Apologies for the ping, comrade @rainpizza had a post describing the material effects of Rojava’s occupation of North Eastern Syria.

To give context, in 2015 the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and Syrian government was being overrun by Daesh (ISIS) terrorists funded and armed by the US through operation Timber Sycamore. As a result, Bashar Assad, the Syrian president, called on Russia for military intervention. Daesh had managed to even take over portions of Damascus by the time Russia started performing air strikes on Daesh supply lines. The Russian Air support managed to reverse the terrorists advance due to their supply line disruptions, and the SAA began quickly regaining territory, forcing Daesh to retreat all the way to the Southern Bank of the Euphrates River.

The US saw that their Wahabbi fundamentalists were failing, and that they’d need to change tactics to topple the Assad government. Once Russia got involved, the US soon formed a coalition of their own in Northern Syria made up largely of the Kurds in what would become the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF). The SDF, to the bare minimum credit I will give them, effectively forced Daesh to retreat from Northern Syria all the way down to the Northern Bank of the Euphrates River.

The US supported the SDF in doing this in order to occupy Syria’s oil, gas, and wheat fields that all existed in the North, which the SDF dutifully did. From there Rojava or officially, the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), was formed under the control of the SDF. Supposedly they purported an ideology known as Democratic Confederarlism, which was theorized by the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, who considered it superior to the prior “statist socialist” line of the PKK, which was Marxism-Leninism. The state of Rojava-

It’s not a state! It’s an organized polity that has a monopoly on violence for the purpose of advancing the interests of the working class-

-you get it.

The state of Rojava would operate on a simple partnership with the US. Rojava would occupy Syria’s resources, depriving the Syrian government of core economic components, and in return the US would provide Arms to the SDF for their “defense”.

Officially, Rojava requested political autonomy within the Syrian government, saying that they wanted Syria to adopt a Federal model rather than the centralized model written in the Syrian constitution. The Syrian government rejected this, instead offering administrative autonomy in the form of municipal administrative decentralization.

The Syrian government opposed political autonomy for a couple major reasons.

1. They feared a response from Türkiye who was already funding multiple takfeeri groups against the Syrian government. Türkiye would never accept a political entity on their borders which could act like a refuge for Kurdish political leaders and potentially inspire a similiar movement among their own Kurds. The Syrian government didn’t want to invite extra conflict with their neighbor for a movement that historically cooperated with the US.

2. Political Autonomy and federalism would weaken the government’s capability to respond to crisis imposed on them by the imperialists. Had liberal reforms been introduced, there would be less barriers preventing foreign powers from interfering with Syria’s domestic affairs. The Syrian government also didn’t want to create a situation where there was a legal justification that allowed AANES to continue depriving the government of its own resources or allowing US troops to keep occupying parts of the country.

The Syrian government didn’t trust Rojava considering the fact that they were starving the Syrian people and stealing Syria’s resources to give to the US, effectively strangling the Syrian economy for a decade especially when considering the heavy US imposed sanctions Syria was under.

The Syrian government countlessly reiterated that if Bashar fell than the group to fill the resulting power vaccum would be Wahabbi fundamentalist Daesh affiliates. Yet Rojava and the SDF stubbornly refuses to move on their demand for political autonomy while giving oil to the US, who sold it in order to fund the Takfeeri groups that the SDF was fighting.

Obviously these fundamentalists, largely backed by Türkiya, strongly opposed Kurdish self determination and often held genocidal intentions towards the Kurds. However instead of recognizing that they were funding their own eventual butchers, the SDF didn’t budge on their demands with the Syrian government until its fall in December of 2024. The US basically withdrew its support for the SDF the beginning of 2025, and fully backed the Jolani regime, leading to the disintegration of Rojava earlier this year.

While Jolani was massacering Alawites it Latakia and Druze in Sweida (and allowing Israel to take Mt. Hebron, putting Damascus in danger of zionist invasion at any time) the SDF did nothing. While 1k people were slaughtered by Jolani’s ghouls every month of the entire year of 2025, the SDF did nothing. While hundreds of alawite women were captured and sent into sex slavery by armed thugs abducting these women off the street, the SDF did nothing.

