Survival and Self-Determination in Northeast Syria

Out of the ashes of the Syrian Civil War, a de facto state formed in northeast Syria, composed of Syrian Kurds and their Arab and Assyrian allies. Known as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), it forged a remarkably multiethnic, multireligious nonstate entity that still operates its own governance structures in defiance of the Assad regime. During the Syrian civil war, it became an indispensable ally to the United States because its military arm, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), succeeded in expelling ISIS from the region. In her latest book, Statelet of Survivors: The Making of a Semi-Autonomous Region in Northeast Syria, Amy Austin Holmes tells the story of how this “statelet” was born and why it is an instructive story of self-governance and postconflict reconciliation. 

Q: Who are the Kurds, and what atrocities and repression have they faced?

A: The Kurds represent one of the world’s largest groups of stateless peoples. It is estimated there are some forty-five million Kurds living in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the diaspora. That means that the total Kurdish population is larger than the populations of Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories combined. Yet there is this tendency to see Kurds as a small minority who can be relegated to a footnote of Middle Eastern history—but nothing could be farther from the truth. Because they are stateless, they have suffered extreme forms of repression: from attempts to ban their language to mass displacement, and even campaigns of extermination, such as the Anfal genocide launched by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds in northern Iraq.  

The Kurds refer to the four main regions where they live as Kurdistan. They are: Bakur (which encompasses southeastern Turkey), Başûr (northern Iraq), Rojhilat (western Iran), and Rojava (northern Syria). Within each of these countries there has also been significant variation. There is also a large Kurdish diaspora in Europe. 

Kurds in all four countries have faced forced assimilation policies. For decades, the central governments in Iraq and Syria attempted to “Arabize” their Kurdish populations, while Turkey attempted to “Turkify” the Kurds. The Kurdish population of Iran continues to face severe forms of repression. For the most part, these forced assimilation policies failed for the simple reason that Kurds are not Turks or Arabs or Persians. They are Kurds.

Q: In culture and language, are the Kurds related to other ethnic groups?

A: Kurds have their own language, culture, and history. In fact, the Kurdish language is not only distinct from Arabic and Turkish, it is part of an entirely different language family, namely the Indo-European language family, while Arabic belongs to the Semitic language family and Turkish is part of the Turkic/Altaic language family. For centuries, they were recognized as a unique ethnic group and enjoyed a degree of self-rule under the Ottoman Empire, when a number of Kurdish principalities existed. These autonomous Kurdish regions were largely respected by the Ottoman Empire until the nineteenth century, when the Ottomans tried to bring them under direct rule from Constantinople. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres promised political recognition and autonomy to the Kurds. However, this was replaced in 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne, which divided Kurdistan between Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria—leaving the Kurds stateless. 

Q: Who are the constituents of the AANES and how have they self-organized? You document extensively how this is a multiethnic and multireligious entity. How did it become this way, and why does it matter? 

A: One of the reasons northeast Syria has a diverse population is because as the multiethnic Ottoman Empire collapsed and the early Turkish Republic attempted to create a homogeneous nation-state, many who were unable or unwilling to assimilate were either forcibly expelled or escaped across the border into what is now Syria. In an unexpected twist of history, those who were once deemed “undesirable” by the Ottomans—mainly Kurds, Armenians, and Assyrians—now form the core of an alliance that governs about one-third of Syria. Geographically, northeast Syria begins where the deportation routes during the 1915 genocide ended. Ras al-Ayn was one of those sites, a town that served as a former concentration camp on the Syrian side of the Turkish border. It is known in Aramaic as Rish Ayno and in Kurdish as Serê Kaniyê‎. 

I started research for this book about ten years ago, when I traveled along the Turkish-Syrian borderlands and witnessed the SDF’s liberation of Kobane from the Islamic State in 2015. It was a decisive victory—and it was the beginning of the end of the Islamic State in Syria. However, I soon realized that their triumph over ISIS is only half the story. The women and men who defeated the Islamic State in Syria have been hailed as the best unconventional partner force the United States has ever had. Led by Kurds, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) evolved into a multiethnic, multireligious force in which all the Indigenous peoples of the region were represented. 

