In January 2019, In That Howling Infinite published, Rojava and the Kurdish conundrum. The post wrote of Rojava as both experiment and predicament – a small, improbable polity suspended between larger, harder powers, “trapped between the Turkish hammer and the Syrian anvil.” Aris Roussinos, whose work we have reviewed before, now returns to the same terrain with the sombre clarity of hindsight. His recent essay on the collapse of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria reads less like contradiction than culmination. What was foreboding then is aftermath now.
Back in 2019, the drama was framed in the key of Trumpian bombast – promises to “totally destroy and obliterate” Turkey’s economy if Ankara stepped out of line — but the underlying reality was austere. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces had borne the brunt of the fight against ISIS, lost thousands of men and women, guarded tens of thousands of jihadist detainees, and constructed, under the thin canopy of American airpower, a fragile, decentralised experiment in multi-ethnic governance. Remove the canopy and the weather would change. The Kurds knew it. So did Ankara, Damascus, Moscow and Tehran.
Roussinos describes that experiment – the AANES – as an attempt to defy the “grim logic” of civil war in divided societies: that conflict eventually collapses into sectarian arithmetic. Ideologically, it was a pivot away from classic PKK ethnonationalism toward Abdullah Öcalan’s “democratic confederalism”: devolved authority, gender parity, communal councils, a deliberate blurring of ethnic hierarchy. In a region shaped by the memory of genocide, forced migration, Baathist Arabisation and mutual suspicion, it was both necessity and idealism. The geography of the Jazira – oil-rich, landlocked, demographically mixed – demanded accommodation if it was to function at all.
Yet even in 2019 the limits were visible. Rojava was romanticised abroad – “an anarchist-lite Paris Commune,” as we noted, perhaps half ironically half-ironised then – but on the ground it was strategically exposed and socially fissured. Arabs and Turkmen did not uniformly welcome Kurdish administration. Kurdish politics itself was riven by clan and party rivalries. Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran all loathed the prospect of a sovereign Kurdistan. The experiment depended not merely on theory but on patronage.
That patronage proved fickle. The likely endgame sketched seven years ago was stark: the Kurds would fight if forced, but ultimately they would deal with Damascus to save their towns and families. Russia would mediate; Turkey would demand a border free of the YPG; Assad would insist on reintegration, autonomy trimmed to vassalage. The analogy to the Paris Commune was offered with unease – bold communal experiments have a habit of ending in blood and absorption.
Roussinos now writes from beyond that threshold. The new Damascus government – jihadist-derived yet internationally tolerated – has reasserted control. The much-vaunted multi-ethnic Syrian Democratic Forces, proudly described as majority Arab, fractured under pressure. Arab components drifted back toward their ethnic kin in Damascus. What remained was recognisably Kurdish: the YPG under another name. Integration proceeded not as confederal partnership but as coerced subsumption.
Pro–Damascus media have seized on the SDF’s recruitment of women, alleging coercion and forced enlistment of minors. While underage recruitment has been documented in past years and prompted formal pledges to demobilise minors -with uneven implementation – broader claims of systematic kidnapping lack clear substantiation and coexist with extensive evidence of voluntary female participation grounded in the movement’s gender-egalitarian ethos. Such allegations serve a wider political purpose: portraying the Kurdish administration as socially aberrant and incompatible with a re-centralised Syrian state, framing critique of specific practices as part of its broader delegitimisation. In Roussinos’ terms, this is another instrument of Syria’s recurring cycle: peripheral autonomy is undermined not only by coercion on the battlefield but also by shaping perception, marking alternative governance as morally and politically untenable.
His larger point is less about Kurdish miscalculation than Syrian structure. Since independence, Syria has oscillated between peripheral revolt and centralised coercion. Its demographic entanglement – Sunni Arab majorities, Alawite and Druze minorities, Kurds without a state, ancient Christian communities – renders majoritarian triumph unstable and decentralisation fragile. The AANES sought to transcend that arithmetic; it ultimately succumbed to it. Meanwhile, sectarian reprisals against Alawites and Druze in western Syria deepen minority distrust of Damascus, reinforcing the very cycle the new regime claims to end.
The pattern is not uniquely Syrian. Lebanon’s confessional balancing act has veered between uneasy accommodation and paralysis; Iraq’s post-2003 settlement oscillates between sectarian mobilisation and fragile cross-sectarian moments; the Balkans, from Bosnia to Kosovo, demonstrate how externally brokered pluralism can freeze conflict without dissolving its underlying fears. In each case, demography and memory shape politics as much as constitutions do. Power-sharing without trust calcifies; centralisation without restraint provokes resistance. The pendulum swings.
