The Rojava revolution was never just an institutional arrangement. It was, and is, a process of social transformation: women's organizations, co-presidency, multilingual education, community justice, overcoming clan feuds, and attempting to build coexistence in a region ravaged by sectarianism. ---- The new phase of the conflict in northern Syria didn't erupt suddenly. It developed over the course of a year, in the palaces of Damascus, following a precise trajectory: increasing military pressure, political isolation of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria (DAANES), and then escalation. A plan with international backing, aimed at forcing the self-governing group to accept a bargain at gunpoint.
The escalation began with the attack on Aleppo's predominantly Kurdish neighborhoods: Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh. Despite an agreement signed for their gradual integration into the city administration, militias that had merged into the new Syrian army, including groups affiliated with the Turkish government, have surrounded the area in recent months, imposing a de facto siege: supply cuts, military pressure, and intermittent clashes. A ground offensive began in January: tens of thousands of Damascus militiamen, backed by tanks and heavy artillery, assaulted densely populated areas defended by a few hundred members of the Kurdish internal security forces, supported by the local population. A massacre awaited.
Formally, it was about "restoring state authority." In reality, it was a test: measuring the international response and the Kurdish self-defense forces' capacity for resistance in an urban area isolated from the rest of the autonomous territories. After days of fighting and local mediation, the Kurdish forces accepted an agreement that provided for the evacuation of the population in exchange for a comprehensive ceasefire. Just one day later, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) also agreed to withdraw from the Deir Hafer and Masekanah areas. The area, controlled for only a year, had lost all strategic value with the fall of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh.
The withdrawal, scheduled for seven the next morning, turned out to be a trap: SDF columns heading toward Tabqa ran into a series of ambushes along the way. This marked the beginning of a large-scale government offensive.
Raqqa, Tabqa, and Deir ez-Zor have turned into battlefields. Many of the tribes that formed the backbone of the military councils federated within the SDF have declared their allegiance to the transitional government, attacking their former allies. The fall of Tabqa opened the way to Raqqa, the former ISIS capital and symbol of the SDF's victory over the caliphate. Faced with the prospect of a devastating conflict, the SDF chose to hold out long enough to evacuate the administration's civilian and military personnel and anyone who deemed the government advance a threat, particularly the Kurdish minority, historically present in the city.
Within a few days, the map of the areas administered by DAANES has dramatically returned to its 2015 form. Two of the three original cantons of the Rojava revolution remain intact: the Jazeera region maintains its integrity, while Kobane is once again under siege. The third, Afrin, has been occupied by Turkey since 2018.
A narrative has taken shape with astonishing rapidity in recent months: that of alleged "Kurdish oppression" of Arabs in northeast Syria. It's a simple story, reassuring to many regional and international players, useful for justifying the return of centralized state order under the new government in Damascus. But it's a false narrative. Or rather, it's an ideological simplification that masks a much more complex and conflictual reality.
Reducing what has happened and is happening in the Northeast to an ethnic clash means ignoring at least three crucial elements: the legacy of Baathist demographic engineering policies, the role of pro-Turkish militias integrated into the new Syrian army, and the profoundly anti-tribal and anti-sectarian nature of the DAANES political project.
In recent months, ethnographic maps have been circulating again, claiming there are no Kurdish-majority areas in Syria. Hence the conclusion: no autonomy would make sense. But those maps are the direct product of the Baathist regime's racist policies: revoking the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of Kurds, forced Arabization, and the "Arab Belt" to sever territorial continuity and cross-border ties.
Added to this were the Turkish invasions of Afrin, Serekaniye, and Girê Spî, and the subsequent demographic replacement operations. Afrin is now, effectively, a Turkish province under the control of the SNA militias: formally integrated into the Syrian army, they are essentially autonomous.
It is strange that DAANES is accused of "ethnicism" using as a cartographic basis the results of decades of state oppression against the Kurds.
The new Syrian army has wholesale incorporated some of the militias most implicated in war crimes. The command structures have remained intact. So have the leaders. Sayf Boulad Abu Bakr, former head of the Hamza Division, sanctioned by the United States and the European Union for kidnappings, torture, sexual violence, and murder, is now commander of the 76th Division in Aleppo, with responsibilities that also include Kobane. CNN reports and Human Rights Watch reports have documented systematic rape, sexual slavery, and the political use of violence in Afrin. These are not individual deviations. It's a system. Yet the dominant narrative speaks of "restoring state unity" and "monopoly on violence," as if the state were neutral by definition, as if centralization in itself guaranteed justice.
This doesn't mean absolving DAANES of all responsibility. Mistakes did occur, and they weren't marginal.
At times, international media portrayed the Northeast's experience as a "Kurdish revolution," obscuring the core of the project: a confederal, pluralistic model, not based on ethnic affiliation. In a region saturated with nationalism, even the shadow of an identity-based discourse provided ammunition for detractors.
The SDF's expansion into Arab-majority areas demonstrated that autonomy could transcend ethnic boundaries. Arab communities, like others in the Northeast, are present in councils, military units, and civilian structures. But participation has not always equated with a full sense of belonging. Tensions have not been lacking. The permanent state of war has forced decisions that have sometimes been unpopular, if not contradictory to the long-term plan. Mistakes, yes. But they are the mistakes of a revolutionary process, not of a supremacist project.
The most overlooked issue concerns tribal dynamics. The collapse of SDF control in large parts of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor occurred through a series of defections, often described as "Arab uprisings against Kurdish rule." In reality, the SDF had an Arab majority for years, especially after the 2017 Raqqa campaign. The loss of this component does not signal an ethnic rebellion, but rather the breakdown of a fragile political pact between the confederal movement and local tribal elites.
