Rojava: Why was the revolution

defeated?
The Rojava Revolution of the 2010s was celebrated as a living example of anarchism in
practice. Now, most of the gains of the revolution are being undone, under the blows of the
Islamist regime in Syria. Fred Weston traces the history of the Kurdish Workers’ Party, and
how the ideas of its leader Abdullah Öcalan led to the stalling, and subsequent defeat, of the
revolution.

In July 2012, the Kurds living in northeastern Syria, led by the Syrian section of the Kurdish
Workers’ Party (PKK), declared their autonomy in what became known as the Rojava
Revolution.

For the first time in their history the Syrian Kurds became masters over their own lives and
destinies, and ruled their own homeland. In the process, the masses set up councils or
communes, which initially had mass participation from below, met regularly and took
decisions on running society by themselves.

In the region and beyond, radicalised youth and workers looked to Rojava to see if it could
be a model for others to follow.

Now, this process has gone into reverse. All the gains that had been made in their self-
governed territories are being destroyed under the new Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)
regime, backed by Erdogan’s Turkey.

We must, therefore, understand what happened to the Rojava Revolution and why it has
been defeated, in order to draw out all the necessary lessons, recognise the mistakes, and
prepare for the future.

A century of betrayals
The Kurdish people are considered the largest ethnic group in the world without its own
state. They share a common historical identity and they speak a common language – albeit
with local variations.

Today, according to the Kurdish Institute, around 33 million Kurds are living in an area
known as Kurdistan, that includes southeastern Turkey (with approximately 12 million), an
area in western Iran (with 10 million), northern Iraq (with 8.5 million), and northeastern Syria
(with 2.5 million), plus a small number in Armenia and a few other pockets spread around
the region. Another 2 million live in the Iranian cities of Khorassan and Tehran, as well as 1
million in the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Damascus.

Up to 10 million Kurds now live in major Turkish cities outside of the Kurdistan region, as a
result of internal migration over the past 50 years. Istanbul is even called ‘the biggest
Kurdish city in the world’. During the same period, up to two million have emigrated to
western Europe, most of them to Germany.
For more than a century the Kurds have struggled for self-determination, often with arms in
hand. And they have suffered more than a century of betrayals at the hands of imperialism.

The nearest they ever came to achieving statehood was shortly after the First World War,
after the Ottoman Empire had collapsed. British imperialism had utilised the Kurds mainly as
a lever with which to weaken the Ottomans during the war, while at the same time
consolidating their control over the oil-rich Mosul region.

In the tried and tested policy of the British Empire, anti-Ottoman sentiment among Kurdish
tribes was fostered by offering promises of autonomy. This was to ensure their cooperation
in Britain’s war effort. The British were also considering the advantages for themselves in
creating a buffer region of autonomous Kurdish states to protect their newly acquired
interests in the neighbouring territory of Iraq. The League of Nations had granted Britain a
mandate to administer Iraq in May 1920.

The British promise of Kurdish independence was used after the end of the war, however,
merely as a means of keeping the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan relatively peaceful while Britain
proceeded to consolidate its control over the region. The Treaty of Sèvres, led by Britain and
France in 1920, initially recognised the Kurds as a distinct national grouping, and even
included clauses on the possibility of their national independence in the future.

The Kurds, however, were to receive their first lesson in the untrustworthiness of the
imperialists. It is not by chance that the Kurds have a saying that they have ‘no friends but
the mountains’. It encapsulates more than a century of betrayals at the hands of the various
powers in the region.

The promises that had been made in the Treaty of Sèvres were soon forgotten. And when
the Kurds demanded actual independence, the British turned on them and bombed them.
The British now had other more important interests to defend, namely the incorporation of
the oil-rich Mosul region into Iraq.

With the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, Britain, France and other powers established the
borders of Turkey, which divided the Kurdish people between the states of Turkey, Syria,
Iraq and Iran.

The Turkish state immediately began oppressing the Kurds. It banned the use of the Kurdish
language, and denied them full citizenship as part of its ‘Turkification’ campaign. Even the
words ‘Kurd’ and ‘Kurdistan’ were prohibited for much of the 20th century, with the Turkish
state referring to the Kurdish people as Dağ Türkleri – ‘Mountain Turks’.

In February 1925 there was an armed uprising of the Kurds in Turkey. It was put down
brutally by the Turkish military, which tortured and killed many of those involved. It also
carried out indiscriminate massacres against the Kurds, including burning villages and killing
children.

Another major Kurdish rebellion led to the short-lived Republic of Ararat (1927-31) in the
Turkish region of the Armenian highlands, which was also eventually crushed by Turkish
forces. This was followed a few years later by the Dersim massacre carried out by the
Turkish military in 1937-38. Thousands were killed and many more were forcibly displaced.
Meanwhile, in 1923, when the Soviet Communist Party was still adhering to a Leninist
position on the national question, the administrative unit of ‘Kurdistan Uezd’ was established
within the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic.

What this experience revealed was that on a socialist basis, all the long-standing problems
created by the oppression of minority national groups, and the divisions of whole peoples by
unnatural national borders, could be resolved amicably. Once the power of the landlords and
capitalists had been broken, once the class interests of these people had been eliminated, it
was possible for the workers to set up a system that took into account the national identities
of people who had been downtrodden for centuries.

By 1929, however, as part of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union, the Leninist
position on the national question had been abandoned in favour of what amounted to a
policy of Great Russian domination, and ‘Red Kurdistan’, as it was known, was dissolved
under pressure from Moscow.

Ever since that period, the Kurds have not given up on the idea of gaining self-determination.
This has brought them into conflict with the states they are a minority in throughout the last
century. And every time they have been brutally repressed, as was the case in Iran in the
crushing of the Republic of Mahabad by Iran in 1946, the 1988 genocide the Kurds suffered
in Iraq at the hands of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the oppression of the Kurds of Syria
under the Assad regime.

Evolution of the PKK

It was in this historical context of decades of betrayals and brutal oppression that the Partiya
Karkeren Kurdistan (Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK) was established in 1978 with the
declared aim of establishing an independent Kurdish state. It was founded in Turkey by
Abdullah Öcalan, together with a group of radical Kurdish students amidst a general
radicalisation of the Turkish working class and youth.

The 1960s through to the 1970s had seen rising industrial action across Turkey involving
both Turkish and Kurdish workers and youth. By the end of the 1960s the trade unions had
been massively strengthened, and a wave of strikes and factory occupations broke out in
1969-70. Over 200 official and unofficial strikes took place in 1976.

The movement’s high point was reached in 1977, after which the state repression ramped
up. This culminated in a military coup in 1980 which crushed the working class. The PKK
was unable to lead the Turkish working class in this period, and the defeat of the movement
transformed the party.

The PKK was founded as a Stalinist (‘Marxist-Leninist’) party. As such it had a very rigid,
bureaucratic internal regime, and adhered to the theoretical baggage of Stalinism. According
to this thinking, both Turkey and Kurdistan still had elements of feudalism and, because the
Kurds were an oppressed national group, the first ‘stage’ of the revolution would be to create
a fully independent and democratic Kurdish state on a capitalist basis before any talk of
socialist revolution.

The Turkish bourgeoisie, however, had other ideas. It saw the rising Turkish labour
movement as an existential threat to capitalism itself, and thus began to adopt greater and
greater authoritarian measures to crush the working class, culminating in the military coup of
1980. The reactionary dictatorship installed by the coup then went on to impose severe
restrictions on the Turkish working class. Right-wing groups, such as the Nationalist
Movement Party (MHP), were also unleashed to terrorise working-class neighbourhoods,
and around 5,000 people were killed in the clashes.

But the PKK grew during this period of mass radicalisation. This was because the party and
its offshoots in the region filled the enormous vacuum of leadership on the left. There was a
revolutionary mood among the Kurds, especially among the youth, who looked to the party
as a reference point. The PKK therefore grew to become a mass organisation, sinking very
deep roots, and emerged as the party of Kurdish liberation.

But the crushing of the Turkish working class in 1980 led to the demoralisation of a whole
generation of left activists. It seemed that it was the class struggle itself that had failed in
Turkey, and many looked elsewhere to continue the fight. It was in this context that the ideas
of guerrillaism and terrorism began to gain a greater hearing among a layer of the youth.

The PKK was able to tap into this mood when in 1984 they declared an armed insurgency
against the Turkish state forces, which was conducted using both guerrilla methods and acts
of terrorism.

The Turkish regime’s response was to increase its offensive against the PKK, with
imprisonment, torture, killings and the prohibition of the Kurdish language in public and
private life. Such was the degree of the state repression that three million Kurds ended up
being internally displaced during the 1990s. The conflict would eventually result in more than
40,000 deaths, and is formally still ongoing to this day.