What is striking is the dialectical twist. The Kurdish movement in Syria attempted to move beyond ethnonationalism toward a post-national confederalism. Its collapse may instead accelerate a harder pan-Kurdish nationalism – the revival of the Ala Rengin flag, the renewed invocation of Rojava as West Kurdistan, the rhetoric of betrayed nationhood. When pluralist experiment yields vulnerability, ethnic consolidation gains appeal. The effort to dissolve identity politics may intensify it.
Can Syria break its sectarian cycle? Roussinos leaves the question open, but the burden is heavy. It would require disciplined control over disparate armed factions, credible guarantees to minorities, and a majority willing to exercise restraint rather than vengeance – feats rarer than battlefield victories. The Kurdish experiment failed not simply because it was naïve, but because it unfolded within a regional system that punishes fragility and rewards coercion.
In 2019, the mood was, borrowing from King Lear, “cheerless, dark and deadly.” In 2026, the darkness feels less theatrical, more structural. The Kurds remain what they have long been: resilient, battle-hardened, accustomed to betrayal. Their attempt to sketch another way -neither Baathist despotism nor jihadist dominion – has been curtailed. Yet the problem it sought to solve endures, not only in Syria but in every state where demography, memory and power are tightly braided. The lesson, as Roussinos insists, reaches well beyond the plains of the Jazira.
Paul hemphill, February 2026, with assistance in drafting by ChatGPT
For more on the Middle East in in That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany.
See also, Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants, Cold Wind in Damascus …Syria at the crossroads, Between Heaven and Hell … Syria at the crossroads
Can Syria break its sectarian cycle?The Kurdish experiment was doomed
Aris Roussinos, Unherd 10 February 2026
It is generally expected that, whatever the ostensible cause of a civil war, in a country divided on ethnic and religious lines the fighting will sooner or later assume an interethnic or sectarian flavour. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), now having surrendered its autonomy under assault from the Syrian state’s new jihadist-derived government, was, whatever else it may have been, an attempt to rebut this grim logic. Indeed, the dusty and unprepossessing plains of the Syrian Jazira — the northeastern portion of the country, east of the Euphrates — served for more than a decade as an unlikely political experiment in the management and diffusion of ethnic conflict.
Whether noble or naive, this project now looks doomed as AANES’s great power backers turn their fickle attentions to Damascus, and the Damascus government has in turn successfully reasserted its control through military coercion. Within a matter of days, as its Sunni Arab levies turned their affections to their ethnic kin in Damascus and their guns on their former allies, Northeast Syria switched from a bold experiment in multi-ethnic governance to a desperate, rearguard battle for Kurdish cultural and political autonomy. The war, at its presumed end, reverted to the dynamics of its earliest days, when Ahmed al-Sharaa, then leader of the Syrian al-Qaeda faction Jabhat al-Nusra, had attempted, along with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels and tribes of changeable loyalties, to seize control of the oil-rich, and newly Kurdish-run region, Syria’s breadbasket.
Simultaneously rich in resources yet neglected by its central government, and host to the country’s richest mix of ethnic and religious minorities, alternately the tools and the victims of the central state, the Syrian Jazira had always run according to its own dynamics. Both colonial French and independent Syrian administrations in distant, Levantine Damascus expended significant, if sporadic, effort in absorbing this neglected region of Mesopotamia within the modern state system, privileging one ethnic group against another for reasons of statecraft, and building model towns and vast dams, as evocative in their current dilapidation of failed modernities as the ancient tells dotting the landscape, now repurposed as gun emplacements, are of earlier lost civilisations.
Barely populated until the French Mandate period, except during the annual circulation of nomadic Bedouin shepherds, the portion of Syria east of the Euphrates underwent during the early 20th century a transformative period of internal and external immigration and development analogous, in a modest way, to that of California or Australia. Ethnic Kurds fleeing the collapse of proto-nationalist rebellions in Ataturk’s Turkey, along with Syriac Christians fleeing the Seifo genocide and many uprooted Armenians streamed south across the culverts and rusting tracks of the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway line, which still marks the modern border, joining their ethnic kin residing there from the beginning of recorded history. Ethnic Assyrians from British-Mandate northern Iraq similarly sought French protection from the predation of the Iraqi state and its Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen auxiliaries, establishing a string of fiercely Christian villages along the Khabur river. Northeast Syria was shaped by the cultural memory of ethnic conflict; its past decade of governance was an attempt to evade the return of its attendant cruelties.
As such, the AANES project was always as much one of necessity as Leftist idealism. The Kurdish regions of northern Syria, stretching West of the Euphrates into Aleppo, were separated from each other by clusters of Arab and Turkmen towns and villages, in large part the result of the Baathist state’s settlement of Arabs from Syria’s desert hinterland to hinder any Kurdish attempts at secession. While the early successes of the Syrian Kurds under the PYD, following a negotiated handover of control by Assad’s overstretched government, resulted in what was essentially the occupation by its YPG military forces of Arab settlements, loyal to one or other rebel or jihadist faction, America’s decisive intervention in the war against ISIS resulted in both sudden and unexpected great power backing for Northeast Syria and an evolution of Kurdish political attitudes towards local Arabs.
