Rojava: Syria’s Radical Experiment in Self-Government (Pt. 1)
Over the course of the past nine years, as it has weathered the deadliest conflict of the 21st century, “Syria” has, in the western imagination, become a byword for death, destruction, authoritarianism, chemical weapons, extremism, and sectarian violence. The images we most commonly see of Syria in the media depict human rights abuses, the brutality of ISIL, and bombs falling on densely populated areas, killing an untold number of civilians. The Syrian Civil War has traumatized the country, but there has been one distinctly good thing to come out of the war: in the desert of northern Syria, a democracy has bloomed.
The Syrian Civil war was sparked by discontent with the authoritarian government of Bashar Al-Assad, a dictator whose family has ruled Syria for decades. In the spring of 2011, just as the Arab Spring caused unrest across the Middle East, a drought, economic troubles, and an increasingly widespread feeling that Assad didn’t represent the majority of Syrians (he’s a member of the powerful Alawite minority whereas most Syrians — particularly the working class — are Sunni Arabs) fueled protests. The protests became riots. Riots quickly led to shooting. By 2012, the Assad regime was fragile; it had lost significant amounts of territory, mostly in Southern Syria, to organized opposition forces. It looked like only a matter of time before Assad would be deposed entirely. In a desperate attempt to get things under control and strike back against the rebels, the Assad regime pulled its forces and resources out of many parts of northern Syria, an area it was less worried about.
Northern Syria is one of the most diverse places in the Middle East. The area is home to about 3 million Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, Assyrians, Muslims, Christians, Armenians, and Yazidis. The largest ethnic group in the area, though, are the Kurds. Kurds have a long history of being discriminated against; under Hafez Al-Assad (Bashar’s father), for example, thousands of Kurds had their citizenship, property, and political rights taken from them. Although they constitute only 10% of the Syrian population, in the governorates of northern Syria, they constitute a plurality. Still, under the rule of the Assad regime, the most Syrian Kurds could do was organize underground political parties. When the policemen, soldiers, and bureaucrats of the regime left, though, these Kurdish groups emerged from the shadows and began leading, governing, and fighting.
Usually, when we talk about power vacuums in the Middle East, especially one involving a variety of ethnic and religious groups, we assume it’ll end poorly. In this sense, and in so many others, Rojava (the informal name of the statelet that has sprung up in northern Syria) is an exception. Although the first order of business was securing and defending the area, the vacuum gave leaders in Rojava the opportunity to try a radical experiment in democracy. After years of oppression and amidst the chaos and brutality of the war, they set about building a secular, feminist, environmentalist, democratic society based on the concept of local communities making their own decisions by consensus. This political ideology is called democratic confederalism.
Democratic confederalism was created by Abdullah Ocalan, who, for decades, has led the PKK, a leftist Kurdish militant group based in Turkey. The PKK, which is engaged in an ongoing insurgency against the Turkish government, began in the 1970s as a cross between a Kurdish nationalist organization and a typical marxist-leninist guerrilla group. When Ocalan was arrested by Turkish authorities in 1999, he became the sole prisoner on Imrali island, where he began reading. Influenced by the writings of American philosopher Murray Bookchin, Ocalan’s ideology began to change. He entered prison as a dyed in the wool communist (the pro-soviet sort) but, quickly, Ocalan came to see centralized state power as the key problem plaguing the Kurdish people and society in general. In our modern model of the nation-state, he argued, minorities will always be oppressed and power will always be wielded to maintain the privileges of some at the expense of others. His central thesis, that top-down power structures are bad, wasn’t new; that’s just anarchism. His solution, however, was new. Ocalan didn’t reject government altogether, he just wanted it to be structured very differently. He envisioned a system of government centered around the community and focused on equality and the environment. Under democratic confederalism, villages, towns and neighborhoods would make their own decisions based on the interests of those involved. No government policy and no large-scale armed struggle would bring about a marxist utopia, he argued; only communities, actively engaged — in good faith — on local matters could bring about true equity and peace. With the regime out of the way, this is exactly what Syrian Kurds set out to do in 2012.
