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- The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), also known as Rojava, operates in isolation and remains unrecognized by most of the international community.
- AANES faces existential threats from Turkey (which conducts airstrikes and supports proxy militias), remnants of ISIS, and tensions with the HTS-led government in Damascus.
- The region's history as a crossroads of civilizations influences its multi-ethnic governance model, which emphasizes secularism, feminism, and minority rights.
- Turkish military campaigns, including the 2019 offensive and ongoing operations, have displaced hundreds of thousands and worsened humanitarian conditions.
- AANES struggles with internal divisions: Kurds, Arabs, and other groups have conflicting loyalties, with some Arab communities favoring central governance under HTS.
- Syria’s civil war has created a patchwork of power dynamics, exemplified by cities like Qamishlo and Raqqa, where checkpoints and competing militias reflect ideological divides.
- HTS and AANES have tentative diplomatic engagement, but their opposing visions (Islamist vs. secular federalism) complicate potential alliances.
- Resource scarcity, environmental degradation, and Turkey’s control of water and energy infrastructure exacerbate economic and social instability.
- The conflict in Syria mirrors broader global crises, including proxy wars, climate-driven displacement, and the erosion of international order, likened to a "World War III" scenario.
- Despite odds, AANES’s progressive policies leave a cultural legacy, though its survival depends on navigating Turkish aggression, internal dissent, and shifting geopolitics.
From the moment I cross the rickety pontoon bridge from Iraq into Syrian Kurdistan, I feel a deep sense of isolation. The arrivals hall, which offers the only link to the outside world, is falling apart around me. The duty free shop is shuttered, and even its sign is crumbling — the “DUTY” has long since vanished, but you can just about make out “FREE” clinging to the wall outside. Away from the crossing, the road passes wheat fields strewn with garbage, dotted by creaking oil derricks patched together after repeated airstrikes. It’s all overlooked by a foreboding border wall, from which Turkish guards take potshots at shepherds and would-be refugees.
Welcome, then, to the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), a place that sometimes feels at the very edge of world affairs. Save the Catalan Parliament, no foreign body recognises this multi-ethnic federation of four million people, often known by its Kurdish name Rojava. And yet this rugged corner of the Middle East, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, has long been a fulcrum of regional change. The Assyrians and Seleucids and Ottomans have all come and gone, leaving locals deeply conscious of their storied history. One group of AANES-affiliated Arab women’s activists have named themselves “Zenobia” — evoking the ancient warrior queen who briefly defied Rome here back in the 3rd century.
These days, AANES faces threats equal to Aurelian’s legions. After the dramatic collapse of the Assad regime, Damascus is ruled by Ahmed al-Sharaa, and his al-Qaeda offshoot Hayyat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Turkey, HTS’s key backer, lurks behind the border wall, its drones leaving vapour trails spiralling through the sky as they target AANES ambulances, civilian protesters and Kurdish commanders continuing the fight against ISIS. And then there is the Islamic State itself, no longer a physical Caliphate but still backed by tens of thousands of fanatical detainees, currently wallowing in AANES-run camps but eager for revenge.
With Donald Trump still prevaricating over Washington’s role in the region, the future feels bewilderingly unclear. Nor is this surprising. AANES’s existential struggles for survival have long been animated by dynamics driving the broader conflict now engulfing the Middle East — proxy conflict amid a new Cold War; Islamist insurgency and authoritarian brutality; struggles over oil and water resources between rich capitals and impoverished regions. All the while, the AANES’s vision of multi-ethnic federation governance offers a striking alternative to Islamism and autocracy, even as its fate hints at the future course of conflicts swirling through Syria, the Levant, and beyond.
Throughout Syria’s decade-long civil war, these complex tensions played out in Qamishlo. The largest Syrian Kurdish city, and the AANES’s de facto capital, it was long divided between Russian-backed Assadists and US-backed Kurds. In practice, that created a complex patchwork of checkpoints and intrigue recalling Cold War Berlin. Woe betide the visitor who confused a checkpoint belonging to “Sutoro” (a pro-Kurdish Christian militia) with one guarded by “Sootoro” (their pro-Assad rivals).
