In 2021, I traveled to Syria to visit the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, a non-state political entity that has its origins in the Kurdish region of Rojava. The resulting book chapter, “The Qamishlo Children’s Orchestra,” is an attempt at a portrait of a multiethnic political experiment in “democratic confederalism” beyond the nation-state. Today, as the Ba’athist system falls to pieces, and as city after city is liberated from Assad, little is clear about the future of Syria, but there can be no question concerning the bravery of those men and women who fought for decades against a corrupt, bloodthirsty government.
This is a short excerpt from The Fugitive World. The photographs were taken by me.
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The Base
“Time to go,” the PYD agent said, and stood up. Outside the media offices, the late afternoon sun painted the compound walls amber. The agent switched cars in the parking lot in case he had been followed, and did not tell Alan, our driver, where we were going. He simply leaned out his window as the car came toward us and issued a two-word command: “Follow us.”
The Party of Democratic Unity, or PYD, is the largest political party in Rojava and is all but synonymous with the council-based system that governs the region, although there are dozens of operational parties represented in city and regional councils. Khabat had promised an interview with a senior PYD official who had been with the party since its inception. The woman had served in the military and at every level of the new administration. We’d spent the afternoon sitting in an office with the media party’s liaison, drinking coffee and watching the wall clock, waiting for the all clear to proceed.
Although the PYD and PKK are nominally separate allied entities, there is no question that the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, is likewise PYD’s spiritual head; his picture adorns every administration office and virtually every billboard in Qamishlo. We passed beneath them on our way out of the city: Öcalan’s smiling visage watched as the guards at the gates waved us onward once they had identified our escort. We entered a highway that extends across northern Syria and ends at Damascus, a road named for the president. It began to degrade almost immediately, its surfaces becoming scaly and cracked. I was forced to reappraise the roads of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq as triumphs of engineering. When I mentioned the difference to Khabat, she was unmoved. “Well, that’s a state.”
Syria was an hour ahead of Iraq and sunset began at four in the afternoon, slowly, with an incremental reddening of the hillsides. The sun was still visible nearly an hour later as we turned south at Amude. Along the highway were roadside villages in cinderblock gray framed by a darkening sky. Whenever the lead car cut left around a pothole, our van became engulfed in purple dust. Alan would jerk the wheel blindly to follow them. “Do you know where we’re going?” I asked.
“No,” Khabat said. She closed her eyes and leaned back in her seat. “And I don’t want to know.”
There are no theatrics to security in Rojava. You practice good hygiene or you die, and the disjunctive is by no means exclusive. In post-2019 Syria, there are no U.S. troops to exercise air power or threaten to enforce the No Fly Zone over Qamishlo, which by my visit had become newly penetrable. The day before my arrival, a Turkish drone strike inside Qamishlo’s city limits had changed the conflict’s terms of engagement. The strike’s victims belonged to an esteemed family, one that could already boast of having donated seventeen šehid, or martyrs, to the cause of Kurdish liberation. All of those killed were civilians, the PYD claimed, in which case it was a war crime. The eldest victim and likely target was Youssef Klo, a famed peacemaker, unifier of ethnic groups and dispeller of tribal feuds, who was traveling by car with two grandchildren. There were no survivors. Klo embodied that most Kurdish of qualities—sacrifice—having once famously said that even if he had 50 sons, he would give them all for Kurdistan. Turkey knew his worth. “’We can do anything,’” Khabat said. “That was the message. No matter where you are.”
Neither the U.S. nor Russia seemed inclined to respond to the attack. “They let it happen,” Khabat said. The strike had hit the very road we were now traveling. There was new electricity in the air. No one knew what might happen next.
When darkness fell, it was the pure darkness of wartime blackout or abandonment. No one wanted to linger on the open highway. It started to raid. We were traveling at 120 kilometers an hour, a speed that felt twice as fast on so decrepit a road. I had heard somewhere that the Turkish military does not fly its drones in bad weather and decided that night to believe it.
South of Amude, the route became busy with trucks, some loaded with oil, which are able to pass through regime checkpoints, the importance of this economic lifeblood being one of the few points of agreement between the AANES and the Syrian government. Khabat woke up and looked out at the darkness. There were lights in the distance—a city. “We’re in Heseke,” she said, and coughed. The van smelled like diesel and orange peels.
The city was still far ahead of us when we pulled off the road and up to the gate of an unmarked military base, surrounded by high reinforced walls. “It’s American,” Khabat said in recognition. We were in Rmeilan, an outlying district where (according to Russian intelligence, anyway) there are at least two U.S.-built air bases.
A soldier with no face visible behind helmet, mask, and shadow held out his hand for our ID cards, then walked away to examine them beneath a floodlight. The lights of the base illuminated waves of dust and bugs pulsing in the wind, a desert snowstorm. The guard returned. Another soldier lifted the boom gate. Passing through a second checkpoint, we were inside the compound. It seemed huge and abandoned, each space giving onto another, all sparsely lit. We stood outside in the cold around a weak fire with a Kurdish soldier who said nothing. A few men came to examine us silently; one by one, they walked away. More instructions came: get back in the car. The meeting would be held elsewhere on the base. Alan drove us along an unlit road.
We came to a kind of banquet hall that seemed to predate the American architectural interventions visible elsewhere on the base. In a windowless dining room, our quarry awaited us in fatigues and combat boots. Fawza Yousif looked as though she might fall asleep. For weeks, she had been shuttled from one safe house to another. The entire PYD leadership was under strict no-cell and off-grid orders as a result of the elevated threat level. She was as safe as could be on the base, but of course she could not live here. She had her missions; there was much to do. By way of introduction, she noted (a mixture of apology and annoyance) that the time and location of our meeting had been rearranged several times over the course of the day. Yet she wanted to meet—wanted to explain her country to another curious visitor from abroad.