While Rojava was initially dominated by Kurds, leaders explicitly aimed to create a multi-ethnic society. This meant that militia groups, previously organized along ethnic and religious lines, were, in 2015, reorganized under the inclusive banner of the “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF); political parties renounced connections to specific ethnic or religious groups. With Democratic Confederalism, Kurds and Arabs, Muslims and others, have come together to build up their communities. Justice has been administered locally, centers of education have been founded, and businesses have flourished in the wake of war. Perhaps the most radical change, though, has been the liberation of women. While they were previously treated as second class citizens, women in northern Syria have been placed in the center of Rojavan life. Previously they’d been expected to stay at home and be obedient to their husbands. Now, women in northern Syria are free to pursue any career they choose, go wherever they please, take up arms to defend their communities, own their own property and businesses, and be leaders. This is a sea-change for a region where social and religious expectations have long prevented women from living freely.
I cannot overstate just how revolutionary democratic confederalism is, especially in the context of the Middle East. In a region mostly devoid of democracy and where women’s rights are practically nonexistent, people in northern Syria overthrew the social order. Rojava is not without its flaws, but it’s a diverse, secular, and forward-thinking oasis in a desert of suffering and injustice.
The Rojavan experiment, though, has not come easily. The gains they’ve made to create a liveable and free society were hard-earned. Although their initial challenge was establishing stability and warding off local jihadist groups, Rojava was soon faced with the most dangerous threat to its existence: ISIL.
In many ways, ISIL is Rojava’s antithesis, a fitting archenemy. While ISIL sells women as sex slaves, Rojava has gender equality built into its constitution; while ISIS exists to impose hardline religious beliefs, Rojava is religiously diverse and culturally secular; while ISIL wants to create a medieval-style “caliphate,” Rojava’s model feels like the future. Perhaps that’s why ISIL made it a priority to wipe out the Syrian Kurds.
ISIL was founded around the turn of the century as an Iraqi Sunni fundamentalist group. Although they aligned themselves with groups like Al-Qaeda and shared a twisted interpretation of Islam with other jihadists, ISIL focused on governing territory more than most other terrorist groups did. They are perhaps better compared to the Taliban (which at one point was a real government) than they are to, say, Boko Haram. ISIL curried favor with locals by enforcing laws, collecting taxes and building key infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, roads. Not everyone in rural Iraq and Syria really believed in ISIL’s version of Islam, but many people did accept ISIL rule in exchange for the order it brought. In a region dominated by violence, the ability to effectively administer laws is essential to long-term success. In 2013, a power vacuum in Iraq allowed ISIL to consolidate its power and achieve its long-held vision of fundamentalist rule.
At the time, the situation in Syria was fluid; no faction was well-organized and it was unclear whether rebel groups would manage to oust Assad. This created the perfect conditions for ISIL to not only take over much of Iraq, but storm across the border and take control of much of Syria. The speed with which they did this was astounding.
ISIL wiped out or absorbed rebel groups in Syria throughout 2014. By the end of the year, their “caliphate” ranged from central Iraq in the east all the way to Aleppo, Syria in the west. With a brutality foreign even to the Syrian Civil War, they tore through the country. Unwillingly to give up their newfound autonomy, though, Syria’s Kurds put up a fight. The odds weren’t good; In 2014, Syrian Kurds had few fighters and little more rifles and pickup trucks to defend themselves. ISIL, at that point seemingly unstoppable, initially plowed through Kurdish-held territory, pushing all the way north to the Turkish border where they surrounded the predominantly Kurdish city of Kobani.