The PKK was, and still is, classed as a terrorist organisation internationally, including by the
United States, the European Union and NATO.

By the mid-1990s, however, the ‘armed struggle’ also appeared to be at a moment of

impasse. The PKK had failed to achieve any of its objectives on the basis of its guerrilla and
terrorist methods, which were proving to be a dead end.

The collapse of the USSR also had a big impact on the party. The PKK leadership, of which
Öcalan was the leading figure, had adhered to the belief that the ideas of Marxism were
being applied in the USSR and Eastern Europe, and that they were genuine communist
societies, which they termed ‘real existing socialism’.

Marxists, however, define such regimes as ‘deformed workers’ states’, where, although there
was a state-owned, centrally planned economy, power was not in the hands of the working
class, but rather in the hands of a parasitic bureaucracy.

Trotsky had predicted that the interests of this bureaucracy would lead it to restore
capitalism if it were not overthrown by the working class. But when the USSR collapsed,
Öcalan, not understanding Trotsky’s analysis, came to see it all as the failure of Marxism.

The PKK leadership under Öcalan subsequently began moving away from the demand for a
separate state for the Kurds.
From what was potentially a mass revolutionary party of the Kurdish people, the PKK’s
leaders ended up giving up on the aim of an independent, workers’ Kurdistan, and moved
towards class reconciliation, particularly inside Turkey.

Öcalan’s new theory

In the early 1980s, Öcalan had taken refuge in Syria. But under pressure from Turkey, the
Hafez al-Assad regime designated the PKK as an illegal terrorist organisation in 1998.
Öcalan went into hiding, before being captured in Nairobi by Turkish intelligence agents in
February 1999. He was extradited to Turkey and imprisoned on İmralı island, put on trial for
treason and separatism, and likely tortured.

While on trial, he called on the PKK to declare a ceasefire and leave Turkish territory. He
was sentenced to death in June, but under international pressure this was commuted to life
imprisonment in 2002 after Turkey abolished the death penalty. He has been in a Turkish
prison cell ever since.

While in prison, he attempted to find an alternative theoretical framework to Marxism. As he

explains: “I had been working on these issues before my abduction. This was truly an
ideological and political break.”1

By chance, he discovered a book by Murray Bookchin, an obscure libertarian-anarchist

writer. Bookchin had developed his own theory of ‘communalism’, a variant of anarchism
advocating the formation of self-managed local municipal communes that would somehow
later link up into a wider network. He claimed that neither private property, nor nationalisation
were solutions to the problems of society.

Öcalan subsequently incorporated Bookchin’s ideas into his own new theoretical outlook
called ‘democratic confederalism’.

In the tradition of anarchism, Öcalan proclaims that the state, which he terms the ‘nation
state’, is the cause of all the problems in society:

“The inability of Marxism, and sociology in general, to see the nation-state’s

relationship with suppression and exploitation […] is a fundamental flaw and
distortion.”2

“I tried to show that the idea that socialism, as proposed by Marx and Engels, could
only be constructed through central nation-states was indeed a fundamental defect of
scientific socialism.”3

Instead, he argues that what is required is for grassroots democratic bodies to be joined up
in what he calls a “non-state democratic nation organisation”, which then gradually
‘democratises’ the bourgeois nation-state:

“The institutional state needs to be subjected to democratic changes. At the end of

this process, there should be a lean state existing simply as a political institution,
which only functions in the fields of internal and external security and in the provision
of social security. Such an idea of the state has nothing in common with the
1 A Öcalan, ‘War and Peace in Kurdistan: Perspectives on a Political Solution to the Kurdish
Question’, The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan, Pluto Press, 2017, pg 17
2 A Öcalan, Democratic Nation, International Initiative, 2017, pg 15
3 ibid. pg 10
 authoritarian character of the classic state, but would rather be regarded as a general
public authority.”4

Accordingly, Öcalan abandons the idea of Kurdish independence: “the foundation of a

separate Kurdish nation-state does not make sense for the Kurds.”5

He states that:

“The PKK does not derive the creation of a Kurdish nation-state from the right of the
people to self-determination. However, we regard this right as the basis for the
establishment of grassroots democracies, without seeking new political borders.”6

“The solution to the Kurdish question will be realised within the framework of the
democratisation of the countries exercising hegemonic power over different parts of
Kurdistan.”7

He advocates that “Each community, ethnicity, culture, religious community, intellectual

movement, economic unit, etc…” should form “a confederation from the local to the global”
based on “direct democracy” or “participative democracy”.8 And all this would gradually
coalesce into a “World Democratic Confederal Union to oppose the United Nations as an
association of nation-states under the leadership of the superpowers”.9

No revolution is required for all this – rather, we are presented with a thoroughly reformist
outlook. Öcalan explains, “It is not realistic, though, to go for the immediate abolition of the
state”.10 And further:

“Revolutionary overthrow or the foundation of a new state does not create

sustainable change. [...] The overcoming of the state, particularly the nation-state, is
a long-term process.”11

It is just a question of “convincing neighbouring nations of this model”.12 He explicitly states

that his model of “democratic confederalism” is:

“... suitable for the building of federal administrative structures in all Kurdish
settlement areas in Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Thus, it is possible to build
confederate structures across all parts of Kurdistan without the need to question
existing borders.”13

What we have here is the idea that a gradual, democratic reform can be applied to the
regime of the Ayatollahs in Iran, to the then Assad regime in Syria, as well as to Iraq and the
Turkey of Erdogan.

4 A Öcalan, ‘War and Peace in Kurdistan: Perspectives on a Political Solution to the Kurdish
Question’, The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan, ibid., pg 19
5 A Öcalan, ‘Democratic Confederalism’, ibid., pg 64
6 A Öcalan, ‘War and Peace in Kurdistan: Perspectives on a Political Solution to the Kurdish
Question’, ibid., pg 18-19
7 ibid., pg 22
8 A Öcalan, ‘Democratic Confederalism’, ibid., pg 69
9 ibid., pg 71
10 A Öcalan, ‘War and Peace in Kurdistan: Perspectives on a Political Solution to the Kurdish
Question’, ibid., pg 19
11 A Öcalan, ‘Democratic Confederalism’, ibid., pg 72
12 ibid., pg 77
13 A Öcalan, ‘War and Peace in Kurdistan: Perspectives on a Political Solution to the Kurdish
Question’, ibid., pg 20
In fact, Öcalan does not even envisage the overthrow of these states, but rather, “Whether
nation-state, republic or democracy – democratic confederalism is open to compromises
concerning state or governmental traditions. It allows for equal coexistence.”14

At the heart of Öcalan’s thinking is a complete lack of understanding of the state. In Öcalan’s
thinking, it is the existing bourgeois state that can slowly cease to have a function, to wither
away. Whereas Marxism – as brilliantly explained by Lenin in his classic, The State and
Revolution – understands that a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is required as the first
necessary step towards a stateless society. In the transitional period, however, if the working
class does not have its own state, i.e. its own special armed bodies, it would be impotent in
the face of the old, bourgeois ruling class’s attempts to overturn the new order.

However, Öcalan rejects this, adding that, “socialism could not be constructed through the
state”.15 Further, he characterises what emerged in Russia and China as “the most
degenerate versions of capitalism.”16

Instead, Öcalan puts forward the alternative of ‘economic autonomy’, which “predicates
neither private capitalism nor state capitalism.”17 Under ‘economic autonomy’:

“The people are to be directly involved in the institutionalisation, governance and

supervision of their own economic, social and political formations.”18

However, capitalism is not to be overthrown:

“A just redistribution of the economic resources presently in the possession of the

state is particularly important for the liberation of society.”19 (Our emphasis)

“Economic autonomy is a model in which profit and capital accumulation is

minimised. Although it does not reject the market, trade, product variety, competition
and productivity, it does, however, reject the dominance of profit and capital
accumulation.”20

By taking this supposed ‘third way’, he states that this allows “the minimum compromise to
be reached between the nation-state and democratic nation”.21

However, this ‘third way’ is illusory, because, as Marx explained, if capital accumulation is
not eliminated, it will eventually take over the whole system. If the capitalist mode of
production survives, no transition to socialism is possible, for if the mode of production
survives so does the class that benefits from it, the capitalist class.

