Statelet of Survivors: The Making of a Semi-Autonomous Region in Northeast Syriaby Amy Austin Holmes, Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $99
The prospects for the Autonomous Administration of Northern and Eastern Syria, a region also known as Rojava, do not look good. Over the past two years, every time I have spoken to an aid worker or researcher returning from the site, they have told me distressing stories. Turkish drone attacks have also decimated the local mid-level leadership. Petty corruption is spreading among the ranks of the survivors. In August 2023, notoriously corrupt militia commander Rashid Abu Khawla launched a mutiny that was put down with U.S. artillery and air support.
Rojava has been a promising experiment for many anti-authoritarians. The Kurdish-led rebels of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had managed not only to evict forces from the Syrian Arab nationalist government, but also to defeat various theocratic rebel factions. The SDF eventually became the US military’s preferred partner against the Islamic State, taking control of about a third of Syria and launching a decentralized left-libertarian experiment.
The revolution appears to be more fragile than expected. “Governance? They’re meh,” one aid worker told me. “Insurrection? They’re really good at this.”
Statelet of survivors, a book-length study by sociologist and former State Department advisor Amy Austin Holmes, offers a more promising long-term prognosis. Holmes has spent a lot of time in Syria and has an impressive amount of data and anecdotes to show for it. (She witnessed the apocalyptic siege of Kobane just across the border from Turkey.) Although outsiders often call the SDF “the Syrian Kurds,” Holmes focuses on the consequences of the revolution. Not-Kurdish elements, which according to her are the key to her strength.
Indeed, Holmes demonstrates that the SDF is a majority non-Kurdish force. His supporters include not only Kurds and Arabs, but also members of smaller, more vulnerable minorities: Armenian and Assyrian Christians faced genocide by Turkish forces in 1915; a century later, the Islamic State tried to wipe out the Yazidi minority. Driven together by common threats, all these groups fought together under the banner of the SDF, hence the term “survivors’ statelet”.
Holmes traces the roots of this cooperation to the Republic of Mount Ararat, a short-lived rebellion in eastern Turkey during the late 1920s. The new Republic of Turkey was moving to suppress the political and cultural autonomy that the Kurds once enjoyed. The Kurdish tribes, both those who had resisted and those who had collaborated in the Armenian genocide, now feared meeting the same fate. The Kurdish Xoybun party agreed to collaborate with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation in a desperate uprising.
The odds were stacked against the revolutionaries, and not just because Turkey was a powerful state. Neighboring regimes – the British colonial authorities in Iraq, the French colonial authorities in Syria, the Soviet Armenian Republic, and the Iranian monarchy – all feared the spread of revolutionary ideas. The French government exiled one of Xoybun’s Syrian Kurdish leaders to Madagascar. The Soviet Union lured Armenia’s most famous rebel commander off Mount Ararat and exiled him to a Siberian gulag, where he was later executed by firing squad.
Despite the republic’s short life, the Kurdish-Armenian cooperation experiment has had a lasting legacy. The taboo on intra-religious and inter-ethnic cooperation has been broken. For decades to come, Turkey will be considered the great threat to the freedom of both peoples.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Kurdish-Armenian cooperation is the Martyr Nubar Ozanyan Brigade, an SDF unit for “crypto-Armenians”. Like Jews who hid among Christian families during the Holocaust, many Armenians hid from Turkish forces among Kurdish or Arab Muslim families. A subculture developed of people who professed Islam, spoke Kurdish or Arabic, and maintained their Armenian identity. A century later, the rise of Rojava allowed them to come out into the open.
One thing that has changed since the days of the Republic of Mount Ararat is the role of women. Female SDF soldiers have captured a significant amount of romanticized, sometimes malicious foreign attention. Yet some of the most significant changes for women have occurred far from the front lines. Rojava’s institutions give civilian women daily decision-making power, including worker cooperatives designed to make women financially independent of their families.
When revolutionaries conquered a town or city, Holmes observes, “after setting up roadblocks and waving yellow and green flags to mark newly conquered territory, women’s shelters were often among the first institutions to be established.” .
