Syria’s Rojava Revolution Is in Grave Danger
Kobane, Syria, was home to one of the most famous military turning points in history. A small force of Kurdish guerrillas, pressed between the advancing Islamic State group and the Turkish border, was supposed to have fallen quickly in a tragic last stand. Obama administration officials said as much. Instead, the Kurds of Kobane successfully held out for six months, enough time for the cavalry—the U.S. Air Force and rebels from elsewhere in Syria—to arrive.
Yesterday, Kobane came under attack again. With the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus and the uncertainty over what comes next, Turkey has been seeking an opportunity to wipe out its Kurdish opponents and carve out a puppet state in Syria’s north. With air cover from the Turkish Air Force, militias known as the Syrian National Army (SNA) overran the nearby city of Manbij and marched toward Kobane.
“In the last war, the people fled to Turkey. This time, it will be a genocide,” Berivan Hesen, a member of Kobane’s local government who lived through the Islamic State group’s siege, said via text message on Tuesday. “They are all ISIS by a different name.” Hesen notes that many of the people living in Kobane now had fled from other parts of Syria under Turkish and SNA control, such as Afrin, where the same forces have committed looting, rape, and torture since occupying it in 2018.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) agreed to “American mediation” with Turkey, the SDF’s Gen. Mazloum Abdi announced on Tuesday night, withdrawing forces from Manbij in hopes that Kobane would be spared. (The next day, Turkey launched drone strikes across North and East Syria.) U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be traveling to Ankara, the Turkish capital, this week. The United States has troops embedded with the SDF and controls much of the airspace over eastern Syria. But the Biden administration has remained vague about what its goals really are.
Syria’s “Kurdish revolution,” which started in Kobane, is no longer just a Kurdish one. After the defense of Kobane, the U.S. military helped Kurdish rebels create the SDF alongside Arab, Assyrian Christian, and other militias. These forces eventually captured a third of the country, establishing the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava, run on an eclectic mix of feminist and libertarian ideas.
The non-Kurdish areas of North and East Syria are filled with “women who chose to take advantage of new freedoms and opportunities, with all the risks they came with,” says Meghan Bodette, research director at the nonprofit Kurdish Peace Institute, where I used to be a nonresident fellow. “A small constituency, all things considered. But I’ve never seen people who believed in freedom more.”
North and East Syria, however, always rested on a delicate political balance. Both Russia and the U.S. restrained Turkey, which fears Kurdish unrest within its borders, from advancing into Syrian Kurdish territory. Now that Assad is gone, so are the Russian forces. Turkey may be betting that the SDF has outlived its usefulness for the U.S., too. And the Turkish attacks on Kobane coincided with a mutiny of Arab tribes against the SDF in the oil-rich region of Deir el-Zour. Arabs who grudgingly sided with the SDF against Assad now want to go their own way.
If the Kurdish-Arab alliance unravels, the U.S. military may decide to directly back Arab tribes as a bulwark against Iran and the Islamic State, according to Nicholas Heras, who has advised the U.S.-led military coalition in Syria and is now senior director for strategy at the nonprofit
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