For the “dominance of profit and capital accumulation” to really be “rejected”, what is
required is a socialist revolution that expropriates the commanding heights of the economy
and places them under public ownership as the first step. None of this can be accomplished
14 A Öcalan, ‘Democratic Confederalism’, ibid., pg 66
15 A Öcalan, Democratic Nation, International Initiative, 2017, pg 11
16 ibid.
17 ibid., pg 47
18 A Öcalan, ‘War and Peace in Kurdistan: Perspectives on a Political Solution to the Kurdish
Question’, The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan, Pluto Press, 2017, pg 20
19 ibid., pg 23, our emphasis
20 A Öcalan, Democratic Nation, International Initiative, 2017, pg 47
21 ibid.
unless the workers have their own state, under their control. The bourgeois state needs to
be completely removed, overthrown, and another state put in its place: a workers’ state.

But as Lenin explained, once a workers’ state has been achieved and consolidated, and as
the economy develops to a higher level, a process opens up whereby this state begins to
wither away.

Hence, in the form of a new theoretical model, Öcalan is in fact making his peace with all the
bourgeois states in the region. Addressing the Turkish state, which is keeping him under lock
and key, he pleads:

“I offer Turkish society a simple solution. We demand a democratic nation. We are

not opposed to the unitary state and republic. We accept the republic, its unitary
structure and its laicism [separation of religion from the state]. However, we believe
that it must be redefined as a democratic state that respects peoples, cultures and
rights.”22

The PKK took up the ideas of Öcalan (and, on Öcalan’s insistence, Bookchin) as the
theoretical basis of the party. As we shall see, these ideas were to play a detrimental role in
Rojava and the Kurdish movement in the region.

The Rojava Revolution

In Turkey, far from finding themselves dealing with a state they could ‘co-exist’ with, and
even less, one that could be ‘democratised’, the PKK found itself up against the second
largest army in NATO, which was prepared to use brutal methods to crush all the aspirations
of the Kurds. This was not a state that was prepared to listen to any talk of ‘democratic
experiments’ in local self-government of the Kurds in south-east Turkey. In fact, the Erdogan
government was intent on destroying the PKK, and in 2004 fighting resumed between the
PKK and Turkish forces.

It was in Syria that the Kurdish movement gained a new lease of life. In 2003, during the
period of ceasefire, the Syrian branch of the PKK was formed, called the Partiya Yekîtiya
Demokrat (Democratic Union Party, PYD). Faced with repression from the regime of Bashar
al-Assad, who came to power in 2000 following the death of his father, the PYD operated as
an underground organisation. A change in the situation was brought about with the Syrian
Civil War.

The fallout from the 2008 world financial crisis destabilised the whole of North Africa and the
Middle East. The revolutionary movement of the masses that ensued in 2011 has gone
down in history as the ‘Arab Spring’, and it affected all the countries in the region to one
degree or another. The revolution first spread from Tunisia to Egypt bringing down the hated
Mubarak regime, and then to one country after another in the region. The short-lived Syrian
revolution was part of this.

In March 2011, Syria saw a movement that started with the youth and then spread to other
layers around the country. The movement shook the Assad regime to its foundations, as it
faced the real threat of being overthrown. The violent response of the regime to the many
street protests only served to spread the movement further.
22 A Öcalan, ‘War and Peace in Kurdistan: Perspectives on a Political Solution to the Kurdish
Question’, ibid., pg 26
In the early stages it was possible to see the beginnings of a Syrian revolution which was a
product of the social and economic crisis that was affecting Syria in the aftermath of the
world financial crisis of 2008. The people protesting on the streets, led mainly by the youth,
raised the slogan of ‘We are all Syrians’: a clear message that they wished to see a united
movement of Sunni, Alawite, Christian, and Kurdish communities.

However, the lack of a revolutionary party, capable of uniting and leading the various
sections of Syrian society along class lines, allowed the regime to play the card of divide and
rule, in addition to carrying out a campaign of brutal repression. The result was the
emergence of reactionary elements, including Islamic fundamentalists, that were
systematically propped up by western imperialism and regional imperialist powers, who were
able to take over whole regions of the country.

From the potential for an all-Syrian revolution, the situation quickly degenerated into a
sectarian civil war, with the Assad regime fighting on different fronts.

A vacuum had appeared in which the Assad regime could not control the whole country.
Thus in 2011 the PYD promoted the formation of the People’s Defence Units (YPG), which
was essentially a people’s army made up of tens of thousands of Kurdish youth, women and
men. The YPG also formed a women’s section, the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ). The
fact that women played such a prominent role was revolutionary in and of itself in the context
of the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the PYD set about establishing a system of ‘people’s councils’ across the
Kurdish areas of north-east Syria, as a means to implementing ‘democratic autonomy’. Their
tasks included the distribution of food and fuel, and the resolution of local conflicts.

By August 2011 the councils organised just under half of the Kurdish population of the
region. At that point, 300 delegates from the various councils met to set up the People’s
Council of West Kurdistan (MGRK), to spread the council movement. It elected a
coordinating body of 33 people called the Democratic Society Movement – Tevgera Civaka
Demokratik (TEV-DEM). The movement was open to all peoples and all democratic political
parties, although the PYD was by far the leading element.

As the Syrian Civil War progressed, the Assad regime became increasingly unable to
provide public services. The MGRK therefore stepped in to fill the gaps, in areas such as
security, justice, and maintenance of basic infrastructure. It was becoming a state within a
state.

In the summer of 2012 the Assad regime was facing a serious crisis. On the one hand, the
western part of the country was seeing upheaval and turmoil, and required immediate
attention. And in the north-east, the growth of the PYD carried with it the possibility of a
Kurdish uprising breaking out in the midst of the civil war.

As explained by Hanife Hisên, a member of the TEV-DEM leadership:

“The state had no substantial military force. We surrounded them… and they
surrendered. The regime couldn’t send them any reinforcements. We didn’t turn a
 single soldier over to the regime – we just talked to them and called their families to
come pick them up.”23

Therefore, Assad essentially allowed the Kurdish organisations to take over. In effect, Assad
leant on the Kurds opportunistically after years of oppressing them.

In this context, the Kurds of Syria were able to establish self-rule, winning many rights they
had fought for in previous decades. In July 2012 the PYD took control of a large area in the
north and north-east of Syria. As this region was geographically Western Kurdistan, it was
called ‘Rojava’, meaning ‘the West’ or ‘where the sun sets’.

This winning of Kurdish self-rule was the beginning of what became known as the Rojava
Revolution.

Self-rule in Rojava
By this point the MGRK councils were attracting hundreds of thousands of participants. So
popular were the councils that the structure was expanded to include a new level at the
bottom, the commune, which typically organised between 30 to 200 households of a
residential street, and met every one or two months.

Communes elected delegates to attend neighbourhood assemblies with the right of recall.
These in turn elected delegates to district councils, which encompassed whole cities and
their surrounding villages. Each district council elected a governing body, known as a TEV-
DEM, which also included representatives of political parties and social movements. And at
the top of the entire structure was the MGRK, with its own TEV-DEM.

Running through this structure were eight ‘commissions’, which were responsible for various
aspects of social life, such as defence, the economy, justice, etc. The women’s commissions
were granted special status, and overlapped with all the other commissions. In practice,
most of the self-organisation of society took place through these committees, which
represented an embryonic form of workers’ and peasants’ democracy, reminiscent of the
role played by the soviets in the Russian Revolution.

As reported by a US activist, Arthur Pye, who spent a year in Rojava:

“People were coming together, taking responsibility for their community, sharing,
discussing, criticizing, debating, deciding…As I listened to their reports and
proposals, something many people would probably find boring, I felt goosebumps.”24

This network of people’s councils had the potential to dismantle the bourgeois state in the
areas under Kurdish control, which would have marked a giant leap for the Rojava
Revolution, and opened the way for even further social transformation. They were essentially
an embryonic form of the dictatorship of the proletariat as envisaged by Marx.

But although the PYD had led the way in setting up the councils, it introduced a number of
measures which held them back from the complete seizure of power. At the initiative of the
PYD, all political parties, NGOs, and social movements were granted five representatives on

23 Quoted in M Knapp, A Flach, E Ayboğa, Revolution in Rojava, Pluto Press, 2016, pg 54

24 A Pye, ‘Hope and Contradictions: My Year in Rojava’, Strange Matters
the TEV-DEM coordinating bodies of the district councils, regardless of their social weight or
class composition.

For example, on the Hesekê district council, the PYD had five representatives, as did five
other parties. Families of the martyrs had five, Yekîtiya Star (the woman’s union) had five,
the Revolutionary Youth had five, as did the Liberals, who had played no role in the
revolution. It was not possible for delegates to remove these guaranteed positions, meaning
the real leadership of the district councils, and hence of the Rojava-wide MGRK, was
ultimately accountable to the PYD and its partners, rather than the councils.

