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Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals
Rojava Fights for Its Survival w/ Arthur Pye (G&R 459)
00:36:04
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A
Welcome to Green and Red Scrappy Politics.
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For Scrappy People, a regular podcast on radical environmental and anti capitalist politics. Brought to you by Bob Bozanko and Scott Parkins.
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A
Welcome to the silky smooth sounds of the Green and Red Podcast. I'm your co host, Scott Parkin. Bob is off on assignment today, but I am joined by a return guest, Arthur Pai. Arthur, welcome back to the Green and Red Podcast.
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B
Thanks so much for having me back. Really appreciate it.
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A
Arthur is a writer, organizer and popular educator based in the Pacific Northwest. He had previously spent a year living in Northeast Syria studying the Orodjava revolution and is a steering committee member of the Emergency Committee for Rojava. Arthur is also a co director of the Municipalism Learning Series and a board member of the Institute of Social Ecology. You can find his writings, which we'll put in the show notes in Strange Matters magazine. Today we're going to talk. There's been some recent developments going on in northeast Syria around Rojava. Rojava emerged out of the Syrian civil war which had resulted from the Arab Spring uprisings. There were Kurdish autonomous areas. It's been an epicenter of conflict between Turkey, Syria and Iraq. And there's a number of people's defense units, militias, which have fought the Syrian and Turkish governments as well as the Islamic State. But I'm going to actually let Arthur talk a little bit more and you want to just give us a little bit of an overview of what Rojava is.
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B
Yeah. So just start there. Absolutely. And thanks for starting it off there. I think, like for folks who are less familiar or maybe haven't heard at all anything about Rojava, in addition to what Scott mentioned about Rojab being a sort of autonomous region where communities are defending themselves against ISIS and the Turkish military invasions into Syria, et cetera. I think most importantly, it's a region where a movement of hundreds of thousands, actually millions of people, have been participating in a project to build an alternative society, society grounded in values of direct democracy, self governance, cultural pluralism, women's autonomy, cooperative economics, what we like to call solidarity economy here. In addition to the group of people putting up a really heroic fight for their lives for the last more than a decade now, it really has come to represent the possibility of a new world very much on par with the ways that Zapatista movement has been an inspiration or the revolutionary projects throughout history have been an inspiration. So I did, I spent a year living on the ground there and had the privilege of traveling around and meeting people in different parts of Rojava. Different parts of the region, people who were participating in different sorts of structures, things like neighborhood communes and assemblies to local village councils and economic cooperatives. Women's organizations as well as militias fight on the front line to defend their communities.
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A
And about year ago, a little over a year ago, the government of Assad fell. He fled. And we had a new government which is backed by the US Come in, is also a former Al Qaeda operative I believe, Ahmed Al Shar. And so since then we see, we've done a couple of shows on Syria and then we. But we've seen just in recent, recently the Syrian government has actually begun an offensive against Rojima, I believe. And so maybe we could talk a little bit about what's going on the ground with that as well as the Turks, I believe too.
