The fall of Bashar al-Assad after the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) takeover in Syria is bad news for the country’s Kurds. It is worth charting how things got here from the start of the war in Syria in 2012. During the conflict, the Democratic Union party (PYD) emerged as the biggest and most influential Kurdish political actor in Syria, taking territorial control in the north and maintaining an autonomous administration, albeit a fragile one.
The PYD’s position is even more precarious after the HTS takeover. Turkey, emerging as the most influential foreign actor in Syria, is laser-focused on limiting any Kurdish push for autonomy domestically and regionally. Another challenge the PYD faces is that the HTS-led regime is very unlikely to tolerate existing Kurdish autonomy in Syria.
The emergence of an autonomous region run by the Kurds in northern Syria was unexpected. Syrian Kurds, who make up about 10% of the population, had been more suppressed and less visible than Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Iran. However, very quickly after the war started, this hitherto quiet Kurdish presence evolved into a highly active political and military movement that garnered significant regional and international attention.
From the beginning of the Syrian war, the PYD chose to side with neither Assad nor the anti-regime rebel groups, and instead sought to secure its position in the north. In 2012 it unilaterally declared the establishment of an autonomous region called Rojava (Western Kurdistan), formed of three territorially separate cantons: Afrin, Kobane and Cizre.
All this has been difficult to digest for Turkey. Its concerns run deep because the PYD has links with the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), an armed group that has been fighting Turkish forces for four decades and is designated as a terrorist organisation by Turkey and its allies. The PYD follows the ideology of the PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan, even if it maintains that it is a separate entity. Turkey, however, sees them as one and the same and refuses to accept any form of Kurdish political entity connected to the PKK on its borders. It did all in its power to oppose Rojava diplomatically and by supporting Islamist forces.
But the biggest setback to Turkey’s interests came from the US. Having seen how effective the Kurdish People’s Defence Units were in holding off Islamist extremists, in 2015 the US provided military support to them to lead the fight against Islamic State (IS). This support bolstered the Kurds’ position and they gradually expanded their territorial control, united the three cantons and renamed the region the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. Turkey viewed this military alliance as a betrayal from a Nato ally.
Turkey saw its chance to reassert its control after the US withdrawal in 2018 (though up to 2,000 troops remained to support Kurdish forces guarding IS prisoners and carrying out anti-IS monitoring of the geography). It turned its military activity in parts of north Syria into an outright military operation in collaboration with the Syrian National Army. It took control of the Afrin canton and occupied a long border area between Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn while continuing to carry out airstrikes and surveillance.
Turkey’s military intervention endangered the PYD’s position, but the latter continued to maintain an efficient and well-organised administration in difficult circumstances, with a commitment to bottom-up democracy, gender equality and eco-centrism. This is exceptional in the Middle East, where hopes for democracy have been largely crushed since the Arab spring.
That is not to say everything has been a model of ideal democracy. The PYD has been criticised for its treatment of political rivals and attempts to indoctrinate the population with its ideology. But this is a new project, with a lot of appeal to many communities in north Syria and to the west – and it seemed to promise a different future to a historically suppressed group.
Now, with the collapse of the Assad regime, the position of the PYD has become even more precarious. The new emerging regime is unlikely to maintain the tacit agreement between Damascus and the PYD that allowed Kurdish control of the north while Damascus continued to supply, albeit poorly, the population there with resources, services and salaries.
The HTS has a hostile relationship with the PYD and friendly relations with Turkey. Turkey may now escalate its military intervention in Kurdish-controlled areas with more freedom and ease. Its recent push into the north-east and the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army’s takeover of Manbij signals that.
However, Turkey is also exploring talks with its own Kurds in the hope of winning their support to change the constitution in a way that could possibly allow the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to hold office for another term. Turkey will want to enter any negotiations with the Kurds from a position of as much power as possible in Syria, where the PYD would ideally have as little strength and influence as possible.
The Syrian war has been a process of change and flux. Indeed, war and regime change can create opportunities for non-state political groups, but they also pose significant risks for such groups. The Kurds are all too familiar with these ebbs and flows of history, whether thinking of the short-lived Sulaymaniyah administration in Iraq in the early 1920s, the Republic of Mahabad in Iran in 1946, the Kurdistan region in Iraq since 1991 or Rojava in Syria since 2012.
Whether any outcome in the post-Assad period will be a positive one for stability, peace and democracy for the Kurds – and for all Syrians in the region – remains to be seen.
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Dr Zeynep Kaya is a lecturer in international relations at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Mapping Kurdistan: Territory, Self-Determination and Nationalism
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