Today, Russian troops are withdrawing from their base at Qamishlo airport, their presence untenable since Assad’s ouster. Yet the uneasy peace that endured here for over a decade hints at the strange relationship between Bashar al-Assad and his former Kurdish subjects. The Assads historically repressed Kurdish language and culture, while the AANES’s armed forces sporadically skirmished with Assadist militias. But as he focused on entrenching his doomed regime, Assad mostly left the Kurds alone.
Many locals fear the same cannot be said for his successors. “Assad was brutal, but you knew where you stood with him,” says Abu Adil, a guard standing by a former regime compound in downtown Qamishlo, a defaced poster of the dictator flapping nearby. “We don’t know if HTS will come and take these buildings over, if the [AANES] will move in, or if we can tear them down and build something in their place.” Abu Adil knows how volatile politics here can be. He himself was displaced in a 2019 Turkish offensive that saw hundreds killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. “Turkey’s militias stole everything,” he explains. “They didn’t leave a single washing machine behind. We don’t have any problem with HTS: but Turkey is the problem.”
Ankara has long been existentially opposed to the AANES, fearing the project in Kurdish-led autonomy provides ideological inspiration and material support to Kurdish militants hoping to dislodge Turkey’s own Islamist autocrat: President Erdoğan. With the Assads gone, Turkey is now aiming to finish what it started in 2019. Last December, Ankara moved to occupy all the remaining AANES-held territory west of the Euphrates, displacing 100,000 people. Over 100 civilians have been killed in ongoing Turkish airstrikes, amid reports of potential war crimes, with the offensive now concentrated around a key hydroelectric dam offering Turkey a potential bridgehead across the Euphrates.
Especially considering their long fight against ISIS — the battle to retake the key of city Kobane killed hundreds of Kurdish fighters — many newly displaced refugees are unsurprisingly resentful. “We were a shield protecting not only the rest of [AANES], but the whole world,” says Ahmed Sharo, a gold merchant and AANES loyalist who fled the Turks to Qamishlo. I’ve heard similar arguments during previous trips to Rojava, but the mood is now especially bitter. No wonder: after wallowing in a refugee camp for years, Sharo says he only had 30 minutes to flee advancing Turkish militias. After we spoke, two women approached and asked for money, a first in all my visits to Rojava’s proud and politicised refugee camps.
It’s clear, then, that many locals here are tired of life in the AANES, unrecognised by the world and exposed to the depredations of a major Nato ally. Yet if Turkey’s assault is particularly concerning to people like Sharo — the Kurds, Yazidis and Christians who’ve benefited most from Rojava’s model of minority self-determination — they’re not the only ones to worry. Just like the region’s population at large, both the civilian AANES and its military wing are now Arab-majority, working to unite religiously conservative Arab communities into their multi-ethnic project. The “administration and the military” are not Kurdish, emphasises Hamdan al-Abd, a charismatic, mustachioed sheikh who represents Arab interests in the AANES Executive Council. “Rather, they respect and protect all communities in the region.”
Others would disagree. I meet al-Abd in Raqqa, the former ISIS capital and now the largest city in the AANES. Like other officials, he is careful to fly both the AANES’s livery and the new three-starred Syrian flag in office, the latter waved by pro-democracy protesters at the start of the civil war and now by the new Islamist government in Damascus. Yet when protesters in Raqqa raised this same flag following Assad’s expulsion, AANES security forces opened fire. In a gloomy hotel lobby, I hold furtive conversations with activists who say they’ve consecutively been detained by the Assads, ISIS and the AANES. “People here don’t feel free, as they now do in the rest of Syria,” says one. “We believe that the new government in Damascus has the same ideas as us, and in the future, this city will be part of their central government system.”