Earlier in 2014, ISIL surrounded Sinjar, a town in northern Iraq. Sinjar was home to thousands of Yazidis, members of a small ethno-religious minority group. Like the largely secular Kurdish people, ISIL sees Yazidis as “kafir” — infidels. Under their perverted interpretation of Islam, Yazidis, Kurds, and other groups of “kafir” are considered subhuman. Accordingly, when the people of Sinjar took up arms to defend themselves from ISIL, the terrorist group stormed the town and indiscriminately killed Yazidi men, taking thousands of Yazidi women as sex slaves. This act, regarded by many as genocide, was the peak of ISIL’s brutality.
When ISIL arrived at Kobani’s gates in the winter of 2014, the world braced itself for another massacre. In an attempt to stop ISIL from killing tens of thousands of civilians, the US stepped in to offer air support to the encircled Kurds. The city was destroyed but miraculously, they weathered the siege. This battle proved to be a turning point, both in the US-Rojava relationship, and in the war against ISIL. Kurdish militias, soon to become a part of the SDF, not only held the city but pushed back against ISIL, slowly fighting to kick them out of Northern Syria. Where others had failed and when it seemed impossible, the SDF managed to turn the tide.
By 2017, it became clear that the SDF was the most effective fighting force against ISIL. The Assad regime was still struggling to find its footing and rebel groups were plagued by infighting. Seeing this, the Pentagon decided to work more closely with the SDF by training, arming, and supporting the militia.
Although the SDF’s goal had originally been only to expel ISIL from the majority-Kurdish areas in northern Syria, they, with American support, began to push into majority Arab territory held by the jihadists. Teaming up with Arab tribes, they fought to free hundreds of small towns in northern and western Syria. For many fighters in the SDF, Kurdish, Arab or otherwise, the fight against ISIL was personal. They’d seen their homes destroyed and saw it as their moral obligation to free others.
The biggest battle in the fight against ISIL came in the summer of 2017. In 2014, ISIL had established a capital in Raqqa, a large city on the bank of the Euphrates river in Syria, south of Rojavan territory. Raqqa was the administrative center of the “caliphate” but it was also a symbol of ISIL rule. It was from their headquarters in Raqqa that ISIL had planned terrorist attacks abroad; where they filmed atrocities; where they’d recruited young men to join the fanatical death cult; and where they had run their organization and directed a campaign of terror.
Over the course of four months of brutal house-to-house fighting and relentless American airstrikes, 80% of Raqqa was destroyed. 700 SDF fighters, 1,400 jihadists, and 1,500 civilians were killed.
After the battle of Raqqa, the SDF beat ISIL back to the Iraqi border. By early 2019, little remained of ISIL’s territorial holdings in Syria. In March of 2019, on the outskirts of Baghuz, a village on the Iraqi border, ISIL made its last stand. In just four years, their roles had been reversed. Many of the same young men and women who’d been surrounded in Kobani were there to accept ISIL’s defeat in Baghuz. Thousands of ISIL fighters and family members were taken as prisoners, not killed.
The final battle at Baghuz represented the symbolic high water mark of Rojava. Though the status of the statelet remained unclear and the larger Syrian Civil War unresolved, the SDF had triumphed over ISIL. A land area the size of Costa Rica was controlled and administered by a diverse group of ordinary people. Kobani had been rebuilt. A local government in Raqqa was working to resettle displaced people. They’d defended themselves and won. Threats remained, but the future looked bright for the roughly 3 million people living in the young democracy. Unfortunately, a year later, as the situation in Syria evolves, there are significant doubts about how much longer Rojava will be able to hold on.
Part two of this series on Rojava will cover the complicated relationship between the US and Rojava. It will also look at Rojava’s conflict with Turkey and future as an autonomous territory.
Further reading (note the dates of these articles. I’ve linked to them to provide further information and context; they are not “up-to-date”):
Meet America’s Syrian Allies Who Helped Defeat ISIS (New York Times, 2018)
In the Heart of Syria’s Darkness, a Democratic, Egalitarian, and Feminist Society Emerges (Haaretz, 2019)
What the Syrian Kurds Have Wrought (The Atlantic, 2016)
A Dream of a Secular Utopia in ISIS’ Backyard (The New York Times Magazine, 2015)
