Considering your whole thing here, do you have any ideas to share on the Rojava attempt now that it’s dead ? Doomed from the beginning, something that was worth fighting for?
It has been very sad to watch the gradual defeat of Rojava this month. While they have not yet been defeated entirely, their territory has been greatly reduced and defeat seems to be the most likely outcome.
First, some background for those who haven't been following. With the Syrian Civil War over and ISIS largely defeated, the new Syrian government launched an offensive earlier this month to retake control of the northeastern territory of Rojava, the Syrian parts of Kurdistan. Rojava has been under the control of a Kurdish-led government allied with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) since the early 2010s.
As one of the most effective fighting forces against ISIS, the SDF and friends managed to maintain their own government in Rojava for over a decade. Influenced by democratic confederalist Abdullah Öcalan and social anarchist Murray Bookchin, Rojava is currently the only area of the Middle East that can be considered genuinely secular, socialist, democratic, and anti-authoritarian.
Even while under siege from ISIS, the Turkish military, and a variety of other armed forces, the government in Rojava created a decentralized democratic system, dramatically expanded women's rights, respected religious diversity, declared public/common ownership over large swathes of privately-owned land and infrastructure, promoted the creation of worker-owned businesses, and sought out ways to preserve the ecological health of their territory. And while their hands were not entirely clean, the SDF was the most respectful of human rights of any side in the civil war. For all of its flaws, the existence of Rojava was an unequivocally positive development.
With the Assad dictatorship gone and the Syrian Civil War officially at its end, Syria's new leader Ahmed al-Shaara launched an offensive aimed at taking control of Rojava and integrating it back into the Syrian state; so far, this campaign has been highly successful. At the same time, al-Shaara paired this stick with a carrot: he issued a decree recognizing the basic rights of the Kurdish people and granting them a limited degree of autonomy. If properly enforced, this decree would go further than previous Syrian governments in respecting Kurdish rights, but it is unclear how much al-Sharaa actually intends to enforce it. Given that al-Sharaa is heavily dependent on support from the firmly anti-Kurd government in Turkey, there is reason to view this otherwise-promising decree with pessimism.
It seems to me an uncomfortable truth that Rojava's existence depended in part upon a set of circumstances which could not last forever. Without the looming threat of an expansionist terrorist organization, Rojava's extension outside of predominantly Kurdish areas became harder to justify to local populations (particularly to Syrian Arabs with Islamist views, who differ from the Rojavan government in ethnicity, religious worldview, and political ideology). The defeat of ISIS also caused an end to active support from the US and other foreign military powers (US officials never really hid the fact that their support was "temporary, tactical and transactional.") Practically any post-war leader was eventually going to seek to re-establish control over Rojava, and al-Sharaa's relatively competent leadership so far improved the chances that such a campaign would be successful.
I wonder if a project as liberatory and hopeful as Rojava could only have been as successful as it was in the context of chaos and civil war. Only when the repressive pre-war status quo had shattered was it possible for a truly progressive autonomous Kurdish government to emerge from the ashes. A project like Iraqi Kurdistan is tolerable to the Iraqi government because it fits neatly within the country's established system of federalism, while a more radical project like Rojava is intolerable to the Syrian government precisely because it is seen as sitting outside of Syrian nationhood. Under the "peace"-time leadership of strongmen like Assad and al-Sharaa, state capacity is large enough to crush projects like this in the name of national territorial integrity.
Perhaps something as beautiful as Rojava could only have emerged from a context as horrific as the Syrian Civil War. This could be an overly deterministic viewpoint, or even just some post-hoc cope of some kind on my part. But perhaps, at the risk of being sentimental, Rojava is an example of A Flower Out Of Stone.
Regardless of whether or not Rojava manages to survive in some form, this is not the end of the struggle for the Kurds. They were working towards freedom and self-determination before Rojava, and they will continue working towards it after Rojava. So long as they remain beset on all sides by governments hostile to their people's existence, it is incumbent upon us to stand in solidarity with them.