The most important questions, including the conduct of the war, and Rojava’s relations with
the outside world, remained firmly in the hands of the PYD-YPG leadership. Thus the fate of
the councils, and of the Rojava Revolution would be tied to the strategy pursued by this
leadership. And the leadership tied its strategy to the ideas of Öcalan, whose picture could
be found in public places all over Rojava.

Dual power
Despite the enormous potential for the workers and peasants to take over the running of
society themselves in Rojava, this was never fully realised. Instead, in keeping with Öcalan’s
idea of ‘equal’ coexistence, the leaders of the PYD limited the scope of the revolution to that
which would be acceptable to the surrounding states of the region, and to the landlords and
capitalists that these states ultimately serve.

Throughout this period, the Kurdish movement in Syria was split amongst numerous political
parties. A number of more conservative Kurdish parties formed a coalition called the Kurdish
National Council in Syria (KNC), which worked to undermine the PYD and its network of
councils.

The KNC had played no role in the liberation of Rojava from the Assad regime, and refused
to participate in the new council structure. Yet despite this, the PYD agreed to an equal
power sharing agreement with it in the form of the Supreme Kurdish Council (SKC), which
they acknowledged to be the highest authority in Rojava.

Thus a regime of dual power existed from the beginning of the Rojava Revolution, whereby
elements of a revolutionary workers’ state, based on the people’s councils, functioned side
by side with the pre-existing bourgeois state, which although weakened had not been
destroyed. All of this was in alignment with Öcalan’s vision of ‘democratic confederalism’.

Tensions within the SKC reached a high point in mid-2013, when Rojava came under attack
from the Islamic State, the Islamists of the Al-Nusra front, and the Free Syrian Army. The
Iraqi Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which was in power across the border in Iraqi
Kurdistan, refused to permit aid into Rojava, effectively maintaining a blockade against
Rojava, with the support of not only the Turkish state but of the PYD’s conservative
‘partners’ in the KNC.

Hoping to break out from its isolation, the PYD leadership was keen to obtain diplomatic
recognition of Rojava, both within Syria, and internationally. Its leaders reasoned that foreign
governments were hostile to Rojava’s democratic council structure, but would be more
amenable to negotiations with a traditional bourgeois-democratic parliament. The PYD
therefore proposed a ‘transitional administration’, whereby a representative parliament would
govern with the participation of all political parties and ethnic groups.

Accordingly, in the autumn of 2013 the PYD organised the drafting of a social-democratic
constitution, known as the ‘Social Contract’. More than fifty organisations of Kurds, Arabs,
Syriacs and others were involved, in discussions that lasted for three months. Although the
KNC was invited, they refused to participate.

The Social Contract specified that the three cantons that made up Rojava were to be
governed on the basis of ‘democratic autonomy’, but that they would remain a component of
a democratic Syrian state. In theory, it would serve as a model for other regions to follow.

In January 2014, the cantons of Cizîrê, Kobanî, and Afrîn declared their acceptance of the
Social Contract, and each set up their own ‘democratic-autonomous administration’ (DAA).
Each DAA had its own legislative council, elected executive, and supreme constitutional
court. The SKC was thus replaced with a more extreme version of dual power, with an
openly bourgeois state existing side by side with elements of a workers’ state, and with both
being dominated by the PYD.

Although Öcalan conceived that the grassroots ‘non-state’ would gradually render the ‘nation
state’ at the top redundant, here we had the PYD consciously working to build up the
authority of a new bourgeois state at the top. But ultimately, such a regime of dual power can
only ever be temporary – one power must devour the other.

Nevertheless, for the first time in their history, the Syrian Kurdish masses were masters over
their own lives and destinies. Despite inheriting a very underdeveloped economy, conscious
efforts were made to transform the provision of food, healthcare and education, and to
involve the widest layers of society in democratic decision making.

The revolution delivered democratic and social gains, particularly for women. According to
the new Social Contract, women were to be guaranteed at least 40 per cent representation
at all levels of the administration, and all leading positions were to be held jointly by two
chairs: one male and one female. A campaign was initiated against domestic violence, and
women’s centres were established in every neighbourhood.

The most significant transformation of consciousness regarding women, however, was a

product of their role in the women’s YPJ units, which played a significant role in defeating
ISIS. For example, Sami Saeed Mirza, a Yazidi man rescued by the YGJ from ISIS, told The
New York Times:

“‘The battle made me think of women differently… Women fighters – they saved us.
My society, Yazidi society, is more, let’s say, traditional. I’d never thought of women
as leaders, as heroes, before.”25

Yet despite unleashing a process whereby the masses were encouraged to take control of
their lives and communities from the bottom up, key barriers remained such as the poverty of
the economy, and the isolation of the revolution. The only way to overcome these limits

25 Quoted in W Enzinna, ‘A Dream of Secular Utopia in ISIS’ Backyard’, The New York Times, 24
November 2015
would have been to enact a revolutionary social programme, that seized the property of the
landowners and (limited) industries, and on this basis, attempted to export the revolution.

The reformism of the PYD leadership, however, consciously held back this process from the
top, so as to pursue alliances on a class-collaborationist basis. For example, in keeping with
Öcalan’s ideas, whilst they seized property of the Assad regime in the areas under their
control, they refused to expropriate the large landowners and local capitalists. Instead, their
economic strategy was based on encouraging the formation of cooperatives from below.
These were to form the basis of a new ‘social economy’, whilst leaving the market intact.
This, ultimately, would play a determining role in the subsequent course of events.

What had emerged were the elements of a workers’ state. The process, however, was never
completed, first because these elements never fully took over the running of society in order
to consolidate workers’ power, and second because the question of the ownership of the
means of production was never resolved.

This was not the first time a revolution had begun but had not completed the process of
social transformation. Back in the 1970s we saw a similar development in the Nicaraguan
Revolution where power fell into the hands of a guerrilla army.

The fate of the Nicaraguan Revolution demonstrated very clearly that for a revolution to be
consolidated as a workers’ state, it is not sufficient to replace the armed bodies of men of the
old regime with those of a guerrilla army. Unless the new regime proceeds to expropriate the
landlords and the bourgeois class, and then works to expand the revolution beyond its own
borders, as the only way of developing the productive forces, sooner or later, “all the old crap
must revive”, as Marx explained.

The struggle against ISIS

Very soon after self-rule was established in Rojava, its very existence was threatened by the
spread of ISIS.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein, but it also led to
the collapse of the state apparatus itself. This created the conditions in which an al-Qaeda
affiliate was set up in Iraq in 2004, which would ultimately evolve into the Islamic State of
Iraq (ISI). This later spread into Syria in 2013, becoming the infamous ISIS (Islamic State of
Iraq and Syria) in 2014.

ISIS set out to establish a caliphate across the Middle East, in which it would impose a
fundamentalist version of Sharia law. At its peak it governed a vast area of Iraq and Syria
where around 12 million people lived. It was renowned for its brutality against its enemies,
and especially women. For example, in August 2014 when ISIS attacked Yazidi and
Christian villages in Iraqi Kurdistan, they captured more than 7,000 women. The women
were repeatedly raped, and either forced to marry jihadis, or sold as sex slaves.

The Kurds of Rojava proved to be the most effective force in the war against ISIS. It is not
difficult to understand why that was. ISIS was an extremely reactionary and brutal force,
while at the same time the Kurds had a cause to fight for. ISIS was an existential threat to
them. They were fighting both for their homeland and all the conquests of their revolution.
They had achieved self-rule in Rojava and they had an ideal in which they believed.
A major event was the victory of the Kurds against the ISIS siege of Kobanî, a key Syrian
Kurdish town on the border with Turkey, in 2014-15. Despite being massively outnumbered
by ISIS forces, the YPG and YPJ successfully recaptured the town after months of gruelling
street-to-street fighting. In this the Kurds were assisted by the US Air Force, which bombed
ISIS positions, and air-dropped supplies.

Therefore, by early 2015, the gains being made in Rojava and the heroic fight against ISIS
gave the Kurds in Syria enormous authority among the Kurdish masses in the region. These
included those in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as among the wider masses of the whole of the
Middle East, and further afield in the western world as a whole.

At its peak the ‘Rojava experiment’, as many referred to it, was very popular on the left
internationally. It was seen as a beacon of hope, as a new way of changing society, as an
example of people’s self-rule.

In the blurb of the book Revolution in Rojava, published by Pluto Press in October 2016, we
read:

“A new kind of society is being built in Syria, but it’s not one you would expect.
Surrounded by deadly bands of ISIS and hostile Turkish forces, the people living in
Syria’s Rojava cantons are carving out one of the most radically progressive
societies on the planet today.”26

One of the authors of the book later commented in an interview:

“Visiting Rojava was like a dream come true. It was what we had been fighting for all
those years – a free society that administers itself.”27

The Rojava Revolution had made some impressive achievements in very difficult conditions.
But it remained under siege from all sides, and was faced with many objective problems.
Only by spreading the revolution could Rojava break out of its isolation and establish real
freedom for the Kurds. And at the peak of the movement around 2015 there were several
opportunities to do so.