Conducting fieldwork in Syria year after year, I saw how this nonstate entity has increasingly taken on state-like powers. The Autonomous Administration has established military and police forces to defend their territory; a new school system and curriculum that offers language instruction in Kurdish, Aramaic, and Arabic; a cochair system of governance that empowers women; an economic ecosystem that strives to undo decades of underdevelopment; protection for the most vulnerable including Yazidis; and a new judicial system of local courts to hold perpetrators accountable for the crimes they committed under ISIS.

Q: There are some unique characteristics of the Autonomous Administration, notably the quota for representation of women. How are women involved in governance and what can you say about the impact this has had?

A: The Islamic State governed with brutality, including the sexual enslavement of women. Through their global propaganda machine, ISIS attracted followers from over fifty countries around the world to come to Syria and participate in genocide and enslavement. In chapter four of my book, I discuss how ISIS governed by weaponizing women—using them as weapons of war against each other. 

By contrast, the Autonomous Administration governs by empowering women. With a cochair system and 40 percent women’s quota in all levels of governance, the Autonomous Administration has achieved a level of women’s participation and leadership unparalleled elsewhere in Syria, or even the wider region. They achieved this precisely because women and their male allies built a statelet where they were able to make their own laws and institutions, as well as promote women into positions of power. The statelet expanded beyond the Kurdish heartland known as Rojava because many Arab, Christian, Yezidi, and Turkmen women welcomed the opportunity to take part in governance, after being excluded from governance in years prior. These ideas of full gender equality—not token inclusion—were developed by the Kurdish women’s movement since the 1970s. Finally, my survey of the SDF found that the ideas of gender equality are now embraced by the rank-and-file, not just supported by SDF leadership. 

Q: Why does the AANES NOT want to secede? Or why does it want to remain part of Syria?

A: The AANES wants to remain part of Syria for both ideological and practical reasons. In both their official statements and in private conversations, they have always emphasized that they want to remain part of Syria. In fact, they would like to extend their decentralized system of government to other parts of Syria, rather than separate from it. Practically, it would not be possible for northeast Syria to secede even if they wanted to, since it is a multiethnic region. They also saw that the 2017 referendum on Kurdish independence in Iraq failed due to opposition from Baghdad, Tehran, and Ankara, even though over 90 percent voted in favor of independence. At the same time, most Syrians I’ve spoken to in the northeast would rather not live under Assad. They hope he may someday recognize their local administration, or agree to a form of decentralized governance, and not ruin everything they’ve achieved in his absence. 

Q: In your book, you use historical anchors to give context to the contemporary map of people in the region. For example, the Armenian genocide of 1915–1916 (destruction of Armenian Christians) and the Mt. Ararat rebellion in 1930, where Kurds and Armenians in eastern Turkey rose up against the Turkish government (but did not succeed). You even go back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to understand modern-day Syria. How do these points in time inform our understanding of the Kurds, Armenians, Yezidis, and other groups today?

A: I argue that the origins of this experiment in self-rule in Syria can be traced to the Republic of Mount Ararat, created by Kurds and Armenians, who declared independence from Turkey in 1927. The uprising that followed was one of the most significant rebellions in the aftermath of the founding of the Turkish Republic. The Kurds in Xoybûn and Armenian Dashnaks communicated with each other in French. One of their internal documents from 1931 describes how they planned to expand the revolt even after Turkish officials declared they had crushed it in the previous year. In chapter two of my book, I use previously unpublished archival documents from the Armenian Revolutionary Federation archives in Watertown, Massachusetts, to piece together fragments of this almost forgotten history. 

I included this chapter in my book because the legacy of the rebellion continues to shape the present. Many of the Syrians I interviewed who have Kurdish, Assyrian, and Armenian ancestry, describe themselves today as “descendants of survivors” of Ottoman-era pogroms. Furthermore, the Republic of Ararat proclaimed that all inhabitants would be treated equally—regardless of race or religion. This far-reaching commitment to equality is also ensconced in the Social Contract of the Autonomous Administration, declared in 2014, and stands in contrast to the founding ideologies of Kemalism in Turkey and Baathism in Syria, which promoted Turkification and Arabization policies vis-à-vis their respective minorities.

Q: Explain the involvement and the role of the SDF and AANES during the Syrian civil war that began in 2011. They were successful in expelling ISIS, but there’s an irony to the story, isn’t there?

