People & Histories
2012–2026

Rojava: self-rule in north-eastern Syria

As Syria's civil war breaks the state apart, Kurdish-led forces build their own administration in the north-east, which after Assad's fall is folded back into the Syrian state.

  • The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East — Harriet Allsopp, I.B. Tauris (2014)
  • Syria's Kurds: History, Politics and Society — Jordi Tejel, Routledge (2009)
  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)
  • How Damascus Reclaimed Syria's Northeast, and What Integration Now Means — Middle East Council on Global Affairs (2026)

Debated by historians self-rulewargreat powersstatehood

Syria’s Kurds, perhaps a tenth of the population, lived mostly along the Turkish border, around Qamishli, Kobani and Afrin. Under Baathist rule their language and culture were suppressed, and a 1962 census in Hasakah province stripped some 120,000 Kurds of citizenship, leaving them and their descendants stateless.

  • Syria: The Silenced Kurds — Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch (1996)
  • Syria's Kurds: History, Politics and Society — Jordi Tejel, Routledge (2009)
In 2004 a football riot in Qamishli became a Kurdish uprising that was harshly put down.
  • Syria's Kurds: History, Politics and Society — Jordi Tejel, Routledge (2009)
  • The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East — Harriet Allsopp, I.B. Tauris (2014)

When the civil war broke out, government forces largely withdrew from Kurdish areas in mid-2012. The Democratic Union Party (PYD), ideologically tied to Öcalan and the PKK, and its armed wing the YPG took control. In 2014 they declared self-governing cantons, run on Öcalan’s ideas of “democratic confederalism”, with male–female co-chairs at every level.

  • The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East — Harriet Allsopp, I.B. Tauris (2014)
  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)
After Kobani the US-backed SDF pushed deep into Arab-majority areas, and in 2018 the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) was formed. Turkey, which sees the YPG as the PKK, seized Afrin in 2018 and more border territory in 2019.
  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)

Assad’s fall in December 2024 changed everything. In March 2025 SDF commander Mazloum Abdi and Syria’s new president Ahmed al-Sharaa agreed to merge the SDF into state institutions, but implementation stalled. In January 2026 government forces advanced, and the SDF withdrew from Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor to Hasakah province. A ceasefire and, on 30 January, a comprehensive integration agreement followed.

Earlier that month, on 16 January, a presidential decree made Kurdish a national language, restored citizenship to stateless Kurds and made Newroz a public holiday, the first formal recognition of Kurdish rights in Syria’s history as an independent state. How much self-government survives integration is still being worked out.

How it's seen
Supporters' view

A grassroots experiment in democracy, women's equality and coexistence among Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians and others, defended at enormous cost against ISIS.

  • The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East — Harriet Allsopp, I.B. Tauris (2014)
  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)

Kurdish and Arab critics

A one-party system dominated by the PKK-linked PYD, which jailed or exiled rival Kurdish parties, conscripted young people and governed large Arab-majority areas without real consent.

  • The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East — Harriet Allsopp, I.B. Tauris (2014)
  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)

Turkish state view

A PKK statelet on Turkey's border. Turkey ran military operations against it in 2016, 2018 and 2019, taking Afrin and a strip of the border.

  • PKK — Republic of Türkiye, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)

Why it matters today

Kurds

Rojava ("the west", meaning western Kurdistan) gave Syria's long-marginalised Kurds more than a decade of self-rule and Kurdish-language schooling. Its future, now being negotiated with the new government in Damascus, is one of the most closely watched Kurdish questions of the moment.