Nor are these revolutionaries-turned-NGO-employees the only ones to disdain the AANES experiment. Jihadis do too, as I discovered when I visited a Raqqa lingerie store. The owner implausibly claims her husband died of a heart attack just as US forces carpet-bombed the city, making her the likely widow of an ISIS fighter. She says the people of Raqqa are “waiting and praying” for Turkish militias to purge the city’s secular Kurdish administration. Though her prosperous business could never have existed under ISIS — the Caliphate were never big fans of latex corsets, even sold by women in full niqabs — she hopes Ankara’s close relationship with al-Sharaa in Damascus can bring an end to corruption at checkpoints and bring down import tariffs.
The AANES has shown some openness to local sensitivities. Though the diplomatic and military elite is still dominated by Kurds, Raqqa and other Arab areas have been able to secure exemptions in areas like secular education, military service, oil tariffs and marriage law. Public opinion in Raqqa is therefore more nuanced than either the AANES or its opponents suggest. By defending the rule of law and protecting basic services even in Arab regions — visiting for the first time in three years, I was struck by the pace of reconstruction in Raqqa’s bustling market — officials have long been able to secure tacit support from locals otherwise suspicious of its modernising, feminist vision. “Despite all the errors AANES has made, it is nonetheless the best option in Syria,” a female Arab journalist in Raqqa tells me, sipping a fruit milkshake from a nearby store. “I personally would like to see the AANES and HTS reach a deal for a shared administration.”
Syria’s leaders have tried to find some common ground. Al-Sharaa has already met the top Syrian Kurdish commander, while HTS and AANES have maintained a careful ceasefire, with both sides expressing sincere desires to prevent further conflict and establish working committees and a national conference. But Turkey’s massive influence as al-Sharaa’s key foreign interlocutor is frustrating progress, while both sides have deeply contrasting visions about what Syria should look like: secular versus clerical; federal versus unitary.
This creates a paradoxical challenge for AANES leaders eager to devolve decision-making autonomy to Syrian communities. But like that lingerie store owner, many people in these same communities long for a more-or-less centralised Syria, a vision they trust the new strongman in Damascus to deliver. Before the war, Syria was not a particularly conservative or radicalised country. Yet 14 bloody years of conflict have catalysed Islamist militancy and Sunni Arab chauvinism, particularly in reaction to the Alawite clique around Assad. More broadly, even moderate Arabs — and some Kurds — would be willing to tolerate a degree of Islamist authoritarianism under HTS as the price of internal stability and reentry into global markets.
Resolving these questions is especially urgent given the deteriorating humanitarian situation. In Kurdish, “the grass is always greener on the other side” is pessimistically rendered as “herbs grown in your own garden always taste bitter” — an apt description of mutual suspicions between Kurds and Arabs. In Raqqa, locals claim the Kurdish administration is appropriating local oil wealth to fund its own separatist ambitions, as wild rumours fly of 24-hour electricity and newly-paved roads in Kurdish areas. But when I travel north to Kobane, site of that famous 2015 victory, I find just the opposite. Turkish airstrikes have put the hydroelectric dam out of action, while their proxy militiamen regularly pepper frontline pumping stations with heavy weapons. Without electricity, hospitals are battling to maintain basic standards, and even the proverbial gardens are struggling. Without much rain this year, the environmental crisis in this desertifying region only grows.
With so much uncertainty, it’s no wonder some in AANES are looking further afield for security. Abu Adil, the security guard in Qamishlo, has already sent his sons to the neighbouring Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) to find work. Like many Syrian Kurds, he uses the word “Kurdistan” simply to mean the rival Iraqi region, suggesting a lack of faith in the AANES’s own Kurdish project. Absent other friends, the Kurds are forced to hope US protection can keep them safe, even if that means partnering with the conservative KRI. Given Trump’s erratic foreign policy, that isn’t a sure bet, though it’s undoubtly more plausible than hoping Israel will come to the rescue, as some desperate locals would wish: Tel Aviv has happily instrumentalised the Kurdish cause while keeping up a brisk oil trade with Ankara.