Forming alliances
In Syria as a whole there is the mass of working people, with the Sunni Arabs being the
predominant ethnic group, but there are also the Alawites, the Druzes and several others.
They had all suffered the consequences of the crisis of the old Assad regime, and the
breakdown of the fabric of society.

Nevertheless, the YPG were the most progressive and effective force fighting ISIS and the
other Islamist militias. As a result of their victories, they had begun to take over areas
inhabited by Arabs, Syriacs, and other non-Kurdish groups. Many of these, however, were
skeptical of the PYD, and hesitant about joining the councils.

26 M Knapp, A Flach, E Ayboğa, Revolution in Rojava, Pluto Press, 2016

27 J Biehl, ‘Revolution in Rojava’, New Compass, 4 November 2016
If the PYD had encouraged non-Kurdish workers and peasants to set up their own militia
units, as well as taking over the land and factories, this could have transformed the YPG into
a revolutionary army for the whole of Syria.

During the siege of Kobanî, US imperialism intervened to assist the Kurds in their fight
against ISIS. At that time, the US saw ISIS as a destabilising force that threatened its
interests in the region. We should remember that the US was waging a war in Afghanistan
aimed at removing the Taliban from power and dismantling al-Qaeda.

Therefore, at that moment it seemed that US interests and those of the Rojava Kurds
matched. After the successful liberation of Kobanî in January 2015, the US made an official
alliance with the Kurds of Rojava to provide arms, military know-how, and a limited force on
the ground.

As well as providing aid in the fight against ISIS, the Rojava leadership also believed that a
US military presence in their territory would be a way of deterring military intervention from
Turkey. However, as we shall see, it did no such thing.

Given that the Rojava Kurds were facing an existential threat from ISIS, it is understandable
that the YPG would accept arms and supplies from anyone willing to offer them, even if they
were the world’s foremost imperialist power. However, the deal made with the Americans
came with serious political concessions, which in the long run seriously weakened the
revolution.

Faced with the awkward situation of making an alliance with the Syrian section of the PKK, a
proscribed terrorist organisation, the US imperialists insisted that the YPG be fused into a
wider fighting force, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), alongside a number of Arab tribal
militias. These militias were under the control of the reactionary tribal leaders and landlords,
and therefore hostile to many of the reforms carried out in Rojava. Therefore, although the
YPG formed the core of the SDF, their role as a people’s militia was diluted through these
alliances.

As the YPG expanded its control into non-Kurdish areas of Syria, the scale of these alliances
grew. Instead of seeking unity with the oppressed non-Kurdish masses, the alliances were
made by conducting ‘pragmatic’ deals at the top, based on fighting common enemies such
as ISIS.

There was no ideological alignment between them. For instance, on the question of the role
of women, the Kurds had to back off and leave to one side all the talk of women’s rights,
women leaders, etc., and acquiesce to the much more conservative norms of the Arab tribal
leaders. The PYD therefore undermined their own base of support by forging such alliances.

The tribal leaders, the Sheiks, had a long tradition of forming ‘alliances’ based on their own
class interests, and would flip sides as soon as it was convenient for them to do so. In the
end, these tribal leaders did end up betraying the Kurds, as we shall see.

The alliance with US imperialism and with the reactionary Arab tribal leaders inevitably
meant a greater and greater isolation of the area in which progressive reforms had been
achieved, as well as a reversal of some of the gains. The PYD did make efforts to spread the
council system to non-Kurdish areas. But by leaving the property of the Arab landlords in
place, their ability to offer a transformative social programme to the non-Kurdish masses was
severely limited, thus restricting the revolution to the Kurdish areas of Rojava.

Iraq
At the heart of the failure of the Rojava Revolution is the rejection on the part of Öcalan of an
internationalist and class approach to the question of Kurdish national identity. This would
lead to a number of missed opportunities to spread the Rojava Revolution to other parts of
Kurdistan.

In Iraq, for example, the Rojava Revolution had a big impact on the Kurdish movement in
2014-15.

After Saddam Hussein was brought down by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Kurds of
Iraq won a degree of autonomy, when the interim Iraqi constitution established the Kurdistan
Regional Government (KRG). The KRG is dominated by what amounts to two authoritarian,
corrupt, family dynasties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) led by the Barzani family,
and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) led by the Talabani family.

The Barzanis and the Talabanis divide power and influence between them, very much like
mafia gangs. Both families, while promoting their own business interests, are also proxies of
local powers. The Turkish regime has close links with the Barzani family, who export oil to
Turkey, while also cooperating to curb the influence of the PKK and the PYD. The Iranian
regime, on the other hand, has leaned on the Talabani family as a counterweight to Turkey’s
influence in Iraq.

Both families have always been extremely hostile to the PKK and to their PYD offshoot just
across the border, fearing the influence they could have on the Kurds in Iraq. They have
tried to bolster more conservative forces among the Kurds of Syria, such as the KNC. In
2013, whilst Rojava was under attack from ISIS, they closed the border between Iraqi and
Syrian Kurdish territories in a bid to destroy the PYD.

But in 2014, the heroism of the Rojava Kurds offered an opportunity to transform the
situation. The Yazidis – a Kurdish-speaking religious minority – had found themselves
isolated and besieged by the forces of ISIS on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. They had
suffered a terrible genocide at the hands of ISIS, which saw the killing of over 5,000.
Thousands of their women were forced into sexual slavery. Tens of thousands were trapped
facing the threat of a brutal end.

The PKK-YPG played a critical role in saving them. They went in and established a safe
corridor, rescuing up to 50,000 trapped people. While the Barzanis essentially abandoned
the people they claimed to represent to a horrific fate at the hands of ISIS, the PKK and the
YPG made great sacrifices to save the Yazidis.

This sent a powerful message throughout all of Iraqi Kurdistan, especially amongst the
youth. They could see that their own so-called Kurdish regional government was playing an
extremely reactionary role. This gave the PKK enormous authority among the Kurdish
masses of Iraq, and led to offshoot organisations being set up amongst the Yazidis.
The influence of the PKK-YPG in Iraq was a threat not only to the Barzani and Talabani rule
of the KRG, but to Erdogan’s regional interests, since the Barzanis were – and are –
essentially his puppet.

However, the PKK-YPG refrained from building a mass organisation amongst the Kurdish
workers and youth in Iraq.

The problem was that their leaders were not thinking in class terms, but merely in terms of
the existing states. They could not see the huge potential that existed for an all-Kurdish
movement across all the borders based on class issues.

Thinking purely in military terms, they did not wish to upset the Iranian regime and its proxies
by widening the struggle into Iraq. Instead they sought Iranian support, or tacit support, as a
counter-balancing force against Turkey.

They therefore did not put up a serious electoral fight in the KRG local elections, but instead
built ties with the Iranian proxy PUK led by the Talabani clan.

While this may have made some sense from an immediate military point of view, in political
terms it was completely counterproductive because it served to undermine the authority of
the PKK-PYD amongst the youth in the area.

The YPG could have encouraged the youth in Iraqi Kurdistan to form their own units, and to
set up democratic councils to assist in carrying out a revolutionary social programme. But
since this would have meant clashing with the Barzani/Talabani gangsters, and their regional
backers, they consciously held back from spreading the revolution as a defensive measure.
Ultimately, however, this ended up weakening the revolution in Rojava, as it allowed the
Barzanis to continue to starve the Rojava Kurds, at Erdogan’s behest.

Turkey
Perhaps most important of all, for a period there were significant opportunities for the
Kurdish movement in Turkey to strike against the Erdogan regime, which was always bitterly
hostile to Rojava.

From the beginning, Erdogan consciously worked to destroy the ‘Rojava experiment’, which
was a direct obstacle to his ambitions in Syria. Early in the Syrian Civil War, Erdogan was
working to install an Islamist force in power as a means of spreading his own sphere of
influence in the region. He also aimed to gain control of Syrian oil.

However, the spread of the influence of the PKK-PYD in Syria and Iraq also shifted the
balance of forces within Turkey. This explains why the Ankara government accepted the
PKK’s appeal for peace negotiations in 2012. There was also the fact that Erdogan’s Justice
and Development Party (AKP), had faced some setbacks in both the 2009 local elections
and the 2011 general elections. Further, the AKP hoped they could possibly win some of the
more conservative layers among the Kurds in Turkey.