The large tribal structures of Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, and Hasakah are not simply traditional communities, but actual transnational, hierarchical power organizations, deeply integrated into the region's agrarian, commercial, and energy economies. Their leaders constitute a veritable social caste, enjoying social, political, and economic privileges, capable of adapting to any regime change: from Ba'th to Jabhat al-Nusra, from Daesh to DAANES, up to the new Syrian state.
Democratic confederalism is based on local councils, cooperative economics, and the overcoming of clan and patriarchal hierarchies. It is a project that challenges the power of large tribal families. In many Arab-majority areas, the conflict has not been between "oppressive Kurds" and "oppressed Arabs," but between an egalitarian political model and social structures based on tribal loyalties and patronage networks.
The reforms promoted by DAANES, however incomplete-such as the promotion of cooperatives, autonomous women's institutions, family law reform, co-presidency, and the introduction of Jineolojî into school curricula-have been poorly tolerated by these structures. The same is true for conservative Kurdish sectors hostile to the confederal project, such as ENKS, historically linked to Turkey and always alienated from autonomous institutions. This also demonstrates how misleading it is to interpret the conflict in purely identity-based terms. To trivialize it erases the real conflict: that between two visions of society.
If anything, in recent months, the ethnonationalist narrative that accompanied the offensive and its preparation, along with the massacres of Alawites on the coast and the events in Suwayda, has pushed the ENKS to close ranks with the rest of the Kurdish political spectrum. Not out of adherence to the confederal project, but out of a real fear of a return to Baathist policies toward the Kurdish population.
The war crimes documented in Afrin since 2018-the kidnapping of Kurdish women, arbitrary detentions, filmed rapes used for propaganda purposes, and so on-are tools of political and demographic engineering. Several testimonies, including a CNN report, describe how several sexual assaults were staged and filmed to simulate Kurdish abuse of Arab women, fueling an ethnicizing narrative useful for legitimizing Turkish intervention and the SNA's actions. The fabrication of lies precedes and accompanies violence, and is now recurring in official rhetoric against DAANES.
Internationally, speaking of "betrayal" may be morally understandable, but politically naive. The United States never supported DAANES as a political project. Its support was tactical, tied to the war against Daesh. Once the new government in Damascus was consolidated, integrated into regional dynamics, and open to international capital, the exception was no longer necessary. The phrase attributed to US envoy for Syria Tom Barrack, "We will not fire a single bullet for you," is not a turning point, but rather the confirmation of a consistent approach.
The alleged alliance between DAANES and Israel must also be clarified: it never existed. It was constructed as a rhetorical weapon to leverage the Arab and Muslim population, and ultimately its solidarity with the Palestinian people. This was encouraged by sections of the Israeli press in an attempt to force the perception of an alliance, or at least a sensitivity, towards the Syrian minorities. The aim was to divert the narrative away from Israel's hegemonic plans in the south of the country by exploiting the Druze minority's struggle for self-determination.
For years, the Kurdish administration has managed tens of thousands of ISIS fighters and their families on behalf of a global coalition reluctant to take responsibility. This has resulted in enormous administrative costs, at the expense of services to the population. Western governments have refused to repatriate ISIS members, manage detention facilities, or develop legal frameworks that could definitively resolve the problem of ISIS detainees.
Despite this, militants in prisons and camps have benefited from services provided with funds from the administration, local NGOs such as the Kurdish Red Crescent, and some international NGOs. The international funds provided to NGOs for camps like Hol have been one of the tools deployed by the West to keep ISIS under control without direct intervention and without having to recognize DAANES and its structures in any way. In most cases, Daesh prisoners have had access to far more services than internally displaced persons, who have received very little international support.
When the offensive reached Shaddadi Prison, the coalition base located 2 kilometers away did not respond to requests for intervention from the prison security forces. When they were forced to withdraw due to disproportionate forces, the militants freed a significant number of prisoners. The same thing happened at Hol camp.
The difficulties and contradictions in the post-caliphate management system did not arise due to DAANES's naivety. These conditions arose because containment without a political solution is not a strategy. The administration handled a global security problem without global support and was blamed when its neglect produced predictable consequences.
The January 30, 2026, agreement between the Syrian government and the SDF provides for military integration, recognition of certificates, and shared management of certain infrastructure. But it lacks third-party guarantees, monitoring mechanisms, or demilitarization lines. It's an agreement earned by the populations of the Northeast, who responded to the attacks with days of general mobilization, forcing Damascus to face a choice: return to the negotiating table or commit a massacre before the eyes of the world.
Autonomy is diminishing. Spaces are shrinking. The central power is reasserting its primacy. But a revolution does not coincide with its administrative structures.
The Rojava revolution was never just an institutional arrangement. It was, and is, a process of social transformation: women's organizations, co-presidency, multilingual education, community justice, overcoming clan feuds, and attempting to build coexistence in a region ravaged by sectarianism.
A committee can be dismantled. A brigade can be integrated. It is more difficult to erase fifteen years of social practices. Despite attacks, setbacks, and international complicity, the Kurdish movement has not adopted a policy of ethnic revenge or religious exclusion. In a region where nationalism has produced catastrophes, this choice is not naiveté: it is historical memory.
Forced reunification may reclaim territory, but it does not produce an inclusive social contract. If the Northeast loses its formal autonomy, it will not necessarily be the end of the process begun in 2012. Revolutions are not linear. They adapt, retreat, change form. The struggle does not coincide with an administrative boundary. The revolution is not the structures. It is the social change that survives even when the state once again occupies the maps.
https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL/
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