Partly at America’s behest, in a failed attempt to assuage the Syrian rebels’ combative Western think-tank diaspora, and partly a genuine attempt to impose progressive governance among a population Kurds frequently portray as stunted by its own reactionary obscurantism and crude ethnic chauvinism, Northeast Syria’s autonomous quasi-government undertook a project of delegating political and military authority to Arab regions won back from ISIS. It was an ambitious goal which seemed, for a decade, to have won majority acquiescence, if not affection. It became the boast of the regional administration that its armed forces, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), was now predominantly composed of Arabs, a feat of enlightened governance that rapidly proved hollow, over the past two weeks, when the majority of these Arab fighters effortlessly switched sides. Having lost almost all its Arab accretions, the SDF was once again, in practice, the Kurdish YPG, an ethnic militia fighting for purely Kurdish goals. Now that, under the threat of military defeat, a shrunken version of these forces will be subsumed under the Damascus government’s control, their future role — on paper, and in reality — remains to be seen.
The integration terms finally accepted, at gunpoint, by the autonomous administration last weekend, though better than those of a fortnight ago are worse than those of the unimplemented March agreement. Consequently, much has been made in recent days of the AANES’s failures to come to terms with al-Sharaa’s shock capture of the Syrian state just over a year ago, and negotiate a settlement with the new reality. Certainly, the region’s political focus had, since the seeming cornering of the Sunni Arab rebellion into its Idlib Bantustan, centred on negotiating re-integration into Assad’s Baathist state in a manner that preserved some means of political and military autonomy. Yet Assad, over-confident of his own position as victor of the long and bloody war, refused to offer more than integration into the central state on terms that amounted to surrender. The new regime in Damascus now offers little different: what has changed is its greater power of coercion, and international backing, compared to its previous Baathist iteration.
Putin, once an occasional, tacit partner of the Kurds west of the Euphrates, has fully backed the new Damascus government, another instance where Russia, once America’s rival in Syria, shares increasingly aligned interests with the Trump White House. Calls for the protection of Kurdish cultural rights and social norms by European states are outweighed by their overriding political interest in the accelerated removal of their more than one million mostly Sunni Arab refugees. Regionally, the success or otherwise of the Northeast’s reintegration will determine Israel’s ability to justify its military protection of Druze autonomists in the southern province of Sweida. Relations with mostly Shia Iraq, which has its own reasons to look askance at Sunni jihadist governance and is currently making a show of reinforcing its border with Syria, will be fraught at best. Given the sheer improbability of fate’s wheel suddenly projecting al-Sharaa into Assad’s Damascus palace, it would be foolhardy to offer any firm predictions, rather than vague anxieties, for the country’s future.
Yet it would be unfair for harsh self-criticism to so soon follow hindsight. For all its faults, the Kurdish project of autonomy from the Syrian central state evolved, through managing the dynamics of their multi-ethnic region, into one that ironically and idealistically attempted to make the very idea of equable Syrian co-existence a political possibility. Inversely, the current Damascus project of re-centralisation has, in western Syria, been accompanied by sectarian massacres and other abuses, which have increased the antipathy of peripheral minority populations towards the central state. Sunni Arab supporters of the al-Sharaa government, whose decade-long displeasure at having their ethnic kin ruled by minorities is accompanied by certainty of their own natural right to rule those same minorities, have made much of Kurdish intransigence while minimising or even justifying the starkest governance failures of their own new regime. Yet the past year’s massacres of Alawites and Druze, punctuating the failed integration talks with the AANES, only heightened the Kurdish disinclination to disarm and dissolve its forces and place the fates of its people in the benevolence of the central state.
Syria’s post-independence oscillation between peripheral revolts and centralised coercion, the very cycle that produced both Assad and his own overthrow, is simply the remorseless logic of a country, like neighbouring Lebanon and Iraq, held hostage by its own tangled demographics. Whether or not the new Syria can break this cycle is an open question. It will take great feats of governance, and of control over his own disparate armed forces, by al-Sharaa to avoid the logic of Syria’s demographic confusion weakening his own state-building project just as, suddenly and catastrophically, it did for the Kurds. Syria’s ethnic and religious complexity makes it a hard country to rule, historically veering, as a result, between instability and oppression. The Kurdish attempt to find another, progressive path ultimately failed, for the same reasons. The lessons, it ought not to need underlining, reach far beyond Syria’s borders.
In That Howling Infinite 