Also in 2012, a left-wing Kurdish-based party was founded, called the Halkların Demokratik
Partisi (the Peoples’ Democratic Party, HDP), which was to grow enormously when the Gezi
Park movement erupted in June 2013. This was a mass movement reflecting rising
dissatisfaction with the Erdogan regime, against its privatisations, its attacks, its austerity
measures, its authoritarianism, as well as its attempts at the Islamisation of society.

The Turkish working-class movement was leaderless and lacked any parties putting up a
bold opposition to Erdogan. In this vacuum, the Kurdish movement became a point of
reference. For the first time since the 1970s, Turkish and Kurdish workers and youth were
fighting together against the ruling class.

The HDP gained a lot of support in the elections in 2015, and they entered Parliament with
13.1 per cent of the vote, winning 80 seats in the 550-seat parliament. This was a big blow to
Erdogan, who, aiming to consolidate power in his hands, needed a parliamentary majority in
order to change the constitution and implement a presidential system.

Hence, the Kurdish movement, in galvanising the rising class anger in Turkey, was
becoming a threat to Erdogan's regime itself.

There was also an interplay between the events in Rojava and in Turkey. When ISIS laid
siege to Kobanî, Erdogan counted on this destroying the power of the PYD in Rojava, and
actively sabotaged its defence of the city. Protests erupted in Turkey, as well as
internationally, in support of the Rojava Kurds. Erdogan met the protests with repression.

Things came to a head when Erdogan launched an offensive, a civil war, against the Kurds
of Turkey in the summer of 2015. Turkish military forces attacked key towns that were
effectively controlled by the PKK in Turkey, razing many of them to the ground.

Erdogan whipped up extreme nationalist hysteria with two aims in mind. Firstly he wanted to
cut across the rising class struggle and to divert attention from the class problems that
people had by dividing the working class along ethnic lines. Secondly, he aimed to prevent
the Kurds from consolidating their control over the increasingly large areas they were gaining
influence in, as this was giving a powerful impetus to Kurdish unity across the national
borders, enormously strengthening the prospect of an independent Kurdistan.

The Turkish state was not going to let this happen. Herein we see one of the fundamental
weaknesses in the theoretical position of Öcalan. The Turkish state was not listening to his
appeals to ‘democratise’. On the contrary, it was acting in defence of the ruling class of
Turkey, of its wealth, privileges and influence.

But the leaders of the Kurdish movement responded to Erdogan’s attacks with vacillation
and compromise. Every time Erdogan raised the pressure, or different powers in the region
raised the pressure, the leaders of the movement thought that they could negotiate or
manoeuvre themselves out of the predicament they found themselves in.

This did not correspond to the mood on the ground. Erdogan’s civil war was having an
enormously radicalising effect among the Kurds in Turkey, who were coming out onto the
streets. There were rolling general strikes in all of the areas and all of the regions that the
Kurds lived in. The youth were willing to fight against the brutality of the Turkish regime, and
they could have taken power in many of these areas.

However, with the excuse that they were too busy fighting in Syria, the PKK did not build on
this movement, or provide it with the necessary leadership. There was another important
element: they didn't want to alienate the Americans and the West who were supporting and
arming them in Syria.

Erdogan went on to crush the PKK inside Turkey, placing Kurdish cities under military curfew
and shelling civilian buildings, killing thousands. This had a demoralising effect and was a
big blow to the Kurdish movement as a whole.

Furthermore, in the face of attacks from Erdogan, the HDP leaders fell back to a nationalist
rhetoric and attempted to cooperate and collaborate with Erdogan in return for a deal on the
Kurdish question and the Kurdish areas. This suited Erdogan down to the ground, as it
undermined the authority they had built up amongst both Kurdish and Turkish workers and
youth with their class politics. After the good results in the June 2015 elections they suffered
a setback in the following November elections, even in the Kurdish areas of Turkey.

The independence referendum of 2017

A further opportunity to build a mass base in Iraq was missed in 2017. The Barzanis called a
referendum for Kurdish independence. It was clear that KDP leader Masoud Barzani put this
forward for opportunist reasons. Since he was losing popular support, he tried to offset this
by whipping up nationalist sentiment. But in doing so, he was trying to tap into the
progressive revolutionary mood that existed amongst the Kurdish masses in Iraq.

The Kurdish masses across the region, not only in Iraq but also in Turkey and Syria,
massively backed the referendum. However, the PKK-PYD leaders made the mistake of only
giving lukewarm support. They were hoping to see Barzani’s political gamble fail, while at the
same time appeasing the Iranians and their proxies.

With the position they adopted in relation to this referendum, they set up a barrier between
themselves and the radicalising masses in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. Instead of
tapping into the mood that existed, instead of coming out firmly and loudly in favour of
independence, the PKK adopted a very half-hearted approach, and therefore failed to build.

What was required was for the PKK to put forward an independent class position, explaining:
‘Yes, we are also for independence, but our fight for independence is also against the
corrupt bourgeois clans, against the reactionary tribal leaders, against the capitalists that you
all hate, against both the KDP and the PUK’.

In the end the ‘Yes’ vote won by more than 90 per cent. Naturally, the US, the Iraqi central
government, Iran and Turkey all united to block the independence movement, which led to
direct military confrontations. Iraqi state forces invaded and eventually occupied all of Iraqi
Kurdistan. But again, the PKK and PYD basically stood by, at best objecting very weakly
only in words.

The invasion of Afrin

By this point the revolution had stalled. A number of political retreats had been made by the
PYD leadership to preserve their military position. But eventually these paved the way for
severe military defeats, as they strengthened the revolution’s enemies, and weakened their
own base of support.
For example, in January 2018, Erdogan stepped up his campaign against the Kurds by
invading Afrin – a stronghold of the revolution. After two months of bitter fighting, Afrin was
captured by the Turkish military.

It should be remembered that one of the key justifications for the alliance with US
imperialism was, in theory, to guard against such an eventuality. But when push came to
shove, the US did nothing to stop Erdogan. This was entirely foreseeable, since US
imperialism would never have favoured the Kurds over a NATO ally, and important regional
power.

This marked an important turning point in the development of the Rojava Revolution.
Previously, despite the many difficulties faced by the revolution, the YPG and YPJ had
largely been successful on the battlefield.

As a result, the area controlled by the Kurds had expanded into non-Kurdish areas, inhabited
mostly by Arabs. Therefore the term ‘Rojava’, was dropped in 2016, to be eventually
replaced officially with the title ‘Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East
Syria’ (DAANES). At its peak in 2017-18, the administration controlled around one-third of
Syria’s land area, and included between 15-25 per cent of its population.

After the loss of Afrin, that process then went into reverse. Whilst before, there had been a
number of opportunities to spread the revolution, such as in Iraq and Turkey, now the
revolution was faced with retreat.

The problem of the economy

The Rojava Revolution was faced with many serious objective problems. We have already
mentioned the menace of ISIS. Simultaneous to this was the problem of how to develop the
economy.

We must remember that this self-rule was being administered in the poorest corner of a poor
country, which was facing dire economic conditions amidst a sectarian civil war.

The Kurdish regions of Syria were particularly poor because the previous Assad regime had
a conscious policy of keeping them economically underdeveloped. Major industries and
power plants were kept in the Arab areas.

This was further aggravated by Western sanctions on Syria, making some vital products
difficult to import. The whole of Syria also suffered skyrocketing inflation.

Meanwhile, as has already been explained, Turkey, which shares a long northern border
with Rojava, was attempting to crush the Rojava Revolution. Erdogan began with cutting off
water and energy supplies from Turkey, before later carrying out military attacks.

The Rojava leadership tried to directly apply Öcalan’s ideas to develop the economy, namely
the ‘social communal model’ of forming cooperatives that will gradually take over from
private capital.

But as explained by Arthur Pye, in his article ‘Hope and Contradictions: My Year in Rojava’,
published in March 2024:
 “While the movement was making a concerted effort to build a ‘social economy’
through the creation of worker cooperatives, after ten years of revolution these new
anticapitalist enterprises still represented only a marginal part of the overall economy.
Despite redistribution of property previously owned by the regime, much of the
economy remained in the control of wealthy local landlords and employers.” (Our
emphasis)28

This was a key flaw of the revolution. No matter how democratic a system can appear to be,
if it does not solve the basic problems of the masses, it will eventually lose the enthusiastic
support of the early days of the revolution. If it does not offer the prospect of permanent and
stable change for ordinary working people, eventually even the participation in all the
democratic bodies will dwindle and decline.