The Islamic State was not the only faction to view women’s liberation as threatening. Local feminist Ilham Amar recalled being tortured by the Syrian government for feminist activities. She told Holmes that when revolutionaries established the first women’s shelter in Rojava, the Syrian secret police were so suspicious that she sent officers to “surround” the building.
The widening vortex of the Syrian civil war has drawn other groups into the SDF alliance. Holmes brings to life tales of the early days of the revolution that other accounts gloss over. Kurdish vigilantes fought pro-government militias with shotguns and stole the cars of intelligence officers. The government frantically offered concessions as it dissolved. An alphabet soup of rebel groups emerged, which then began to coalesce around the opposing poles of Islamic State and Rojava.
Some members of the SDF are natural allies of the revolution, such as Dowronoye, an Assyrian political party with long-standing ties to Kurdish rebels. Others are much more unlikely partners. The Sanadid Forces, an Arab militia, are led by the prince of the powerful Shammar clan, who is suspicious of political parties and wants a return to pre-modern clan rule. Unlike other SDF units, Sanadid forces do not allow women to carry weapons. Yet they have collaborated with the SDF from the beginning because of their shared distrust of the Syrian government, the Islamic State and Turkey.
The real challenge is what comes after filming ends. This part of Syria was already a poor region before the war. Holmes calls it an “internal colony,” with laws that prohibit many types of economic development. The few resources the region has – farms, oil fields, hydroelectric dams – have been damaged by the fighting. Turkey has sealed its border, forcing northern and eastern Syria to rely on Iraqi Kurdistan, a fickle partner, for trade. US financial sanctions discourage most investments in Syria.
The revolutionaries responded with what Holmes calls “an eclectic mix” of economic theories. Ahmad Youssef, the revolution’s finance minister, told Holmes that his goal was not to “exclude” the rich but to “remove conflict” between the classes. State lands and abandoned properties were to be handed over to collectives, while private property remained intact.
Yet there are clear limits to Rojava’s development capacity. The majority of the Autonomous Administration’s budget comes from oil, which must be sold through smugglers, with all the opportunities for price gouging and corruption that entails. black market trade. When the administration established a Kurdish- and Assyrian-language school system, Syria’s central government simply refused to recognize it, rendering diplomas from those schools outside the region useless.
Paradoxically, the revolutionaries have achieved the greatest international recognition by carrying out a task that no state wants to carry out. Tens of thousands of foreign fighters from dozens of countries had joined the Islamic State in its heyday. Now surviving fighters and their families are rotting in prison camps in northern and eastern Syria. Few external states have bothered to track down, extradite and try their own citizens who committed war crimes in Syria. Instead, they rely on Rojava – a statelet they don’t recognize – to keep militants behind bars.
Holmes presented these findings in February 2024 at George Washington University, where he now works. An audience of interested researchers, journalists, activists, and university students watched Holmes read a PowerPoint in his methodical, scholarly style. Ambassador William Roebuck, another former American diplomat who spent time in Syria, hosted the event.
The atmosphere was rather dark. One audience member, convinced that Rojava was already over, asked whether the United States should issue special visas to friendly Syrians to avoid a repeat of the Afghan refugee crisis. I watched the representatives of Rojava sitting in the front row, listening to the outside world predict their impending exile.
Roebuck offered little consolation. Nation-states are “tremendously jealous of their control prerogatives, and easily threatened and easily become threatening,” he argued. The Syrian central government, supported by Iran and Russia, was nursing its wounds and preparing to reassert its power over the rebellious provinces. Turkey also wanted to see the destruction of a movement linked to armed rebellions against its authority.
I pointed out that Rojava had already survived the Republic of Mount Ararat, and Holmes said that the changes brought about by the revolution are not so easily undone.
“One of the reasons for the longevity,” he added, is that “it’s not just a Kurdish nationalist movement. It’s truly multi-ethnic and all the ethnic groups in the region have been able to have more breathing space.”