A: In the summer of 2012, the forces of the Assad regime withdrew from the north of Syria to turn their guns on rebels in the south. The vacuum was filled by some extremist groups, such as Al Qaeda offshoots and later ISIS, but also by groups who embraced ideas of equality or at least coexistence, including Kurds in the YPG/YPJ, Syriac-Assyrians in the Syriac Military Council, and Arabs in the Al-Sanadid Forces. These Kurds, Christians, and Arabs joined forces and started to cooperate, even before the United States started to support them. This multiethnic alliance later grew into the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). I discuss the evolution of the SDF in more detail in chapter three of my book. 

While the SDF’s battle against ISIS was supported by the Global Coalition Against Daesh, including some eighty-five member countries and partners, the statelet they created is recognized by none of them. This paradox is worth unpacking. The international community recognizes the accomplishments of the SDF on the battlefield—and by “international community” I am not merely referring to “the West,” but rather those eighty-five countries and organizations around the world that are part of the Global Coalition. They also recognize the SDF’s critical role in detaining, feeding, and housing some 50,000 people affiliated with ISIS from over fifty different countries around the world. In fact, many countries appear to prefer the SDF to bear this heavy burden indefinitely as they refuse to repatriate their own citizens who joined ISIS, or even the children whose only crime was to have been born to parents of ISIS members. 

The international community expects a nonstate actor (the SDF) to run state-like institutions (prisons, detention facilities, and camps for displaced people) in accordance with international standards, as if it was a state. Yet they refuse to give them any political recognition whatsoever, or even to acknowledge the existence of the local governance structures they created—in part out of the necessity of housing the international community’s ISIS militants. 

Q: Some Kurds participated in the genocide of the Armenians. How did postconflict peace ever arise? 

A: It’s an excellent question. I can’t get into the heads of people who lived in the 1920s or 1930s, but the archival documents indicate that the initiative to cooperate was taken by Armenians in the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, who reached out to Kurdish leaders including the Bedirkhan family. As leaders of their respective Christian and Muslim communities, they signed an official treaty of cooperation in Lebanon in 1927. In my book, I analyze how Kurds and Armenians were able to overcome past divisions and instead fought for their common survival and self-determination in the aftermath of the 1915 genocide. The 2014 genocide by the Islamic State led to the creation of an even more diverse, multiethnic coalition where three religions are represented (Islam, Christianity, and Yazidism) in the form of the Syrian Democratic Forces. Imagine for a moment if other people in the Middle East—or here in the United States—would learn from their example of focusing on what unites them, rather than what divides them. We would likely live in a more peaceful and prosperous world. 

Q: The Kurds live in four different countries. Which—if any—of these regions will have the most impact on the Middle East, which is going through a time of possible realignment as the Israel/Gaza/Iran conflict escalates?

A: Tragically, the Middle East is once again convulsed with violence as the conflict between Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah has expanded. In her speech at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Harris spoke about the need for Palestinian self-determination. I haven’t heard any mention of Kurdish self-determination, or even the Syrian conflict, although the SDF are our partners on the ground, without whom we could not have defeated the Islamic State. Assad has managed to cling to power because of support from Russia and Iran. Yet both Moscow and Tehran are now involved in other conflicts and may have deprioritized their support to Assad. Russia is fighting a brutal war in Ukraine, and Iran faced a nation-wide uprising sparked by the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman arrested for improperly wearing a hijab, who died in police custody in 2022. Then Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, and Iranian proxies have been drawn into what appears to be turning into a regional war. 

My point is, the fact that Russia and Iran are distracted from Syria is an opportunity for the United States and the eighty-five countries and partners of the Global Coalition to reprioritize our efforts to find a solution to the Syrian conflict. The members of the Global Coalition, which includes about one-third of all the countries in the world, are looking to the United States for leadership. We rely on Kurds in both Iraq and Syria every single day for our collective security. The way things are going, we may need them even more in the near future. 

Contributor Bio

Amy Austin Holmes was a Visiting Scholar with the Weatherhead Scholars Program in 2018–2019. She now has dual academic affiliations as a Research Professor of International Affairs at the Elliott School at George Washington University, and also teaches at the Bush School of Government and Public Service in Washington, DC. Her new book, Statelet of Survivors: The Making of a Semi-Autonomous Region in Northeast Syria, was published in January 2024 by Oxford University Press.