- [03:54]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. There's a lot of moving pieces. But as folks may know, the reason we had this put this show together today is because of this sort of emerging situation. So folks are interested more in the nitty gritty of like how society is being organized in Rojava. I encourage you to check out the episode that, that we did together on Green and Red maybe a couple years back. But exactly like you said Scott, going back To December of 2024, a group called HTS overthrew the Assad regime and came to power at the seat of national power. So this, the Syrian state today is this sort of new Syrian state. And for starters HTS Hayatari Al Sham is, is really just a sort of rebranding of a group called Javat Al Nusra, which was a rebranding of a group called Al Qaeda. And the reality is that both ISIS and Jabhat Al Nusra were parallel in some ways competing, but ideologically very much identical really offshoots of Al Qaeda that sort of jumped into the Syrian civil war to try to take over territory and govern it through their own basically what the Kurdish movement would call fascist and Islamo fascist ideology so on. Nobody was sad to see Bashar Al Assad go as a very brutal dictator, certainly no friend of the Kurdish people or the Syrian people in general. However, it has been a little bit of an out of the frying pan into the fire sort of situation for Kurdish communities. Even before Bashar Al Assad was completely overthrown in HTS seized Damascus. Over the course of that sort of operation, there were Kurdish communities that were ethnically cleansed by not just HTs, but some of the parallel Turkish backed militias which have long made up a kind of backbone of the opposition to Bashar al Assad. So there's a region in northern Aleppo called Sheba full of Kurdish refugees from the Turkish invasion of Afrin going back to 2018. It's a region that I actually personally spent a lot of time in. It's an incredible place where was an incredible place, I should say, where people who on the one hand were like materially poor and desperate, they were refugees trying to survive in makeshift camps and villages that had been half abandoned over the course of the war. They were also still trying to build this revolutionary society. So even in refugee camps they were building like neighborhood communes and assemblies and councils and women's committees and all of these things. But unfortunately they were all violently ethnically cleansed from the region in the middle of the kind of heat of that conflict in late 2024. And so moving into the new year being last year, there was this big looming question which was, okay, the Assad government is overthrown, but a third of Syria at this time is controlled by the Kurdish led Syrian Democratic Forces is a part of this big autonomous region officially known as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. It's a total mouthful. Don't feel like folks listening shouldn't feel like they have to remember all these acronyms, right? But functionally there were two powers in Syria now. Now the Kurdish led movement is a movement for what they call democratic autonomy. So it's important that folks know that they were never seeking to overthrow the central government of Syria or to break away and create a whole new nation state for them. They're like guiding the ideology of their whole revolution is the idea that nation state borders and nation state power structures are actually the problem and that communities need to build ways to defend and govern themselves autonomously without reproducing the same mistakes of past movements that it's created new states. So there was this tension right away over what was how is this going to shake out? Right. Would the new Syrian state tolerate a continuing form of democratic autonomy in in the northeast? And for a while it looked like maybe in March 10th of last year there's the what's now well known as like the March 10 agreement. The General Commander of the SDF traveled to Damascus and met with Syrian new Syrian President Ahmed Al Sharad and signed a formal agreement that the sdf, the sort of Kurdish led Syrian Democratic Forces and the regions govern in in their areas would formally integrate into the new Syrian state. And a lot of questions were left unanswered. But basically neither sides at that time at least wanted to go to war with each other. Neither of them would have benefited from that. And there was a desire to cool things down and prevent there from being a wider war and bring the question to the negotiation table. So throughout the whole year, there's been a formal process of negotiation between the kind of autonomous administration in the northeast and the central government in Damascus. And it's gone back and forth a lot. Then there's been a lot of sort of backsliding and bypassing of the Kurds in the process. But at the same time, this sort of rebranded Al Qaeda government has been very strategically building its brand and its legitimacy with the United States and with Europe and with Turkey and even with Israel, believe it or not, to legitimize its own rule in the hope that it could then extend it and take over all of Syria, which is what we now know has been their plan all along. And I think the Kurds in Damascus never actually trusted each other. But again, there was initially a process of solving this through negotiation. So the idea in the northeast was that, okay, well, we don't want another war, we don't want another nation state, we don't want sectarian violence. And like Balkanization, we just want to protect the gains of the revolution. People should understand that over in that region, over the course of the last decade or more, women have gained the full political and social rights. Half of all leadership positions in governing structures and military structures are all women. Women have their own organizations that operate autonomously. So there's tremendous amount of concern about what will happen to their lives, to their rights, to their gains, if the Syrian state were able to actually centralize control. There's a lot of other ethnic minorities that have enormous concerns. So listeners may be aware that another thing that happened over the last years since HTs took power in Damascus was a pair of egregious massacres of ethnic religious minorities that happened. The first was actually around the same time as the March 10 agreement was in the northwest of the country against the Alawites, which are ethnic minority, which were. The Alawites were associated with the old regime because Assad himself was an Alawite. But there, there was a massacre of thousands of innocent civilians by state backed forces. And then over the summer, in a place called Sueda, the Druze people, which are a religious ethnic minority in the south, were also subject to massacre by state backed forces. These things are still being.
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A
And the Druze are Christians, right?
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What's that?
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Are the Druze Christians?
