Eurasia Press & News
While Syria celebrates the fall of the Assad regime, the mood in the north of the country is very different: taking advantage of the chaos, Turkey and its proxy, the Syrian National Army, have launched an offensive against the Kurds. In a matter of days, the autonomous region lost two major cities: Til Rifaat and Manbij. For the past decade, the Kurds have effectively existed in Syria as a quasi-independent state. The new Syrian authorities from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham have been actively discussing the need to disarm the Kurdish forces at meetings with Turkish officials. Turkey has long been trying to put an end to the Kurdish separatist movement. The Kurds are being helped by the United States, which needs them as effective allies in the fight against ISIS, but so far it does not seem that the Americans are ready to stand up for the Kurds in the confrontation with Turkey. The Insider correspondent, who lives in Syria, spoke with the Kurds about why they believe that their old enemies have now come to power in the country.
Sources from the territories controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the backbone of which is made up of Kurds, report more than one hundred thousand refugees from the cities captured by pro-Turkish proxies. They tell of mass crimes in the Kurdish territories captured by the Turks, as well as dozens of people dying in clashes every day.
At the same time, the new Syrian authorities of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham are discussing the need to disarm the SDF in meetings with Turkish officials. The region, which became famous throughout the world for the brave Kurdish women and men fighting against ISIS, risks losing its autonomy and all its achievements.
From victory to a new war
Thirty-year-old Kurdish woman Berivan and her friends came specially to the main square of one of the largest cities in the region of Qamishlo (Al-Qamishli in Arabic) to take part in the celebration of the final fall of the Assad regime and to see with their own eyes how the statues of Hafez al-Assad are being torn down and the faded portraits of his son Bashar are being torn down.
But the girls check their news feeds every now and then and anxiously discuss the latest events. One of Berivan’s friends shows a video on her phone of the interrogation of two girls in bloody military uniforms, probably prisoners of war. The militants shout at them: “Are you Arab or Kurdish?”
“No, I don’t know these ones,” Berivan shakes her head and adds, handing her phone to her friends: “I think I’ve seen these ones a couple of times.” In the video she shows, the militants “load” prisoners of war into the back of a pickup truck. One of them, a seemingly exhausted girl in a military uniform, is taken onto one of the militants’ back like a sack.
In early 2016, Berivan fled her parents’ home to join the Women’s Defense Units, a Kurdish militia made up of only women. After taking part in several operations against ISIS in Manbij, a city in northern Syria’s western Kurdistan region, she decided that military service was not for her. She also said she had never been interested in politics, and simply wanted to free herself from her parents’ insistence that she get married.
Kurdish woman Berivan fled to the women’s self-defense units to escape her parents’ insistence on getting married
Now she works as a tattoo artist and has many clients. The rise to power of the militants from the former Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and the escalation of the Kurdish war with pro-Turkish forces make Berivan worried about the future: “Very soon, my work, my past, my identity and even my uncovered hair may become haram again.”
All attention of the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) is now focused on the attacks of the Syrian National Army (SNA) and Turkish aviation in the area of Manbij and the Tishreen Dam, which has already been captured by Turkish forces. The death toll from daily operations has already exceeded two hundred . To repel the attacks, the SDF had to transfer forces guarding prisons with ISIS militants to the front with the SNA and Turkey.
In addition to being one of the most important sources of electricity in northeastern Syria, the Tishreen Dam is a gateway to the Euphrates River and the city of Kobani, which has great symbolic significance for the Kurds. Kobani was the first city in the region where the Kurds declared freedom from the Assad regime on July 19, 2012, and the first city where ISIS was defeated. Kobani is now under threat from Turkey, which the Kurds accuse of being behind the scenes in the war, according to SDF commander Mazloum Abdi .
