You may not have heard of the autonomous administration of north and east Syria, or even its more common name Rojava, but if you’ve watched even mainstream news for the last 8 or so years you’ve probably heard of the fighters of Syrian Kurdistan. This ethno-region has had de facto autonomy since 2013, created out of the rubble of the Syrian Civil War. But who are the Kurds, who have numerous movements for autonomy in many other countries such as Iraq, Turkey and Iran? We will attempt to answer this question by looking at the history of their struggle.

The Kurds are an Iranic ethno-lingo group, who had their own small kingdoms during the middle ages (and even lead a short lived grand Islamic Caliphate under Saladin and his heirs) but were divided between the Ottoman and Persian Empires when the two empires had numerous clashes between the 16th and 19th centuries. Kurdish Nationalism was kindled in the late 19th century, with the Sheikh Ubeydullah leading a kurdish uprising with the help of Nestorian christians against both the ottomans and the persians in 1880. In his words:

“My dear sons!
We must obey the advice of our fathers and grandfathers. Enough is enough, we must not bear the burden of the tyranny of the infidel Turks. We need to save ourselves, not only the Kurds from Ottoman Turkey, but also our Kurdish brothers in Iran, from these two governments that have blocked the path of progress for us. Our ancestors asked us to donate our blood through the religion of freedom.”

Both empires crushed the rebellion by 1882, but Kurdish nationalism would continue to percolate especially within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. In 1908, Sheikh Ubeydullah’s son Abdul-Kadir Ubeydullah helped found the Kurdish Society for Cooperation and Progress, which was a liberal nationalist (and secret) movement, the first of its kind for Kurds. The Ottomans suppressed this organization, but Ubeydullah founded another later organization during the First World War along the same lines, the Society for the Advancement of Kurdistan. During the war many Kurds served the Ottoman Empire loyally, including the most gruesome aspects involving the genocide of Christian minorities like the Armenians and Assyrians, but many others resisted the Turks militarily, resulting in genocide and mass deportation of the Kurds themselves. The collapse of the Empire and its partition into League of Nations Mandates gave Kurds hope for a Kurdish nation-state, something the British promised them in the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920. Ultimately with the new Republic of Turkey asserting itself in their war of independence against the allied powers, by 1923, that dream had vanished and Kurds continued to live in middle eastern countries as a disenfranchised minority.

In the French Mandate of Syria many kurds fleeing the new state of Turkey after the 1925 and 1927 Kurdish uprisings (the first of which ended in Adbul Ubeydullah’s execution) found a new home in the western part of the country with Kurds who had been living there for centuries. When Syria gained Independence after World War Two, it identified as a primarily Arab country. In the 1963 Coup by the Arab Nationalist Baa’thist party, this led to repressive measures against all non-Arab ethnicities, but particularly Kurds, with Kurdish being banned in schools and even in public use at the workplace or during marriage ceremonies. In 1992 Kurdish NAMES were not even allowed to be given to children. Kurdish land was systematically seized and given to Arabs, and many many other forms of oppression both large and small were inflicted on the Kurds. Most of this was enacted by current President Bashar Al-Assad’s father Hafez, who took power in a second coup in 1970 and ran Syria until his death in 2000.

The Arab Spring and the ensuing Syrian Civil War in 2011 gave Kurdish Nationalists under the Kurdish Supreme Committee an opportunity to seize autonomy from Syria and formed People’s Protection Units, a paramilitary organization also known as the YPG.

In order to understand the YPG’s ideology, and its relationship to anarchism, one first has to understand it’s connection to another group, the PKK. In 1970s Turkey, state persecution of the Kurdish minority was at an all time high. Kurdish traditional dress, Kurdish cultural practices and eventually even Kurdish language and names were banned. In response to this, a clique of leftist Kurdish nationalists formed around a charismatic leader named Abdullah Ocalan. Ocalan. This group soon coalesced into a political party called the Kurdistan Workers party, or PKK. The party’s official ideology was Marxist Leninism. The PKK engaged in violent street fights with Turkish nationalists during the political violence that led to the 1980 Turkish coup.