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The Druze are their own religion. There are Christians in Syria who also are persecuted. The Assyrians, Syriacs. And the Northeast is a place where their rights are by far the most protected. I went to, I was in Syria long enough to go to Christmas mass in a church in Al Hasakah. So you can imagine what that would have looked like if ISIS would have succeeded in taking over Hasakah had the SDF not been able to protect it and liberate it. Right. So all of these things are at stake right now, and not just for Kurds, but for other ethnic minorities, again, for women as well. People are extremely concerned about how centralized state control by this government in particular could affect their lives. So people feel, in other words, that protecting the gains of this revolution is not just a matter of holding territory. And it's also not just like a partisan political question. It's a material question of how people's lives are going to be shaped. But unfortunately, long story short, the negotiations basically fell apart. The government, Damascus, succeeded in winning over the support of the Trump administration. Last November, Ahmed Al Shara, who's formally listed as a international terrorist and the head of a foreign terrorist organization according to U.S. law, visited the White House and was showered with cologne by the President of the United States. I'm not making this stuff up.
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They call him a very fine looking man. I don't know if that was in Qatar or the White House, but I.
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Think that might have been the early kind of precursor meeting. You may be right about that. But yeah, there's been, people have understandably made kind of half jokes, half not joking about Trump having this sort of man crush. He likes strong men. He likes charismatic, confident men, similar to.
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What he did with Mom Darby.
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Actually just going to say he likes the winners. It's got nothing to do with ideology. It's this weird personality ego thing. And Shara, for all of his fascist politics, is very savvy as a strategist. This is where Al Nusra, his former like organization, really differentiated themselves from isis. You could see ISIS and Al Nusra as these two different parallel attempts to realize Al Qaeda's vision for society in Syria, but through different means. Right. Isis, everybody knows, did so through these very bombastic tactics of grotesquely beheading people, committing massacres, and filming it and bragging about it. Leading with that, Nusra took the approach of kind of coalition building, took a very slow, pragmatic approach, and eventually built different brands and rebrands. And Shara himself as an individual, slowly cultivated a sort of alternative personality. In fact, he never used to be called Al Sharah he was known as Jelani. So he even changed his name. He got rid of the big beard and the like Al Qaeda militant uniform. He put on a blazer, he did interviews with Western journalists and it worked with Trump. And even in early January, the US brokered a sit down. I believe it was in France, between Damascus and Israel. We don't know all the details of this meeting, but basically there was a move towards an understanding that essentially, look, you, you can, you can play ball however you want, like within your own country. You can aesthetically be a jihadist or whatever and you can implement your own ideology on, and impose it on your own population. But you're going to play ball. And that means that you're going to play nice with Israel enough to share intelligence. That much has been shared about this meeting. Almost certainly. It means that like you're going to give up on the idea that the Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights is ever going to change. You're going to accept maybe this newer Israeli occupation of this mountain on the border, I'm forgetting the name. And you're, you're going to cooperate with the United States, you're going to cooperate with U.S. business, you're going to open your markets, et cetera, et cetera. We all know this story. It's not the first time it's ever been told. No, it's also not. You mentioned Turkey and that is really important. It's not, nor is this as simple as just seeing Damascus now as purely this US Israeli public puppet, without its own interest or without sort of contradictory alliances. Right. So Turkey is also a huge ally here and it is a major reason behind the current attacks on the Kurds. So the last thing to set the scene for the current emergency that's unfolding is that in, in early January on the same exact time of this meeting with Israel, Turkey also put the fine final, excuse me, the final spoiler you could say on the negotiations with the sdf. And there's even reports of the literal moment in a single meeting where somebody walked in and said this meeting is over. And immediately after that, state forces, Damascus state forces launched an all out attack on two Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo. And that's where this story really begins.
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A
And we've also the Syrian Democratic Forces. The other thing I've read is that there was a number of alliances that were also broken that had to switch sides as well.