National question
In official documents of the Assad regime, the city of Kobani was called Al-Arab in the Arabic style, as were other cities in the region of northeastern Syria. For example, the city of Derik is officially called Al-Malikiyeh, named after the Syrian Baath Party colonel Adnan al-Maliki. Under the Baath regime, there was a ban on everything Kurdish. It was forbidden to speak Kurdish in the workplace, and children in Syria were not allowed to have Kurdish names. Berivan’s parents had to pay a $300 bribe to local officials to give their daughter a Kurdish name. But naming a store in Kurdish was a little more expensive – $500.
Berivan’s parents had to pay a $300 bribe to local officials to give their daughter a Kurdish name
The Baath regime tried unsuccessfully to weaken the national liberation sentiments of the Syrian Kurds, many of whom had relatives in the Kurdish-populated regions of Turkey. In 1973, Hafez al-Assad gave the order to create an “Arab belt” on the border. Kurds were deprived of Syrian citizenship and resettled in Arab cities like Raqqa, creating special settlements there. Arabs, on the other hand, were resettled in cities on the Syrian-Turkish border, where mainly Kurds, Assyrians and descendants of Armenians who fled the genocide at the beginning of the last century lived.
After the regime in Kobani was overthrown and the revolution spread to other cities in the region, the new, predominantly Kurdish authorities in these areas restored Kurdish names, opened Kurdish language schools, and made Kurdish an official language along with Arabic. The region of northeastern Syria became known as Rojava, which means “west” in Kurdish and is the western part of the territory historically inhabited by Kurds.
Since the pro-Kurdish armed groups came to power in 2012, the Assad regime in the region has been acting only formally. All administrative work since then (and to the present) has been carried out by the Autonomous Administration of Northern and Eastern Syria, officially recognized only by the Parliament of Catalonia , and all military structures in the region are under the control of the pro-Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces.
The new authorities carried out reforms in all spheres. They allocated a 50% quota for women’s participation in all positions and in all institutions. They strengthened control over the prohibition of child and forced marriages. They began to punish polygamy. They soon established the provision of basic services: they opened hospitals and solved the problems with electricity by purchasing generators.
Kurdish authorities in the region have tightened their grip on child and forced marriages and have begun punishing polygamy.
Significant changes have also occurred in the military sphere of the northeastern Syrian region during the years of the Syrian civil war. As the Kurds made military advances against ISIS and the administrative system developed, more and more Arab tribes joined the pro-Kurdish groups. This is how the SDF was created, which includes Assyrians and Armenians in its ranks, but the majority are now Arabs.
Threat from the North
The Syrian regime had no way to retake Rojava, and ISIS was all but defeated. But a far more serious threat loomed over the region: Turkey. During the Syrian civil war, the Turkish government repeatedly laid claim to the country’s territory in the name of its “national security.”
Among the Kurdish authorities in the region, there are many supporters of the ideology of Abdullah Ocalan, the founder and leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, who is serving a life sentence in Turkey. The PKK is recognized as terrorist in many countries around the world, has been waging a guerrilla war with Turkey for almost half a century, and is fighting for a solution to the “Kurdish question,” that is, the creation of an independent Kurdish state.
While Ocalan is held in near-isolation in a prison built especially for him on the island of Imrali in Turkey, his portrait hangs in all the administrative buildings in the northeastern region of Syria. Residents of the region regularly demonstrate in support of him and the PKK. And although the PKK itself denies direct involvement in the internal affairs of the region, all SDF recruits undergo ideological training based on the works of Ocalan.
The situation for the Kurds in Syria began to deteriorate rapidly in 2018, when Turkey seized the Kurdish-populated Syrian region of Afrin the day after Russian troops withdrew. In late 2019, after the withdrawal of American troops, the Turkish occupation extended to the towns of Serekaniye (Ras al-Ayn in Arabic) and Gire Spi (Tel Abyad in Arabic). Under a ceasefire brokered by Russia, the Turkish army, along with Russian military police, patrolled villages from the town of Kobani to Dirbesiye.
