Kobane, Syria, was home to one of the most famous military turning points in history. A small force of Kurdish guerrillas, pressed between the advancing Islamic State group and the Turkish border, was supposed to have fallen quickly in a tragic last stand. Obama administration officials said as much. Instead, the Kurds of Kobane successfully held out for six months, enough time for the cavalry—the U.S. Air Force and rebels from elsewhere in Syria—to arrive.
Yesterday, Kobane came under attack again. With the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus and the uncertainty over what comes next, Turkey has been seeking an opportunity to wipe out its Kurdish opponents and carve out a puppet state in Syria’s north. With air cover from the Turkish Air Force, militias known as the Syrian National Army (SNA) overran the nearby city of Manbij and marched toward Kobane.
“In the last war, the people fled to Turkey. This time, it will be a genocide,” Berivan Hesen, a member of Kobane’s local government who lived through the Islamic State group’s siege, said via text message on Tuesday. “They are all ISIS by a different name.” Hesen notes that many of the people living in Kobane now had fled from other parts of Syria under Turkish and SNA control, such as Afrin, where the same forces have committed looting, rape, and torture since occupying it in 2018.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) agreed to “American mediation” with Turkey, the SDF’s Gen. Mazloum Abdi announced on Tuesday night, withdrawing forces from Manbij in hopes that Kobane would be spared. (The next day, Turkey launched drone strikes across North and East Syria.) U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be traveling to Ankara, the Turkish capital, this week. The United States has troops embedded with the SDF and controls much of the airspace over eastern Syria. But the Biden administration has remained vague about what its goals really are.
Syria’s “Kurdish revolution,” which started in Kobane, is no longer just a Kurdish one. After the defense of Kobane, the U.S. military helped Kurdish rebels create the SDF alongside Arab, Assyrian Christian, and other militias. These forces eventually captured a third of the country, establishing the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava, run on an eclectic mix of feminist and libertarian ideas.
The non-Kurdish areas of North and East Syria are filled with “women who chose to take advantage of new freedoms and opportunities, with all the risks they came with,” says Meghan Bodette, research director at the nonprofit Kurdish Peace Institute, where I used to be a nonresident fellow. “A small constituency, all things considered. But I’ve never seen people who believed in freedom more.”
North and East Syria, however, always rested on a delicate political balance. Both Russia and the U.S. restrained Turkey, which fears Kurdish unrest within its borders, from advancing into Syrian Kurdish territory. Now that Assad is gone, so are the Russian forces. Turkey may be betting that the SDF has outlived its usefulness for the U.S., too. And the Turkish attacks on Kobane coincided with a mutiny of Arab tribes against the SDF in the oil-rich region of Deir el-Zour. Arabs who grudgingly sided with the SDF against Assad now want to go their own way.
If the Kurdish-Arab alliance unravels, the U.S. military may decide to directly back Arab tribes as a bulwark against Iran and the Islamic State, according to Nicholas Heras, who has advised the U.S.-led military coalition in Syria and is now senior director for strategy at the nonprofit New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington. In 2019, when former President Donald Trump wanted to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, the Trump administration considered a strategy of letting the Kurdish forces fall to Turkey and buying off Arab tribes.
“The U.S. has essentially sub-contracted out engaging with the local Arab tribes to the [Kurdish-led rebels], which is a method that is likely unsustainable now,” Heras says.
Before Assad’s fall, the SDF had controlled the parts of Deir el-Zour province east of the Euphrates River. Assad loyalists controlled the western half of the province. As government forces withdrew last week, the SDF moved in. But they weren’t necessarily welcomed as liberators. Protests broke out in the newly captured areas, and the SDF reportedly killed at least one civilian.
Muhammad Dakhil, the Arab co-president of the SDF-aligned administration in Deir el-Zour, downplayed the unrest in a phone interview with Reason on Monday. “Let’s say you’re in a city where the authorities arrived three days ago. They’re not going to be governing it in three days,” he said. “We’ve been here for 48 hours.” Dakhil chalked up the outbursts of “small groups” in the streets to “sabotage” by Assad loyalists.
The next day, things got much more serious. Several Arab units in the SDF announced that they were defecting to the new Islamist government in Damascus. (Dakhil declined to comment, writing in a text message that “it’s a military matter, soldiers have the details, and I’m not a soldier.”) The SDF retreated back east across the Euphrates.
A civil society mediator in Deir el-Zour, who goes by the name of “Shimayan,” agrees that Assad loyalists had been responsible for sabotage and looting. But he blames the SDF’s failures, and believes that it may have to leave the province as a whole.
“The truth is that the people of Deir el-Zour want someone to maintain security and protect their property and public property. If the SDF could do the job, nothing would happen,” he tells Reason via text message. “If the SDF cannot completely impose its control over areas west of the Euphrates where the regime was, things will not be stable east of the Euphrates.”
The dilemma is partly because of U.S. policy. To a large extent, the SDF was reluctant to go into Deir el-Zour in the first place, as it meant pulling troops away from Kurdish areas to try to control hostile territory. But the U.S. military pushed its Kurdish partners to take over the province, partly to finish off the Islamic State group and partly to keep Iran and Russia out of the strategic region.
A major question is whether this split will lead to a broader Kurdish-Arab conflict. One of the mutinying commanders in Deir el-Zour called on all Arab leaders in the SDF to rise up against the group’s “terrorism” and “oppression.” During the battle for Manbij, some SDF fighters switched to the Turkish-backed side, according to Sihem Hemo, a Kurdish official there.
After taking Manbij, SNA fighters filmed themselves shooting wounded fighters from the SDF in their hospital beds. Hemo tells Reason that there was “torture and pillaging” in the city, especially targeted at Kurds. The Zenobia Women’s Gathering, an Arab feminist organization, also announced that three of its members were killed during the fall of Manbij.
The United States has, directly and indirectly, backed all sides of the fight. Turkey is a NATO ally. Some of the SNA units now attacking Kobane had received weapons and training from the CIA and the U.S. military. (After the Trump administration cut off support, a U.S. official condemned these same factions as “thugs, bandits, and pirates that should be wiped off the face of the earth,” and the Biden administration imposed human rights sanctions.) Meanwhile, several hundred U.S. troops are embedded with the SDF.
Washington has so far taken a vague, noncommittal public stance on the struggle between its partners. The Pentagon’s deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters on Monday that “we want to see the protection of civilians, escalation management, and the management of risk to U.S. forces and partners through the Defeat ISIS mission.” She declined to answer specific questions about U.S.-Turkish conversations.
Asked on Tuesday about foreign interference in Syria in general, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller gave a long-winded nonanswer: “All of the actors in Syria, all of the actors inside the region have to deal with what came before. There’s been a very brutal civil war in which you had a number of internal actors, at times supported by external forces as well.”
Dakhil, the official in Deir el-Zour, seemed himself confused about what U.S. policy was. “I want to ask you a question. The role of our partners, where are they on this matter?” he asked over the phone. “Manbij surrendered, went away, almost. But our partners, the Americans for example, what is their role in this matter?”
In his Sunday victory speech about the fall of the Assad government, President Joe Biden said that he wanted to support an “independent, sovereign—an independent—independent—I want to say it again—sovereign Syria.” But U.S. policy at the moment seems to be creating the opposite: a Syria chopped up by foreign powers.
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