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Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. The sdf, both for pragmatic reasons and just like anybody has to do in the middle of a very messy civil war. To try to create stability, but also for ideological reasons. Right. Remember that this, the Kurdish freedom movement is very openly and explicitly pushing a pluralistic, internationalist kind of politics. So they're not, they've moved from a kind of Kurdish nationalist ideology to this idea of what they call democratic Confederalism. So they really see their political project not just as a matter of securing Kurdish rights or Kurdish autonomy, but more specifically of creating a society where the region's different sort of diverse communities would have structural forms of self governance that were coordinated together. The SDF for a long time has been a majority Arab force just because of the nature of the region that the movement came to control after pushing ISIS out well beyond the boundaries of the kind of Kurdish majority northern cities. But it's also included Armenians and Assyrians and, and Turkmens and different groups. One of the most precarious, you could say, alliances has been that of the sort of tribes you could call them. These are, there are Kurdish versions, but they're largely Arab tribes, especially in the kind of rural areas and in the more southern areas. And these are like very traditional conservative structures that made pragmatic alliances with the sdf. And some of these tribes, many of them actually have now flipped to the Damascus side. But really, but like before that happened was this attack in Aleppo. So I think in some way Aleppo was a test or a kind of trigger point. But for those who don't know, in Aleppo, remarkably over the whole course of the civil war, these two Kurdish neighborhoods that are clustered next to each other on the top of a hill in the north of the city have maintained themselves as like autonomous neighborhoods. So they're like this little pocket of democratic Confederalism that's, that's isolated from Rojava at large, but really is a part of the same movement and revolution. And there was an agreement that was made with the Damascus regime that SDF would withdraw its like formal military forces from the neighborhood. They withdrew their heavy weapons and they, what remained was just the, what's called the Asaish, which is like an internal security force, like a, let's call it like the Kurdish neighborhood police force, basically. And in early January, when all these things came to a head, the state forces just basically ripped up the agreement in practice and they started shelling the neighborhood and attacking it out. The operation was clear, clearly had been planned for some time. There was a six day long, fierce kind of siege and battle where a lot of civilians were killed, thousands were displaced. There were egregious war crimes that were filmed and Bragged about by state backed forces forces, things like executing prisoners and throwing women's bodies off of buildings and cheering and singing. These are of course some of them the famous Kurdish female fighters who were members of the Asaish who were fighting to defend their neighborhood. But after a week they, the neighborhoods fell and the state forces completely took over the neighborhood. And instead of a further negotiation happening from there, they launched a major basically blitzkrieg operation on northeast Syria writ large. And that's where we're at right now is that over the last week or two, in a matter of days, northeast Syria lost the autonomous administration. Right. And the SSDF lost like 80% of its territory.
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A
And have the Turk, the Turks, did they also launch an offensive from the other direction?
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The Turks have been supporting the Damascus operation, but not bringing Turkish military forces in directly or visibly into. There's been, there's been some real reports and evidence that Turkish advisors are on the ground with like special forces advisors, with Damascus state backed forces also of Turkish drones and aircraft playing a role in the air. But for the most part, I think in my opinion, there's a very intentional effort to make this look like a legitimate Syrian operation to safeguard the sort of unity and territorial integrity of the sovereignty. Exactly, state sovereignty at the expense of anything that stands in its way. And so with the backing of Turkey, and crucially with the tacit backing in the United States, Damascus has launched this massive operation against the northeast. So they crossed the Euphrates river, which has long been like this red line that demarcates these competing sovereignties or parallel sovereignties within Syria over the last year or so, and of course going back rest of the civil war for much of it. And they proceeded to basically force the SDF to withdraw, or the SDF made the decision to tact withdraws forces from the sort of Arab majority cities that the movement had been holding for years. Now that includes Topka, that includes Raqqa, the former capital of the ISIS caliphate, and Deir Ezzor down in the south. When state forces took these cities, they continued to commit these crimes. They filmed themselves slitting the throats of Kurdish people, Kurdish fighters committing crimes against civilians, harassing them, executing them. They film themselves cutting off the hair of women and parading their braids around like trophies and other things I won't even mention. They also started opening up prisons that had been guarded by the sdf. Prisons full of ISIS detainees, releasing ISIS prisoners. Hundreds, maybe even thousands now have been released by Syrian state backed forces, which if you think about the sort of