by Jonathan Spyer
BEHIND THE LINES: As Syrian forces push into Kurdish regions, the Syrian Democratic Council calls for urgent global intervention to prevent a massacre.
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"Regarding Rojava – in the event of government forces seeking to enter our regions – the region will enter a total resistance situation. The people, for now, are mobilized,” Îlham Ehmed, a top official of the Kurdish-led Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday. Ehmed, who is co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), is one of the two most senior officials of the Syrian Kurdish de facto autonomous zone (the other is Gen. Mazloum Abdi) and the de facto foreign minister of the area.
“We need international support in this matter. For the right of the Kurdish region not to be attacked,” she continued.
“There are certain figures in Israel engaged in communication with our side,” Ehmed said later in the same briefing. “We expect their support. If these conversations lead to support, we will be happy to accept it from wherever it comes.”
It has been a dramatic week for the Syrian Kurds, in which they have found themselves abruptly plunged into a war for survival. Still, the broader trend lines had for a while become increasingly visible. They pointed toward the imposition by the Islamist authorities in Damascus of power east of the Euphrates.
An “agreement” in which the Kurdish-led administration essentially consented to its own dissolution rapidly collapsed over disputes regarding the timing of the handover of authority. The government then apparently decided to settle the matter by force.
Two incompatible authorities
The sudden thrust of Damascus’s forces across the Euphrates River last week was in many ways tactically surprising but strategically inevitable. Since the Sunni jihadist Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) organization seized power in Syria on December 8, 2024, two incompatible governing entities in Syria have uneasily co-existed. The first is the Syrian government of President Ahmed Sharaa, which rules Damascus and now the rest of Syria west of the Euphrates River, aside from areas in the southwest held by Israel, and a small de facto Druze autonomy in Sweida.
The second is the Kurdish-led autonomous administration in which Ehmed serves.
Long-term consensual co-existence between these two entities was never likely. Sharaa, the former Abu Mohammed al-Julani, is very clearly set on creating a centralized, authoritarian, Sunni Islamist regime in Syria, under the tutelage of Turkey and with the support of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. This project ruled out any acquiescence to the de facto partition of the country and the continued existence of the secular, West-oriented Kurdish-led authority. What had held the government in check until now was a tacit US guarantee to the Kurds. Once that disappeared, an offensive soon followed.
In the early days, following HTS’s arrival in Damascus on December 8, 2024, the two very different authorities eyed one another uneasily. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the armed forces of the Kurdish-led authority, have formed the de facto guarantor of Syria east of the Euphrates since the final demise of the ISIS “caliphate” in 2019. But their military strength, in cooperation with the US-led global coalition, and the relative efficiency and solidity of their administrative structures, never translated into diplomatic recognition and acceptance.
HTS, in its early days in power, presided over almost an opposite arrangement. It was rapidly recognized by all key Western and regional countries as the legitimate government of Syria. But in practice, Sharaa’s organization in the first weeks and months ruled over a chaotic vacuum, in which, while it was the official authority, it had little in the way of real administrative capacity.
I visited Syria a month after Bashar al-Assad’s fall. I traveled through the SDF-held area and crossed into the government zone at the Tabqa Dam, on the Euphrates. The contrast between the staid discipline of the SDF’s position and the euphoric chaos of the new government’s checkpoint was very notable.
At the former, bored Kurdish conscripts checked and waved us through. At the latter, a gaggle of bearded Sunni jihadis, seemingly still euphoric and astonished at their victory and the situation in which they found themselves, seemed almost like they were play-acting as they checked our documents and let us pass. There were more fighters than were needed at the checkpoint. There was a sound system blaring out nasheeds, Islamic religious songs, at the government checkpoint. Many of the fighters were chewing seeds.
My friend Fares, a former fighter of the SDF who had volunteered to drive us through the Badia desert that separates western and eastern Syria, was not impressed. He smiled dutifully as we passed through, the way you do at checkpoints. Then, as we pulled away, he said to me in English, “Those songs they’re playing there, those are ISIS songs. Any Syrian would recognize them.”
Damascus consolidating its power
For as long as the early chaos prevailed, the SDF area could assume that it would be left alone. But Sharaa and his colleagues have not wasted time, and much has changed in the intervening year. They have consolidated their authority within the capital and its environs, with the active help of their key Turkish patrons.
They have transformed the jihadi militia leaders who backed up their victory into division commanders in their new army. They have secured the support and recognition of the Trump administration above all, and of European and regional powers.
As a result, they evidently now felt ready to attempt a reunification of the country by force. The result is that the two groups of men that I saw at sleepy adjacent checkpoints a year ago, and the organizations they represent, are now at war. But with the government/Sunni jihadist side now backed by Turkey, and the Kurds no longer aligned with Washington, it is a somewhat one-sided affair.
Damascus’s forces, having crossed the Euphrates, rapidly conquered the majority-Arab Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor provinces. The SDF-aligned “military councils” in these areas quickly went over to the government side. The oil and gas fields of Deir ez-Zor are now in Sharaa’s hands. The Sunni Islamists are on the edge of the Kurdish-majority Hasakeh province. The SDF-linked authorities have issued a general mobilization in this area to which Kurd official Îlham Ehmed referred.
Further west, the government army and the Sunni tribal host that follows it have surrounded the town of Kobanî and its surrounding villages, from two sides (the sealed Turkish border is the third). “Julani has approached the city on an axis of five kilometers or less,” a resident of the area told me on Tuesday. Kobanî is under a full siege.
So what will happen next?
“There is a need,” Ehmed said, “for an urgent and immediate intervention. Without it, a disaster could happen.
“Footage seen in recent days has been difficult to watch,” she continued. “Damascus’s forces have decapitated women – both fighters and civilians. There is great fear now among women. ISIS has been rebuilt and sent against our regions. Turkey has trained a new generation and indoctrinated them to hate Kurds.”
I have seen the footage that Ehmed was talking about. It includes the dreadful desecration of corpses, the harassment and tormenting of female prisoners, and, yes, the evidence that efforts to behead Kurdish women have taken place. We have this footage because the jihadi perpetrators are proud of it and place it online.
So the Syrian Kurds, who fought and defeated the Islamic State a decade ago, are now mobilized in their heartlands and prepared for a new jihadi assault. The assault this time is carrying the banners of the internationally recognized authorities in Damascus.
Government forces, equipped with tanks and artillery, but accompanied by a tribal Islamic horde, are waiting at the edge of Hasakeh. The broader strategic direction of events seems clear – toward the eclipse of the SDF and the assumption by the Damascus authorities of rule over northeastern Syria, for better or for worse.
The urgent question now is whether that can be achieved without one of the large-scale massacres with which the authorities in Damascus have increasingly become associated.
Jonathan Spyer
Source: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-884284
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