were not Syrian, but Shia militiamen from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, all armed, funded and trained by Iran. That put the American-backed SDF and Iran in undeclared alliance.
Another War Opens
Jerablus residents returning home
This was first published at the New Arab.
On August 9th, Turkish President Erdogan visited Russian President Putin in Saint Petersburg. The two leaders cleared the air after a period of mutual hostility during which Turkey had shot down a Russian fighter jet and Russia had bombed Turkish aid convoys heading to Syria.
Clearly some kind of deal was struck at the meeting. Turkey now feels able to engage in robust interventions in northern Syria against both ISIS and the Democratic Union Party, or PYD, a Kurdish party-militia closely linked to the PKK, a group at war with the Turkish state. Except for the public recognition that Moscow is more relevant than Washington, it isn’t clear what Turkey has given Russia in return. Turkey has after all just supported the rebel push to break the siege of Aleppo.
Perhaps the earliest sign of the new reality was the Assad regime’s aerial bombardment of PYD-controlled territory in Hasakeh. The PYD closed Aleppo’s Castello road to regime traffic in response.
A ceasefire was quickly agreed, but the clash was still a surprising turnaround. Assad had never bombed the PYD before. In fact the two had sometimes collaborated, not as a result of ideological proximity or fraternal feeling, but out of a ruthless pragmatism. The regime withdrew from Kurdish-majority areas without a fight in June 2012. The PYD inherited the security installations in these three cantons – now called Rojava, or western Kurdistan – and Assadist forces were freed up to fight the revolution elsewhere.
‘Democratic Confederalism’ or Counter-Revolution?
Abdullah Ocalan (the Turkish ‘c’ is pronounced ‘j’)
This is my latest article for al-Araby al-Jadeed/ the New Arab.
The first fact is this: the Kurds have suffered a terrible historical injustice. The Arabs were rightly enraged when Britain and France carved bilad al-Sham (the Levant) into mini-states, then gave one of them to Zionism. But the post-Ottoman dispensation allowed the Kurds no state at all – and this in an age when the Middle East was ill with nationalist fever. Everywhere the Kurds became minorities in hyper-nationalist states.
Over the years an estimated 40,000 people have been killed in Turkish-Kurdish fighting, most of them Kurds. In the late 1980s, Saddam Hussain’s genocidal Anfal campaign murdered somewhere between 50 and 200,000 Iraqi Kurds. In Syria, where Kurds formed about 10% of the population, or around two million people, it was illegal to teach in Kurdish. Approximately 300,000 Kurds (by 2011) were denied citizenship by the state, and were therefore excluded from education and health care, barred from owning land or setting up businesses.
While oppressing Kurds at home, President Hafez al-Assad (Bashaar’s father) cultivated good relations with Kurdish groups abroad. This fitted into his regional strategy of backing spoilers and irritants as pawns against his rivals.