traditional U.S. interest in this conflict in the U.S. role is pretty remarkable. The U.S. envoy to Trump's sort of ambassador to Turkey and Syria is this guy Tom Barrick. And several days ago he finally, he put up. There's this enormous looming question, right, of what is the US going to do to slow and stop this Syrian offensive. There's been these very sort of milquetoast statements about we encourage both sides to de escalate and prevent further con conflict. Right. It's pretty meaningless. And the state is launching an all out offensive on Kurdish communities there. There has been this looming question of how the US administration was going to respond. And what happened was Tom Barrack finally, he just put out this statement and he literally said the entire reason for the original reason for the partnership between the United States and the Syrian Democratic Forces in the fight against ISIS has expired. We're going to work with Damascus on fighting ISIS now, which is pretty. If it wasn't so serious it would be funny. But there's ISIS fighters in the ranks of Syrian backed state forces. There's people fighting with ISIS patches on their plate carriers and shoulders. They're releasing ISIS prisoners as they go. One interesting thing we saw just a few days ago was around this same time the US announced that it was going to start airlifting ISIS prisoners to Iraq to secure them. Okay. What that tells us is that the US is making this cynical decision to back the Syrian state and betray The Kurds. The US military again. Again, of course, yeah, in 2019. This is a Trumpian tradition. But at the same time, the US military clearly doesn't trust that these ISIS prisoners will actually be securely guarded by Syrian state backed forces. But it's too late, right? Like they have already released them. The SCF has withdrawn from Al Hol and these other major camps that have been holding ISIS prisoners. And by the way, nobody likes this situation. The SDF has been demanding that foreign countries that these ISIS fighters came from would repatriate them because it's been a, it's been a major sort of challenge for the SDF with like very little resources to try to figure out how to secure these prisons in the first place, let alone how to make sure it's done in a humanitarian way. It's a very difficult situation. But that's basically where we're at right now, is that the Syrian Democratic Forces have been pushed back or have withdrawn back to the sort of Kurdish majority cities as their strongholds. The Syrian forces are continuing their march on these cities. Fighting is ongoing. The city of Kobani which many of your listeners may recognize the name or know that 10, 10, 11 years ago, this is the border city, the Kurdish border city that was very famously under siege by ISIS and was able to resist with no heavy weapons and small arms and scrappy like fighters in the city for months and months until Obama was finally, reluctantly convinced to support them and push ISIS back, back off of the city. And that's where the US SDF relationship began. The stakes are no less high today. The city is completely besieged. It's surrounded. It's got Turkey to the north, it's got state forces on all other sides to the, to the west, south and east. The water has been cut off, electricity has been cut off, the Internet has been cut off. They're running low on food. It's an extremely serious situation. And state forces continue to, to push north. And so basically there's been several attempts at negotiations and quote, unquote, ceasefires, but none of these ceasefires have actually been recognized on the ground or materialized into a stop to the fighting. So the SDF has called for what they call a general mobilization. That means that basically entire society in Rojava right now is in the streets and taking part in, like, night watch with rifles on the, in the neighborhoods and campfires. It's snowing there, it's freezing. Families, all the Kurdish people and other, like, minority groups that have been afraid to stay in the cities that have been seized by state forces, have been displaced further and further north and are being packed into schools and community centers and families that are opening up their homes to three other families. I've been talking to people on the ground there every single day, and it's just an extremely serious situation. I think that one of the silver linings is that it's really brought Kurds together, including across, like, former conflicts and rivalries along political terms and turf wars that have kept the community divided. And that's really inspiring to see. But it really, the situation really could not be more serious right now. The whole revolution is at stake.
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A
One question I have is how is the Kurdish diaspora outside of Syria? Respond. I've seen actually video of Kurds trying to go into Syria from Turkey and Turkish troops or military police not letting them cross the border.
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B
That's exactly right. And this is another sort of deja vu moment from the siege of Kobani when Kurdish people flooded the border from the Turkish side, in some cases overwhelmed Turkish border police and tore down the fences. This is also happening now both from Bashur south, Kurdistan, which is like the Iraqi side and Bakur, what they call North Kurdistan, which is the Turkish side. Kurds have been flooding to the border for protests and also crossing the border to join this call to join what they call the general mobilization. Even on the Turkish side, some Kurdish people have even found ways to break through those police lines and literally tear down the fences and enter into to Syria to join the resistance, which is incredibly inspiring to see. But it also has unified the diaspora beyond the neighboring states.