Assessing these panicked appeals, a Syrian Kurdish friend describes his stateless people as “children who grew up without parents, leaving them desperate for love from anyone.” Indeed, the Syrian Kurds have long sought support in unexpected places. On the one hand, the AANES has drawn support from the international Left by advancing its progressive ideology through the “anti-fascist” struggle against ISIS. On the other, the AANES’s armed wing successfully established themselves as the Pentagon’s indispensable partner in the war against Islamist terror. Even beyond emotive appeals to anti-fascist values, or else the security risk posed by over 40,000 ISIS affiliates still held in the region, yearning for a HTS takeover, there are reasons for observers of all stripes to care about what happens next.
When appealing to its anarchist and socialist supporters, the AANES has long drawn comparisons to the Spanish Civil War. The analogy is more than a rhetorical flourish. Just like in Spain, the Syrian bloodbath presaged a far wider conflict, one defined by proxy warfare, state collapse and mass displacement. The conflict offers a case-study for the coming disintegration of the so-called “rules-based international system” — a euphemism for US hegemony — as Islamism and other forms of political militancy both challenge and buttress central state power.
All this is precipitated by rising temperatures, desertification, failed harvests, and the weaponisation of water resources. Israel’s degradation of Iran’s clients in Hezbollah and Hamas forms part of this broader story, paving the way for Assad’s collapse. Turkey’s expansion of drone and proxy warfare beyond Syria into Iraq, Azerbaijan and Libya does too. The mooted economic corridor linking Saudi Arabia through Israel to Europe, while evading Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, will be linked to fresh conflicts, as will Turkey’s competing, multi-billion dollar Development Road project between Baghdad and the West. Combined with worsening resource competition in the Eastern Mediterranean and Horn of Africa, little wonder that AANES representatives have long referred to this spiralling polycrisis by a simpler name: World War III.
The complex struggles in northern Syria therefore form part of a broader picture, suggesting ways in which state governance, resistance and reaction might evolve in decades to come. For all their differences, the AANES and HTS have responded to these historical upheavals in strikingly similar ways. “HTS have two faces,” says one opposition activist in Raqqa. “One is a religious face, which aims to export jihad worldwide; and the other is a political one, which tries to find a solution for all the peoples in Syria. We are with them for this second approach.” The AANES, which has long sought to balance radical Leftist militancy and institutionalised legitimacy, could be described in similar terms. Evolving far beyond its utopian vision of a decentralised “commune of communes”, it’s established a complex federation capable of feeding and protecting millions of people despite severe ideological differences. Indeed, while AANES officials dramatically claim that “Turkey wants to reorganise Syrian society under an Ottoman vilayet system”, their own project rather closely resembles that unwieldy pre-modern federation.
Given this mutual pragmatism, it’s possible to at least imagine a future modus vivendi between HTS and the AANES. While the latter have declared their readiness to recognise al-Sharaa, and integrate into his new Syrian army, any such transition is likely to be fraught and protracted. Rather, the Kurdish leadership will seek ways to survive, adapting themselves to a diminished role in the new Syria. Their chances depend on the direction taken in Damascus. Al-Sharaa himself looks set to continue down the path of technocratic crony capitalism, coupled with authoritarian repression of civil society. It’s a model he has already successfully trialled in Idlib, while the new Syrian foreign minister recently joined Tony Blair on stage at Davos to proclaim his hopes that his country would follow the Saudi Arabian path toward neoliberal integration. While this model could protect some basic rights, community self-determination in the Kurdish model is likely to remain beyond the pale.
Nonetheless, it’s striking to hear AANES talking-points over women’s and minority rights being echoed by both al-Sharaa and the conservative Arab opposition in Raqqa. From 1789 to 1917, all true revolutions have had an impact beyond their collapse, as civil rights once seen as radical become everyday conventions. The same could yet happen in Syria. Of course, the Spanish Civil War analogy also implies the likelihood of the Rojavan revolution’s final defeat. Yet this is a corner of the world where hope can thrive even in the grimmest of circumstances, even amid the “bitter herbs” of your own garden. Just ask Raqqa’s female activists, whose namesake Zenobia died in exile, her resistance to the Romans crushed.
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