Christians, Shiites, and anyone who isn’t a Salafi extremist in Syria today, are being harrased daily by Wahabbi fundamentalists. The Jolani regime is stationing foreign terrorist groups made up of Uyghurs from the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), Uzbecks, Chechans, on the border of Lebanon, while declaring that the biggest threat to Syria is Iran and Hezboallah.

Israel whose stolen more Syrian land is apparently so fine and dandy that Jolani gave up the Golan (read Jolan in Arabic) heights.

I’ve watched disgusting videos where these barbaric salafi freaks have patrolled the streets of Syria, call for a man walking with his wife on a stroll to the window, and then tell the man in Arabic something along the lines of, “Brother, some advice, you shouldn’t allow your woman to be out in public while not observing modesty” referring to the fact that the lady isn’t wearing a Niqaab.

It’s blood boiling. Can you fucking imagine?! Being out on the street with your spouse, minding your own business, for fucks sake she’s wearing a Hijab, and this armed goon rolls up to you, his disgusting unkempt beard in your face, and he tries to act like he is some bastion of civilization.

THIS DIDN’T HAPPEN IN SYRIA BEFORE! It was a secular soceity largely free of sectarianism!

But now it’s a playground for fundamentalists to impose draconian policies on a diverse nation of people.

Every church that’s bombed, every alawite raped, every Druze brutalized, and of course every Kurd murdered, I hold Rojava as the most responsible parry towards this modern reality.

Jolani is their monster, he would not be in power today had the SDF conceded to the Syrian government.

I will never forgive them for what they’ve done to my father’s homeland.

To put it simply: Rojava is a cautionary tale.

The Kurds revolted due to legitimate grievances with the leadership of the Syrian Ba’ath under Bashar as well as the wahhabist marauders (backed by tge West ofc) that were trying to remove him from power. They very naively accepted aid from the West in doing so, repeating the same mistake as the Assyrians in the 1920s.

They tried to build a semi-socialist project that wasn’t guided by Marxist principles and was ultimately propped up by the anti-socialist USA. Naturally they were only pawns; the wahhabists were always meant to take over and the Kurds were abandoned once no longer useful.

Hence why Marxists hold a grudge against AANES/Rojava: they put autonomy before anti-imperialism and aligned with empire to pursue independence, destroying an anti-imperialist regime and expanding Western influence as a consequence.

Their reward was literally being left to die.

USrael uses existing ethnic tensions in the region as a weapon to cause unstability. They arm and train militias from these minorities to split the countries apart.

They did this in yugoslavia, syria, lebanon, iraq, china, etc… And now are trying to do the same in Iran.

functionally they stole oil from usa enemy until that enemy collapse, but with leftist aesthetics and then were inevitably betrayed. Now whether some autonomy and woman fighting for that project was worth it jordanification of syria and likely civil war in iran via air tunnel they now provide for entity? opinions differ on vision.

obviously on the tactical scale/the ground they were better than whatever the alternatives were at the time of appearance, and they didn’t appear out of cia, but rather fighting isis and some pkk elements (thus leftist flair), but then again, western tourists have gone to fight for them, and they haven’t gone to fight for hezbolah. Basically secular fighting force turned into useful idiots turned into malicious actors.

https://www.trotskyistplatform.com/?p=1505

Believe it or not, this article was what convinced me to switch from a positive to a neutral stance regarding Rojava. Basically, there is no point in supporting a counterimperialist movement if the empire is just going to move in and immediately make a mess of the place afterwards. The logic was not so much that ‘the U.S. supports Rojava, ergo Rojava is bad’ but ‘Rojava is (either knowingly or unknowingly) cleaning up one mess where someone else is going to make a mess, so there is no point in supporting Rojava’. When I saw it from that perspective, I finally understood why so many communists disliked the YPG. Admittedly, I haven’t kept up with the situation for a while, but if you are referring to the 2010s then that article is a great starting point (although I should warn you that it is lengthy).