Local residents were not happy – they threw stones at passing military vehicles of Russian troops, and Russian soldiers responded by shooting in the air and running over protesters. The ceasefire was not observed: shelling by Turkish forces on the contact line caused the destruction of infrastructure, residential buildings and the death of civilians, and strikes by Turkish drones even on residential areas of cities became commonplace.
New escalation
“When I learned that Assad’s army and Russian troops had left the bases in Shahba and Manbij, I immediately realized that Turkey would launch an operation. I told my wife that I would go to the front. I promised that this would be the last time,” Mazloum, a father of four and one of the SDF commanders, told The Insider. Now Mazloum is back on the front lines near the city of Manbij, near the Tishreen Dam. He is coordinating operations. He has 13 years of war behind him.
Five years ago, he tried to become a civilian. He laid down his arms and found a job in the municipality of his village near the town of Serekaniye. He decided to renovate his house; his wife was pregnant with their fourth child. In the fall of 2019, when his wife was about to give birth, Turkey and its SNA proxies captured the village of Mazluma along with the entire town of Serekaniye. Mazlum and his family left the city on a single motorcycle.
Since then they have been living in tents, they have no home, but Mazlum is sure that they could not stay:
“There is not a single Kurd left in my village and in all the neighboring villages. Even the old people who can barely walk have left. The same thing is now happening in Shahba and Manbij. The invaders are even terrorizing some Arabs. There is definitely no life for us Kurds there.”
Mazlum himself and the entire Kurdish command operate underground. The SDF military tunnels have been built for many years in the territories liberated from ISIS in all the cities on the border with Turkey – due to the fact that Turkish aviation is actively operating in the region. The Kurds say that Turkish drones regularly carry out attacks on civilian objects. For example, on December 19, a drone struck the car of journalists Cihan Bilgin and Nazim Dashtan, who were covering events on the front from the territories controlled by the SDF.
According to Mazloum, there were multi-kilometer tunnels in both Shahba and Manbij , but these cities fell into the hands of pro-Turkish forces within days:
“There were tunnels in Shahba, but there was no one to fight in them. There were few fighters and few weapons. Therefore, the troops simply evacuated with civilians who they could. Our forces left Manbij due to the betrayal of some Arab tribes, who went over to the SNA at the beginning of the attacks.”
The SDF has little to counter the Turkish air force and the SNA artillery. The Kurdish fighters use only homemade kamikaze drones. The SDF learned this from ISIS. The US fully supports the SDF only in the fight against ISIS, but in the fight against the Syrian National Army and the Turkish army, the second most powerful army in NATO, the SDF has no helpers.
US Helps Kurds Fight ISIS, Not Pro-Turkish Forces
Old enemies came to power
Mazloum does not trust the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group that came to power in Syria. He does not even want to hear about reforms within the Islamist group and the promise of the HTS leader, the de facto head of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa (Al-Julani), to respect the rights of national minorities: “The people who committed crimes in my village have now come to power. These are the same militants who fought against us in 2013.”
Serekaniye, Mazloum’s hometown, was divided between 2012 and 2013, one controlled by pro-Kurdish forces and the other by Jabhat al-Nusra, which changed its name to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in 2016. Both forces were fighting the Syrian regime, which bombed one side of the city and then the other. Ironically, Mazloum’s home was in Jabhat al-Nusra-controlled territory. He decided to inform the Kurdish armed forces of the group’s movements and plans:
“I never spoke Kurdish to anyone, never even mentioned my family and my roots. We only spoke Arabic, even at home. My wife covered herself and I grew a beard. We were very afraid, to be honest. Because they cut off the heads of those they suspected of working for the Kurdish administration.”
Now neither Mazloum’s wife Soad nor his eldest daughter Arin wear a headscarf. None of his children speak Arabic well. Mazloum himself does not see himself in the new Syria:
“Before, I couldn’t travel around Syria because the regime forces (of Bashar al-Assad) would arrest me for serving in the SDF and for evading military service in the regime army. Now, I can’t travel around Syria because I’m afraid I’ll be arrested for the same reason.”
