Solidarity Activists Are Raising Alarm Over Impending Turkish Attacks on Rojava

When Seattle-based journalist and activist Arthur Pye visited North and East Syria in 2023, he was stunned by what he observed at an organizing meeting in Serdem, a refugee camp of internally displaced people. Many of the refugees had been participants in the Rojava Revolution — a Kurdish-led, multiethnic, feminist, directly democratic movement involving more than 4 million people — in the autonomous city of Afrin before Turkish-backed assaults forced them out of their homes. At Serdem, Pye watched refugees organize and govern themselves in accordance with these values, even in the most desperate of circumstances.

But now, thousands of displaced people residing at the camp have been displaced yet again, according to Pye, who first became interested in Rojava during ISIS’s attempted siege of the city Kobanî in 2014. Since December 1, the Turkish military and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) have been bombarding the Shehba region in North Syria, which includes the Serdem camp. The SNA shares Turkey’s goals of destroying Rojava and ethnically cleansing Kurds from North and East Syria. SNA militiamen are reportedly kidnapping and assaulting some of the approximately 100,000 refugees attempting to flee Shehba. About a week later, on December 9, the SNA seized Manbij, a city that had been in Rojavan territory. Some residents in Manbij are protesting SNA’s seizure of the city and the army’s looting of homes and businesses.

Turkey and SNA are threatening to capture Kobanî next, a city Pye called “the heart and soul of the Rojava Revolution.” As of December 17, Turkish-backed forces had been firing at areas just south of the city, signifying their intention to launch an assault.

The attacks are a result of shifting power dynamics in the region after the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) expelled Bashar al-Assad from Syria on December 8, just 14 days after its initial advance. Exuberant crowds across the country emptied prison cells, toppled statues of Assad and danced in the streets to celebrate the end of a brutal dictatorship that imprisoned, tortured, killed and displaced countless civilians. The interregnum offers hope and possibility for many in the country. But once it became clear that Russia, Iranian militias and Syrian regime forces weren’t going to be major players in Syria anymore, Rojava became particularly vulnerable to Turkish-backed attacks, according to Samantha Teal of the Rojava Information Center, an independent, volunteer-run organization of journalists and researchers based in the Rojavan city of Qamishlo.

“There was this kind of one day of celebration on the street and statues being pulled down, but it quickly became clear the situation for North and East Syria was not going to be so perfect,” Teal said. “It wasn’t like a kind of fairy-tale falling of Assad, and everyone’s free.”

The fate of the revolution is now largely in the hands of the United States, which has allied with Rojava’s military — the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) — in the fight against ISIS for about a decade. The U.S. negotiated a ceasefire between Turkey and the SDF that ended on Saturday, December 21. The SNA, however, has reportedly violated the ceasefire agreement by attacking the Tishreen Dam, infrastructure that lies south of Manbij, and a Turkish drone killed two Kurdish journalists, among other attacks. SDF forces successfully repelled strikes against the dam.

“Will America intervene if Kobani is attacked?” Teal asked. “This is somehow what everything hinges on right now.” The SDF has proposed the establishment of a U.S.-supervised demilitarized zone in Kobani to appease Turkey’s security concerns. Turkey has yet to respond to this proposal.

A Feminist Revolution From Below

Since declaring autonomy from the Syrian regime in July 2012, more than 4 million people in North and East Syria have been organizing a revolutionary multiethnic, feminist, ecological and directly democratic society from the ground up with the goal of building autonomy. The movement, originally led by Kurds, set up communes in nearly all villages and neighborhoods in Rojava to coordinate access to basic needs, including self-defense, bread, water, electricity, heating oil, health and garbage collection, according to Azize Aslan in her recently translated book Anticapitalist Economy in Rojava: The Contradictions of Revolution in the Kurdish Struggle. Communes and commune sub-committees host assemblies where everyone is encouraged to participate and make decisions about daily life together.

“It gave me chills to see how communities can govern themselves. I was seeing it kind of with my own eyes, up close in person,” said Pye in his recollections of the Serdem camp. “These were just everyday people coming together to really take responsibility for their own community, and they knew nobody else was going to make these decisions for them. And they felt it was on them to not only understand their problems, but come up with solutions.”

Aslan reported that as of 2017, there were more than 3,800 communes across Rojava. Each commune has two co-presidents, one man and one woman that represent the cultural diversity of the commune, who coordinate neighborhood-level needs with other municipal levels of governance structures.