Fawza had once been a university student in Aleppo—“a brilliant student,” Khabat said—but quit her studies to join the PKK during the years when Öcalan was living there in exile. When Syria outlawed the PKK, its members fled into the Qandil Mounains, but Fawza was one of the first to come back at the sign of revolution. She was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured under Assad. As soon as she was released, she joined the YPJ.
Fawza’s life now was politics. She had served as the co-chair of the Democratic Federation of Rojava – Northern Syria (before its name was changed to AANES in 2018), and was presently a member of the president’s committee of the PYD. She also sat on the social contract committee, which was currently at work revising the Administration’s founding constitution. (After our meeting, she went on to serve as co-president of the executive council of AANES.) There are few figures more enmeshed within the Rojava experiment or committed to its fate.
As we sat down, Fawza launched into a lecture on autonomy. “We don’t believe in the state pyramid, where the top rules over the lower tiers,” she said. “We have the opposite pyramid—not from the top to the bottom but from the bottom to the top.” The commune system was a democratic solution to the problem of authoritarianism in non-state areas.
The idea of autonomy was that the population on the ground knows the best way for themselves, she explained. “The difference between our system and others is that we believe the community can lead itself.” Minority quotas meant that ethnic groups and religions other than Kurds and Muslims were proportionately represented. “We call it the equality of the unequal,” Fawza said. The Yezidis, the Syriacs, the Chakas, the Chechens, the Armenians, the Christians — everyone had a representative, everywhere. Fawza explained that the origins of this tenet of political life were two main ideas that had evolved, over years, in Kurdish Syria: the freedom of woman and democratic confederalism. Both, she said, were the products of Öcalan’s thought.
I said that what interested me about the revolution was that so many movements of liberation are nationalist in character: they envision for themselves a nation of their own, founded on principles shared by a people, which is to say an ethnolinguistic group.
”Nationalism is the root of our problem,” she said. Nationalism was opposed to democracy. The Ba’athists were Arab nationalists and this was why the country had fallen apart. The capitalist regime was carrying out a program of cultural genocide against the people. It would be the same under the next one, and the next. Nationalism and its siblings—authoritarianism, oppression, capitalism—were always threatening movements. The people had to be vigilant. ”We are dependent on the power of the population, the communities who are organizing themselves, that they have the power, in order to not find themselves trapped under the opposite—under the normal pyramid.” Hence the emphasis on education, the training sessions, the meetings without end. Without that vigilance, this threat would consume them. The threat was a dinosaur that would surely eat them.
Sorry — a dinosaur? “Yes, I said a dinosaur,” she said. The dinosaur of nationalism. The dinosaur of history.
“Of course,” she went on, ”when we talk about the places in Syria Turkey has occupied, places where nationalism has again taken hold, this was all under Trump. He gave the green light for Erdoğan to invade. And after the occupation, deadly violence. And ethnic cleansing…” But no one seemed to be paying attention. It wasn’t like in 2012, when journalists from Europe and the United States descended on Rojava to proclaim a new democratic system, a feminist dream realized. And yet the stakes were so much higher now—
The lights went out. The hall became perfectly dark, without even an illuminated exit sign. Several seconds passed. No one came. We were alone in the building, if not the base, the desert, the universe. As if waking up from a long sleep, we felt for our cell phones and turned them on, conjuring squares of light. Fawza continued as if there had been no interruption. “We need a permanent solution with the Syrian government for us to have stability in the region. Without a solution, there will always be destabilization, whether from Daesh or Turkey.” The lights came on again.
Did she regret any failures of the movement so far? No, she said—only the failures of others to adhere to their agreements. “Such as the Americans?” Yes, she said, many international actors, including the Americans. Sanctions were choking the region to death. Everyone was ready to return: a French concrete company, Scandinavian energy firms. But the sanctions remain. They needed income and industry. They needed foreign conglomerates to reopen their oil wells, restart the derricks. Pumping liquid dinosaur to the surface.
Since its ground invasion began in October 2019, Turkey had occupied several areas of Syria that were formerly part of the AANES, settling them with thousands of people from Turkey and elsewhere. It seemed clear that the U.S. was abandoning them, Khabat said. Three of her friends had died in the fighting that followed the U.S. pullout. Khabat had followed the invasion closely, often from the front lines, since she knew Turkey would work to keep the news out of foreign media outlets. “What did Russia and Beijing do? In Ukraine? In Xinjiang? They kept all the foreigner journalists out of the country, so that there was no one reporting on the ground.”
Although the international coverage of the invasion did perhaps slow Turkey’s war, it would not be enough. A rising sense of doom had replaced the optimism of the revolution. Fawza’s eyes closed with exhaustion. It was late. We stood to leave, and Fawza asked who else we would meet in the coming days. Mostly women, Khabat said. Fawza was rejuvenated—with pique. “Good,” she said. “You men”—she pretended to spit—“men destroyed the world! It’s on you!”
“She likes you,” Khabat said once we were alone. “She doesn’t usually talk like that.”
Outside the hall, Alan was waiting in the van. There may have been a few Americans left on the base—around 700 U.S. troops remained in Rojava after the pullout—but none came out of the shadows that night and no one bothered to escort us back to the main road. The base became a smudge of weak, cold light, then nothing. Oil trucks rumbled down the center of the highway. “I’ve been here so many times,” Khabat said sleepily, “and it’s always in a different place.”
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An invigorating and insightful read. Loved it!