This process was pointed out in an interview published in January 2024 by Lefteast:

“Every neighbourhood has a commune […] But in reality, it’s very easy to observe
that the participation of the people in these communes is rather low or it’s not high
enough for these bodies, for these mechanisms to become the main decision-making
units as they are supposed to be in theory that the Kurdish movement has developed
and has been trying to implement.”29

And in the words of two employees of the autonomous administration in Hasaka, interviewed
for a Civil Society Knowledge Centre research study in 2024: “We cannot afford meat
anymore for example, sometimes we need to borrow money to buy medicine we need.”
Researchers concluded, “Participants also pointed out their lack of hope for change, their
resignation, and surviving one day at a time.”30

Similarly, Arthur Pye, concluded from his year in Rojava that:

“Many starry-eyed western radicals have traveled to Rojava only to become

disillusioned by this realisation. Some arrive desperate to see the society of their
dreams; a place where oppression has been eliminated and all people are flourishing
equally in their newfound liberation. What they find is a society neck-deep in
problems, where many of the revolution’s aspirations stand in sharp contrast to the
harsh realities of life in Syria.”31

And all these above quoted texts are written by people who have been very supportive of
Rojava and are in no way hostile to what the people there were trying to achieve. But they
are forced to come to terms with the fact that the ‘experiment’ was failing.

What this reveals is that although in Rojava self-governing councils had been established,
although many cooperative movements had been set up, although the people were armed,
the limited nature of the local economy and its isolation meant that some of the very basic
economic problems could not be solved.

28 A Pye, ‘Hope and Contradictions: My Year in Rojava’, Strange Matters, our emphasis
29 A Rebrii, L Shishko, ‘The Revolution against the Odds: an Interview on Rojava with Anya Rebrii
and Liza Shishko (Part I: The Messiness of the Revolutionary Process)’, Lefteast, 4 January 2024
30 M Blakah, M Younes, ‘Poverty, Precarity, and Isolation: The Economic Situation of Syria’s “Middle
Class”’, Civil Society Knowledge Centre, October 2023
31 A Pye, ‘Hope and Contradictions: My Year in Rojava’, Strange Matters
The very simple and basic fact remains that in Rojava capitalism was not overthrown. Whilst
it is true that given the poverty of the economy to begin with, even the expropriation of the
landlords and local capitalists would not have been sufficient to relieve Rojava’s problems.
Nevertheless, by placing the economy under the control of the workers and peasants,
guided by a democratic, socialist plan of production, a much deeper process of social
revolution would have been started.

Not only would this have drawn more people into the people’s councils, including non-Kurds,
but it would have given them greater ability to actually transform their lives in the process.
Most importantly, it would have provided an incredible inspiration for the workers and
masses of the neighbouring regions, and given an impetus to the spreading of the revolution
into Iraq, Turkey, and beyond.

Capitulation
Despite these economic problems within Rojava, the Syrian Kurds were still determined to
defend their homeland and defeat ISIS. A US-led coalition with both Iraqi forces and the SDF
eventually liberated 95 per cent of the territory, with the final ISIS stronghold of Baghouz
falling in 2019. ISIS still remained a threat, but had been forced back into clandestine
activities with continued, though reduced, operations in the region.

In the meantime, the problems of the revolution continued to increase. Turkey, after its
capture of Afrin, invaded the region multiple times, and constantly bombarded Kurdish areas
with artillery and drones.

Participation in the democratic structures declined, given the increasing demoralisation, and
mounting economic problems. Nevertheless, the Assad regime was content to permit the
existence of the DAANES, in order to keep the SDF on side in its struggle against the
Islamists and Turkey.

As the civil war dragged on, the Assad regime became increasingly hollowed out. Things
came to a head in December 2024, when Assad was overthrown by the Turkish-backed
Islamists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The new Islamist regime, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa,
was not prepared to permit the continuation of self-rule in north-east Syria, and quickly
prepared for a showdown with its enemies.

Erdogan wants to see a united Syria under the control of al-Sharaa, with a widening of
Turkey’s sphere of influence, together with an end to any form of autonomy of the Kurds.
This involves a dismantling of the Rojava administration and the integration of its militias into
the Syrian national army – in effect a total surrender.

As part of this effort, Erdogan put pressure on Öcalan to dissolve the PKK and its affiliates,
in return for the granting of certain democratic and cultural rights to the Kurds in Turkey. By
this point, the PKK leadership had been weakened after years of Turkish bombings and
drone attacks to its base in the Qandil mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Öcalan accepted Erdogan’s offer. In his article titled ‘The PKK Has Reached the End of Its
Life Cycle and Should Be Dissolved’, published on 28 February 2025, he calls on the PKK
fighters, not only to lay down their arms, but also to dissolve the party itself. This came after
more than 40 years of armed struggle on the part of the PKK against the Turkish state:
 “Like many other historical movements, it [the PKK] has now reached the end of its
life cycle and therefore needs to be dissolved.”32

Öcalan not only declares the end of the PKK, but he also states that, “For over a millennium,
Turks and Kurds have seen the need to remain in an alliance…” and that, “The fundamental
task today is to restore and reorganise this historic relationship…”33

As if this were not enough, Öcalan went on to state that:

“In light of the current atmosphere shaped by the call made by [Nationalist Movement
Party politician] Devlet Bahçeli, the will expressed by the President [Erdogan], and
the positive approaches of other political parties towards this call, I am making a call
for disarmament and assuming its historic responsibility.”34

The very same theoretician of ‘non-state’ politics ended by appealing to the PKK as a whole
to “gather your congress and take the decision to integrate into the state and society”. 35 He
was appealing to the ranks of the PKK to integrate into the state of Erdogan no less. He
concluded that “all groups must lay down their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself.”36

Öcalan did not even attempt to restructure the PKK into a party working within Turkish
politics, but simply called on it to dissolve. And applied to the Kurds in Syria, his statement
amounts to dissolving and integrating into the Islamist state of HTS.

Shortly after, in March 2025, a deal was signed between the HTS government and the
Kurdish-led SDF with the aim of integrating the north-east of the country into a centralised
administration. The deal would place all public institutions in the north-east of Syria,
including its borders, airports and oilfields, under Syrian government control. The SDF would
also integrate into the national army.

In effect, applying this deal would have meant total surrender.

The Financial Times described a ceremony in July 2025, “which took place outside a cave in
northern Iraq’s mountainous Qandil region” as “the first visible step that the Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK) would abandon its armed struggle after announcing in May that it
would heed jailed leader Abdullah Öcalan’s call to disband.”37

Erdogan sees this final act in a long drama as an opportunity to consolidate his regime and
to spread the Turkish sphere of influence widely across the region. In a speech given in July
2025, referring to Öcalan’s statement to disband the PKK, Erdogan proclaimed: “The doors
to a great and strong Turkey, to the Turkish century, have been flung wide open.”38

32 A Öcalan, ‘The PKK has reached the end of its life cycle and should be dissolved’, links, 28
February 2025
33 ibid.
34 ibid.
35 ibid.
36 ibid.
37 A J Yackley, ‘Kurdish militants burn weapons in step towards peace with Turkey’, Financial Times,
11 July 2025
38 A J Yackley, ‘Erdoğan hails new page in Turkey’s history as Kurdish fighters lay down arms’,
Financial Times, 12 July 2025
The question has to be asked: why has a decades-long armed insurgency led by the PKK,
which saw over 40,000 people die, now come to an end? Has the PKK achieved its historical
objectives? Have rights of autonomy been granted to the Kurds? Are they any closer to their
historical goal of achieving a state of their own? The answer to all these questions is a very
resounding NO!

Öcalan’s acceptance of the deal is a tacit admission that the strategy of the PKK has
reached a dead end. Having reached the limits of guerilla and terrorist methods, Öcalan then
sought to find an accommodation with the existing bourgeois states, which he believes can
become ‘democratised’. With the PKK in Turkey and the PYD in Syria both weakened as a
result of failing to export the Rojava Revolution on a class basis, Öcalan, who has long since
rejected revolutionary struggle, was left with limited options but to make his peace with the
Turkish state.

Betrayal
The agreement between the new Syrian regime and the DAANES was followed by a tense
stalemate, which was only finally resolved a year later in January 2026. Al-Sharaa launched
a military offensive and took huge swathes of territory that had been under the control of the
SDF, after which a very bad ‘agreement’ was forced on the Kurds.

The reliability of the Arab tribal leaders was very quickly revealed once the Assad regime
fell. They largely turned against the Kurds, and switched sides, backing the new al-Sharaa
regime. Significantly, in some cases, this has allowed the Syrian regime to seize important
oil fields which had formerly been controlled by the SDF.

By early 2026, a number of Arab SDF affiliates had joined the Syrian Arab Army. In several
areas, former SDF members from Arab tribal backgrounds switched allegiance and took part
in operations against the Kurdish-led force. In Raqqa, an Arab-majority province, many tribal
leaders defected from the SDF to al-Sharaa. As al-Sharaa’s forces moved in on Rojava’s
territory, the tribal leaders announced they were leaving the SDF and joined forces with the
central government.