It should be noted, however, that so far since the fall of the Assad regime there have been no serious conflicts between the SDF and HTS. The SDF commander-in-chief and the namesake of The Insider’s interlocutor, Mazloum Abdi, said that they were warned in advance about Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s march on Damascus. Despite reports of the suppression of protests, torture and lynchings by the new Syrian authorities in Latakia, Tartus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, HTS has not touched either the SDF-controlled region of northeastern Syria or the Kurdish neighborhoods of Sheikhmaksud and Ashrafiyeh in the city of Aleppo.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham warned Kurdish forces in advance about the march on Damascus
These neighborhoods are guarded by small Kurdish self-defense groups, which also belong to the SDF. Since the capture of the city by HTS forces, there have been several reports of attempts to penetrate this Kurdish enclave in Aleppo. However, none of the attacks have escalated into large-scale clashes. Moreover, from the advance of Turkish proxies in the north of the country, Kurds are fleeing not only to the region of northeastern Syria, but also to Aleppo.
47-year-old refugee from Afrin Amina is one of those who fled with her family to the Sheikhmaksud neighborhood of Aleppo from Shahba on December 10. “We gathered in minutes and fled towards the refugee camps established in 2018, since the occupation of Afrin. When we left Shahba, the militants took our cash and my gold earrings. We were lucky, but some were simply stopped and taken away in an unknown direction,” Amina recalls.
Amina and her family came to the Kurdish quarter of Aleppo, Sheikhmaksud, to visit relatives; they have no relatives in northeastern Syria. Now she fears that Sheikhmaksud will also be cleared of Kurds and they will have to leave again:
“We are already refugees twice. The third time, we will probably have to die. If HTS’s policy towards us changes, they will reach Rojava too. We here in Sheikhmaqsud will just find out about it earlier. We have nowhere else to go.”
Many Kurds are thus still considering emigrating from Syria. Before the fall of the Assad regime, the road from Syria to Greece cost $14,000, plus $10,000 to Germany, but now the prices have almost doubled. The road to Greece now costs more than $23,000. But even having paid such money, people cannot get any guarantee: now many European countries have suspended consideration of asylum requests from Syrians.
Many Kurds are still thinking about emigrating from Syria. Getting to Greece costs $23,000
Pro-Turkish course of the new Syria
There is no official agreement between HTS and the SDF yet, but negotiations are underway. Ahmed Al-Sharaa said that the SDF will be part of the new Syrian army. SDF Commander-in-Chief Mazloum Abdi agreed, but set a condition that HTS cannot fulfill on its own, namely, an end to Turkish attacks in Syria.
Almost immediately after the fall of the Assad regime and the rise to power of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Turkish President Erdogan declared : “We have paved the way for victory in Syria.” The Turkish delegation was the first to arrive in Syria on an official visit. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakad Fidan demanded that the new Syrian authorities expel Kurdish groups from the country, otherwise Turkey could conduct a military operation contrary to the US position.
At the same time, there are positive signs: in Turkey, for the first time in many years, the authorities have allowed meetings with the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. And Western leaders are increasingly talking about the need to support the Kurds in Syria, key allies of democratic countries in the fight against ISIS. The American military has even begun building a new military base in Kobani.
However, The Insider’s interlocutor Mazloum is skeptical and considers foreign military bases to be a temporary phenomenon: “Any agreement with Turkey now on any section of the front will not fundamentally change the situation, but will only delay a new occupation operation. We are fighting a war for our existence. We will not surrender soon, but we are still far from victory.”
The Kurds’ resources without external support are incomparable with the forces of pro-Turkish proxies in Syria and the Turkish army itself. If it openly enters the war, its outcome is predictable – the Syrian Democratic Forces will most likely suffer defeat. Therefore, there should be more hope for diplomacy on the part of the Kurds than for force of arms.