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That was my next question.
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Yeah, exactly. So across Europe and in the United States as well, Kurds and their allies have been taking to the streets to demand action by their respective governments on an international scale, to demand action by the un to demand investigations into the Syrian state's ongoing war crimes, and to demand that the international community, quote, unquote, which we all, any of us, have been following the news lately, whether it's Greenland or Venezuela or latest conversations in Davos. Right. Know that there's a lot of fiction to that phrase, the international community, and there always has been.
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Yeah.
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But nonetheless, these are desperate times. Right. So the communities in Rojava and official political leadership, as well as Kurdish diaspora like organizations are calling on their supporters and their fellow community members to just do everything in their power to, to raise hell to keep this story alive in the first place, to try to do anything they can to get media to cover the stories, to get elected officials for other public figures to speak out forcefully condemning Syrian state actions and demanding action by their own governments, to demand action from parliaments, congress, et cetera, ecr, the Emergency Committee for Rojava, which is a group that I'm a part of. For our own part, we've been trying to heed this call as well. If folks are interested in joining us, supporting this call, learning more about what's happening, definitely encourage people to go to defend Rojava. We've put out recently a joint statement and call to action in collaboration with a number of other US based Kurdish organizations, just local grassroots Kurdish associations made up of Kurdish immigrants who live here in the United States and are organizing mutual aid and cultural events in local cities around the US So also really encourage people to find out whether there is a local Kurdish association in your community and if so, reach out to them, support them. I'm sure they'd love to hear from you. There very likely may be events happening in your city that you just don't know about because you're not connected to the Kurdish community. If that's true for you here and just in my hometown, which is Seattle, I'VE been doing a lot of organizing with our local Kurdish association, which is a group called kawa, the Kurdish association of Washington. And we've been doing things like holding demonstrations in downtown Seattle and downtown Bellevue and there are people in other cities who are doing the same. This is really a kind of all hands on deck moment and even ecr. We're doing so much to try to coordinate and spread our limited capacity where it's most useful, that we also have very limited capacity to coordinate these things directly too. So we encourage people to just get creative and take initiative as well. You can find resources on our website, you can certainly reach out to us and we'll do our best to get back to you. But there's also nothing stopping you from sending a letter to the editor to your local newspaper or holding a small solidarity demonstration or like I said, reaching out to Kurdish organizations.
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A
And we'll put your website in the show notes as well for folks to, to get involved. Is there any is.
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B
Thank you.
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A
Is there. We're also living in a very difficult time where it's hard to penetrate like the media, the media cycle with like you said, Venezuela and Greenland and Minneapolis.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And. But is there also where you're doing pressure to members of Congress as well?
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B
Absolutely. So if folks are interested in the kind of advocacy side of things here in the U.S. again, go to defendrojava.org, that's our website. And we, you'll see right there on the main page, not only do we have a link to in this kind of public statement called action that we put out, but we also have a simple sort of call in tool that you can use. You can follow the link to find your own senator or representative or you can target a couple of the kind of key foreign affairs officials that we suggest. You can word for word follow a script that we provide there to you and phone numbers. We try to make it as easy as possible. And you can also share that. You can copy paste all of that, send the links to other local chats with the whatever activist groups you're a part of or send to friends and family as well.
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A
I'm going to wrap it there because we're getting a little short on time. Like you said, the website is defendrojava.org, we'll put that in the show notes folks, we've been talking with Arthur Pai with the emergency committee for Rojima talking about the situation on the ground that has developed over the last month and months. If you like what you're hearing please check us out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Bluesky. If you're watching this on YouTube, hit that subscribe button. If you're listening to us on the audio platform, please give us a rate and review. And if you really like us, go to greenandredpodcast.org and hit that support button. Become a patron@patreon.com greenmedpodcast Arthur, it's good talking with you again. Glad you were able to join us today and everybody else out there make trouble and misbehave and we'll talk to you again soon.
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B
Thank you so much for having me.
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A
Scott yeah, totally.
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B
Solidarity.
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A
Sam.