After the coup, the party was driven underground and many of its members fled to Syria, where they were given refuge by Hafez Al-Assad, in an effort to undermine Turkey. From there, they became an outright paramilitary group and began a campaign of guerilla warfare against the Turkish state. This conflict escalated until the 1990s when Ocalan was captured and sentenced to death, although as Turkey tried to join the European union, they commuted this sentence to life in prison. Ocalan remains imprisoned to this day. While in prison, Ocalan’s ideology began to shift away from marxist leninism. Eventually, influenced by anarchist thinkers like Murray Bookchin, Ocalan and the PKK dropped Marxism entirely and began espousing what they call Democratic Confederalism.

By the time of the Syrian civil war the PKK had a large presence in Syria, and became a founding core, or vanguard of the YPG, bringing their ideology with them. As Kurdish fighter Zind Ruken explained an interview with the Wall Street Journal, “Sometimes I’m a PKK, sometimes I’m a YPG. It doesn’t really matter. They are all members of the PKK.”

Now, if you watched the last video on this channel, you know that we at Springtime Of Nations are not the biggest fans of Democracy. But we’re also not ones to get hung up on words. Most of the problems with Democracy as it exists in the modern nation state is tyranny of the majority, whereby individual rights can be swept aside in massive elections which are decided largely by demographic tribalism. While it is by no means perfect, PKK and by extension Rojava mitigates that problem substantially by the liberal application of the Confederalism part. Essentially, what the ideology advocates is decentralization to the greatest extent possible. Political decisions in Rojava are usually made at the town or community level, with integration of preexisting ethnic and local customs being integrated into the political system. The central “government” if it can be called that, exists primarily for the purpose of coordinating defense.

While the Democratic Confederalist movement of Northeast Syria has its roots in Kurdish nationalism, it has grown to transcend these roots by inviting the various other ethno-religious groups of the region into the confederation. The YPG now acts as the vanguard of a larger multiethnic military force consisting of Assyrians, Turkmen, Armenians and of course Arabs. This military coalition has become known as the Syrian Democratic forces or SDF. Non Kurds make up somewhere from 20-40% of SDF fighters. There is of course some tension, and even accusations of ethnic cleansing, but not nearly as much as you might think because of the decentralist nature of Rojava, which allows local communities to basically do their own thing so long as they accept the premises of the confederation.

This system of an ethno-religiously diverse confederation united by shared ideology and focused on self defense is reminiscent of the revolutionary era American Republic, and even moreso of the early swiss confederation.

Despite being a favorite of western anarcho-communists, the economic arrangement of Rojava is far from communism. Its constitution guarantees the right to private property, and the only tax levied to support the military is a small tariff. The YPG is funded mainly by a monopoly on the sale of oil, which it has seized from ISIS and other jihadist groups.

In 2012 as the Syrian Arab Army pulled out of Western Syria to defend the heart of the state at that time under dire threat, the YPG filled the power vacuum, establishing a libertarian socialist confederation of the numerous different minorities in the northwest of Syria, not only Kurds but Assyrians, Turkmen, Armenians, and of course Arabs. While theoretically far-left and anarcho-syndicalist in practice partially due to the needs of the war against their adversaries (Mostly Turkish backed militias and the remnants of Islamist groups like ISIS), the “Democratic Confederalism” of Rojava has a great emphasis on decentralization, with no income taxes being levied by the central government and ethnic communities being left mostly to their own ways. A small tariff on commerce is levied and the sale of oil is controlled by the “state”. On the other hand there is a draft of men for the YPG forces in the territory, and YPG and associated forces have been accused, sometimes credibly, of being behind ethnic cleansing of some arab villages although this is a rare occurrence if it happens at all.

In Rojava, libertarians are presented with not only a successful but sympathetic candidate for support. The social and political views of the YPG are much closer to that of the libertarian than many ‘liberal democracies’ in the west. Bashar al-Assad has been protecting and working with the YPG to expel Turkish forces and their Islamist militias out of Syria, but who knows what will happen once Syria has regained total control of its borders. Giving the Kurds some form of autonomy and repealing the Arabization laws could keep them nominally part of Syria, but Rojava as it exists now is a great boon to champions of liberty who want to show how a free society can emerge even from the bloody chaos of a civil war, and in a third world country. We should all hope for the success of the Kurds, not just in Syria, but in Iraq, in Turkey, and in Iran to gain for themselves power over their own destiny.