As an article on The Amargi website states:

“The retreat [of the Kurds] cannot be explained solely in military terms, but also
through more complex social and political dynamics within the territories once
governed by the DAANES. Among them is the issue of the alliance with Arab tribes,
which was one of the main structural pillars of the DAANES and which represented
more than 80% of the population of the northeast. The fall of Assad put that alliance,
crucial in defeating ISIS, into question.”39

Naturally, now that ISIS has been defeated, the Kurds have been discarded as so much
loose change by US imperialism, which is now backing Al-Sharaa and his HTS regime.

As a (British) Channel 4 News report – ‘Syrian army takes over most of Kurdish territory’ –
pointed out in January 2026:

39 ‘The Alliance That Broke Rojava: Arab Tribes and the Fall of Kurdish Control’, The Amargi, 1
February 2026
 “The Americans have thrown their weight behind the central government in
Damascus and withdrawn support from the Kurds, who they no longer see as useful,
to the delight of the Turkish leader [...] Many [Kurds] feel betrayed by the US and
other Western countries which protected them while they fought Islamic State. But
now the West wants to strengthen the Syrian government that emerged after the fall
of Bashar al-Assad. The Kurds are relearning a lesson that history has taught them
many times. Loyalty doesn’t last and they have no permanent friends.”40

US Special Envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, explained the position bluntly:

“The original purpose of the SDF as the primary anti-ISIS force on the ground has
largely expired, as Damascus is now both willing and positioned to take over security
responsibilities, including control of ISIS detention facilities and camps.”41

Barrack thus invited the Kurds to ‘integrate’ into the new Syrian state, i.e. to submit to a
reactionary regime, led by an Islamic fundamentalist, and former al-Qaeda commander.

The Kurds are angry at the about-face of the US, who have abandoned them in favour of a
regime that actually emerged from what had up until very recently been classed as a terrorist
organisation, one that had in the past been linked to al-Qaeda and ISIS, the very
organisation the Kurds had so valiantly fought against.

But this development should not have come as a surprise to anyone.

We stand on record as having warned that the Kurds in Syria would be betrayed by their
American ‘allies’. In May 2018, Hamid Alizadeh, editor of [Link], stated the following in
a speech on Syria, Turkey, and the oppression of the Kurds:

“It is clear that once ISIS is finished, is fully defeated, and once the Americans have
gotten what they could out of Syria, then they won’t hesitate to sell out the Kurds [...]
The Kurdish movement is being isolated, and this political isolation is only a
precursor to a military isolation and a military crushing of the movement at some
point in the future.”42

This perspective was, tragically, confirmed almost to the letter. Even before the defeat of
ISIS, the alliance the PYD made with the US did not deter Erdogan from bombing and
occupying Kurdish areas. But in the end, the Turkish military did not have to intervene
directly when the Assad regime collapsed, as they were able to use the forces of al-Sharaa,
who Erdogan fully backed.

Uncertain future
There were, however, clear signs of frustration with the line of capitulating to the surrounding
reactionary states. In fact, the slogan “One, one, one, the Kurds are one” was one of the
most prevalent slogans at demonstrations across the world in support of Rojava in January

40 ‘Syrian army takes over most of Kurdish territory’, Channel 4 News, Youtube, 21 January 2026
41 Quoted in A Sewell, ‘Syrian military, Kurdish-led forces announce a new truce after previous a
ceasefire broke down’, PBS, 20 January 2026
42 ‘Syria, Turkey, and the Oppression of the Kurds’, Revolutionary Communist Party, Youtube, 25
May 2018
2026. This is a political slogan that rejects the borders that divided Kurdistan across Turkey,
Iraq, Iran, and Syria. It expresses the deeply felt idea that, despite these borders, the
Kurdish people and land are one.

What happened in Qamishlo, the de facto capital of the DAANES, on 1 February 2026 is
indicative of this mood. Thousands took part in a mass rally in defence of the Rojava
Revolution. And some of the banners displayed the slogan of “One, one, one, the Kurdish
people are one.” Other slogans included “Northern and Eastern Kurdistan are one
homeland.”

One of the speakers, referring to the Rojava Revolution, stressed the fact that, “We built this
project with our own hands, and we will protect and defend it.”43 Appeals were made to the
Kurds of Iraq to support the Kurds of Rojava. The rally ended with chants of: “Long Live the
Resistance of Rojava”.

Unfortunately, it was just two days after that rally that Syrian government forces entered
Qamishlo.

The DAANES is now undergoing a transition that puts an end to a decade of self-rule. At the
time of writing, the Kurds in Syria have lost control of 80 per cent of their former territory to
the regime of al-Sharaa.

One huge conquest of Rojava was the right to learn Kurdish as their first language. Many
now fear this could be taken away from them as they are reintegrated under centralised rule
from Damascus. Women, who had won important rights in the Rojava region, also look with
fear to the future, as the conservative, Islamist regime encroaches on their territory.

Damascus will be taking control of local institutions, border crossings, gas and oil fields.
DAANES institutions are to be integrated into the Syrian state apparatus, while SDF fighters
will be incorporated individually into the new Syrian army. There is no mention of what the
future holds for the SDF’s women’s units.

Under the terms of the deal signed with the HTS regime in January 2025, the Kurdish
language will be recognised and may be taught freely in schools, and the Kurdish New Year,
Newroz, will become a public holiday. Syrian citizenship will finally be granted to all Kurds in
Syria. But there will be no recognition of self-government or self-determination for the Kurds
of Rojava.

And without Kurdish self-organisation or an independent self-defence militia, al-Sharaa can

remove these concessions when it pleases him. A dangerous situation is being prepared for
the Kurds.

The only way forward

Despite our criticism of the model that was applied in Rojava, we, as revolutionary Marxists,
are staunch defenders of the Rojavan Revolution. It revealed the potential that existed for
genuine national and social emancipation of the Kurds. It will remain in the consciousness of
the Kurdish people, and of revolutionaries everywhere, for many years to come.

43 Quoted in ‘Qamishlo chants “Kurdish people are one”’, ANHA, 1 February 2026
Nonetheless, we must say what is: despite the heroic struggle of the Kurdish masses, the
Rojava Revolution has been defeated and is in the process of being liquidated.

Even before the victory of HTS, Rojava was no longer being discussed as the model of
social transformation that had previously enthused so many on the left in the previous
period.

An example of this is an interview with two pro-Rojava activists, Anna Rebrii and Liza
Shishko, published in January 2024. The article opens with the words “Remember Rojava?”.
As Rebrii explains:

“Many people with whom I talked when I was there just wanted to leave because of
this worsening economic situation and constant atmosphere of fear. You just never
know when you may find yourself in the wrong place or time and become a casualty
of yet another drone assassination by Turkey. And there’s just the lack of prospects
for the future. And that, I believe, has been greatly undermining the project.” 44

It is true that the revolution was confronted by serious obstacles and powerful enemies from
the start. However, its defeat was not inevitable. Rather, it was the product of the flawed
ideas and strategy of the PKK and the PYD in Syria – above all, of Abdullah Öcalan.

In order not to repeat the mistakes of the Rojava Revolution, it is necessary to make a
complete break with all forms of reformist thinking, with all forms of class collaboration.

Communists support the right of the Kurdish people to self-determination. However, it will not
be achieved with the ideas developed by Öcalan. Contrary to his idea that the Kurds must
respect the existing borders and ‘co-exist’ with the oppressive states that surround them,
genuine freedom for the Kurds can only be achieved through a revolutionary struggle to
overthrow these very same regimes.

What is required is a struggle of the Kurdish masses together with the working classes of
Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, for socialism throughout the region. All of these countries will
inevitably see class struggle at some stage.

Turkey, with its large and powerful working class, is particularly important. We have touched
on the immense potential for workers’ power in Turkey in the 1970s. Those conditions are
destined to re-emerge in Turkey as the crisis of world capitalism impacts on the country.

The task of revolutionary communists in the region is to build a revolutionary party that
encompasses Kurds and non-Kurds, a party that is class-based and which connects all the
struggles of the workers of the region under the slogan of a ‘Socialist Federation of the
Middle East’.

A party that is based on this approach is what needs to be built in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran
and throughout the whole region. Forward to a socialist Kurdistan within a Socialist
Federation of the Middle East.

44 A Rebrii, L Shishko, ‘The Revolution against the Odds: an Interview on Rojava with Anya Rebrii
and Liza Shishko (Part I: The Messiness of the Revolutionary Process)’, Lefteast, 4 January 2024