“[W]hen I visited Rojava in early 2018, I was struck by the mobilization capacity of the people,” writes Aslan. “People previously oppressed by the state, who did not have the right to speak or live freely, were now actively participating in the process of self-management and determination of autonomy, with their voices, their ideas and their decisions.”

Still, Aslan also writes that many in Rojava would feel more comfortable taking up arms and joining the war than attending an assembly. Teal, the Rojava Information Center researcher, similarly said they’ve interviewed people involved in communes who say some of their neighbors have a state-like mentality. “They say people in my neighborhood don’t want to come to my commune because they are used to everything being run centrally, they don’t want to participate in this local organization,” said Teal. Participation levels ultimately vary from commune to commune, according to Teal.

Communes organize restorative justice programs for many disputes and social issues to minimize involvement of courts in daily life. Still, mass detention centers exist in Rojava. Rojava has detained around 56,000 Syrian and foreign prisoners, including women and children, from its decade-long war with the Islamic State. For years, the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), Rojava’s formal organizing body, has repeatedly made calls for international support and resources to address this grim situation.

The movement directly addresses these types of contradictions through a robust process of critique and self-critique during assemblies.

This participatory, women-led revolution didn’t happen spontaneously or overnight. It is a culmination of more than a century of Kurdish resistance against ethnic cleansing and genocidal campaigns in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. From the 1970s to the mid-2000s the Kurdish movement organized around, and fought for, the creation of a Kurdish nation-state in response to these existential threats, Aslan explained in her book. But in 2005, many Kurds abandoned the goal of nation-state building in favor of constructing societal structures that promote autonomy for all people.

For years, the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), a political coalition representing political parties and organizations in North and East Syria, has proposed a formal decentralized political model for all of Syria, in which different regions retain autonomy while still being connected to a centralized government, Teal said. While HTS has claimed it will protect the rights of minorities and Syria’s diversity, it is unclear whether their actions and words will align.

An Urgent Call for Action

The latest assault against Rojava is alarming supporters around the world, who see the revolution as a beacon of hope and inspiration for the Middle East and the entire world. On December 12, Kurds rallied in Nashville, Tennessee — home to 15,000 Kurds — demanding the United States defend their Kurdish allies who fought and died in the protracted, bloody war against ISIS. Supporters staged demonstrations across Europe, the U.S. and Brazil on December 14 in response to a call for a Day of Action by Rise Up for Rojava, an international coalition of supporters.

Pye said several Shehba-based council members he spoke with before the territory fell to the SNA underscored the importance of convincing the U.S. government to stop Turkey’s assault on Rojava. The U.S. provided $200 million dollars in aid to the Turkish military in 2023 and approved the sale of F-16 fighter jets earlier this year. “It’s important that people understand that what Turkey does and what Turkey does through its proxies is all made possible by this kind of unwavering U.S. support,” said Pye. “That’s why it’s so important that we raise our voices and demand action from the United States government.”

The Emergency Committee for Rojava (ECR), a U.S-based membership organization building a support network for Rojava, released a toolkit with a call-in and email campaign script targeting ranking members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. The script demands emergency legislation denouncing Turkish aggression and a commitment to long-term U.S. support of the SDF; formal political recognition of DAANES, Rojava’s formal organizing body; as well as more overt calls for intervention, including economic sanctions in response to aggression by Turkey and its proxies; the withdrawal of Turkish forces from Syria; and an immediate halt to U.S. military aid to Turkey.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment at the time of publishing.

Supporters can organize call-in campaigns, film screenings, demonstrations and fundraisers for Heyva Sor, a humanitarian organization supporting displaced people fleeing Shehba, Manbij, and other dangerous areas in Syria. “All of these together are incredibly urgent,” said Pye, who is a steering committee member of ECR. “These things can make a difference. It may seem like a long shot, but these are desperate times, and legislators need to hear that people know about this situation and that they care about it. Otherwise, they certainly won’t do anything.”

If history is any indicator of what’s to come, Turkey and its proxy forces are likely to commit terrible atrocities against Kurds and other minority populations if they successfully seize Rojavan territory, according to Pye. “But we’re also at risk of losing something that is a precious beacon of hope and inspiration, I think, for democratic community [and] self-governance. I think Rojava has really shown us all a path away from oppression and domination, and a new path towards democracy and autonomy and cooperation,” he said. “That’s something we all have a stake in, not just those in Syria. The whole world has something precious to lose in this fight.”