Rezgar Akrawi: From this it follows that criticising the SDF is not criticism of the rights of the Kurdish people. Criticising the ruling parties in the Kurdistan Region is not criticism of the Kurdish cause. Rejecting the nation-state is not a rejection of national identity and national rights. It is a leftist position, one that calls for national solidarity to be freed from subordination to elites and authorities, for the question of national liberation to be tied to the struggle for democracy, equality and social justice, and for the united struggle of working women and men by hand and by brain across every nationality and community.
Rojava's Promise and the Dissolution of the SDF: Time for the Left to Rethink the Kurdish Question?
The Kurdish question as a case in point: a call for a citizenship state and social justice with a socialist horizon.
Rezgar Akrawi
The People's Palace Scene: One Experience Ends, One Question Opens
On 25 August 2026, Mazloum Abdi announced from the People's Palace in Damascus that the mission of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had ended and that it was dissolving as an independent military force. The Autonomous Administration went with it, along with every military and civilian formation attached to it, all of them absorbed into the institutions of the Syrian state. The announcement followed the broad military operation launched by government forces in January 2026. That operation cost the SDF large stretches of the territory it controlled, and it opened a negotiating track that ended in an agreement to integrate its forces and institutions into the Syrian state.
I regard this as a positive development. It reduces the likelihood of devastating nationalist wars, and the first victims of such wars are always workers and the labouring poor of every nationality. The successive agreements, from March 2025 to the comprehensive agreement of January 2026 and on to the announcement of dissolution, did lower the risk of war and spared the region further destruction. Yet they contained no provision whatsoever on the questions we fight for as leftist and progressive forces: women's rights, the secular character of the state, an end to privatisation, protection of the public sector, guarantees for the rights of working women and men by hand and by brain, the achievement of social justice, and democratic elections for every official.
For years, a wide segment of the Kurdish and international left presented this model as a leftist social, feminist and grassroots democratic revolution. It ended by a decision taken at the top and announced from a presidential palace in Damascus. There was no popular referendum, and no declared decision by the councils and communes that the SDF had presented to the world as the true holders of sovereignty in what was called the "Autonomous Administration," supposedly built on the power of the people. The United States had been the principal military and political backer of the SDF, while at the same time supporting the political and military trajectory of the new authorities in Damascus. It was therefore a central party in shaping the course of the war, and then the course of its resolution. That fact alone reveals where decision-making power actually sat the entire time, and how far a wager on the major imperialist powers can be trusted.
What stands out is how the costs were distributed. The new state absorbed a section of the military and party elite of the SDF, notwithstanding that state's class, religious and authoritarian character. A number of SDF commanders were appointed to military posts and others received ranks and administrative positions. They became an active part of the military, political, administrative and security apparatus of the Syrian government, and of its capitalist class structure. Working women and men by hand and by brain, meanwhile, Kurds, Arabs, Syriacs and every other community, were left facing the same social, economic and political problems that preceded the war, now sharpened by years of conflict and destruction.
In parallel, decrees were issued recognising the Kurds as a constituent part of the Syrian people, recognising Kurdish as a national language and Newroz as a national holiday, and lifting the effects of the unjust 1962 Hasakah census. These are real gains, and generations struggled for them. Yet the recognition came once the balance of power had already been settled, not before. Rights granted by decree can be withdrawn by a counter-decree, all the more so under an undemocratic government resting on Islamist organisations with a history of repression and violence. What is required today is to turn these gains into binding constitutional text within a comprehensive political transition, so that they do not remain favours dispensed by an authoritarian power.
That warning grows sharper still when we look at the nature of the new authorities in Damascus. They have offered no clear and binding guarantees on the secular character of the state, on women's rights or on public freedoms. Their record of repression and documented violations points the other way, and it raises the fear of a new authoritarianism under a religious cover, no less dangerous than the one before it.
What Belongs in the Record, and What Cannot Be Buried
Objectivity requires that the positive side be recorded as well. In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, international reports have documented the hosting of large numbers of displaced people from every Iraqi community. They have noted a level of stability and of social and religious freedom that in certain respects stood higher than in other parts of Iraq, and a role in protecting minorities from the threat of extermination during the rise of ISIS.
In north and east Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces played an effective military role in the fight against ISIS and paid a heavy price in lives. Attempts were made to build a civil administrative model under conditions of war and siege, and relative progress was achieved in women's participation, which is rare in the context of the region.
Against this stands the documented record. In the Kurdistan Region, international human rights organisations have reported serious and systematic violations: the detention and torture of journalists and human rights defenders, the suppression of protests against unemployment, corruption and unpaid salaries, at times with live ammunition, and serious failures to protect women from violence, alongside wider abuses recorded year after year.
In north and east Syria, extensive violations by the Syrian Democratic Forces have likewise been documented. They include the recruitment of children under the age of eighteen, in breach of repeated public pledges to end the practice, together with arbitrary detention and torture in places of detention and the suppression of demonstrations. Human rights reports have also documented allegations of abuses against Arab residents and of forced displacement in some areas, as well as the closure of media offices and civil society organisations.
None of these files closed with the integration. United Nations investigators have continued to receive testimony about killings, enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention in Hasakah. The humanitarian consequences of the fighting are still being tracked by United Nations agencies. And the independent international commission of inquiry remains the body mandated to establish responsibility for such crimes.
The Gap Between Discourse and Practice
The left, whether local or international, faces a complex challenge. How does it defend the legitimate rights of the Kurdish people while holding to consistent critical standards towards every authority without exception? That balance is the condition for the credibility of internationalist solidarity itself.
Solidarity with the oppressed Kurdish people and with all oppressed peoples is a basic principle of the left. It is grounded in values that reject national subjugation, class exploitation and every form of discrimination. The Kurdish people have been subjected to historic and continuing national oppression, and it has included genocide, forced displacement, the denial of cultural and linguistic rights, and political repression.
Such solidarity, however, does not rest on unconditional alignment. It has to draw a clear line. On one side stands support for the right of oppressed peoples to dignity, equality and self-determination. On the other stands unqualified endorsement of particular nationalist parties whose involvement in grave and documented violations has been established, parties that throughout their history have practised political assassination, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance and torture against their opponents, many of them from the ranks of the left.
A large part of the left was drawn to the concept of "democratic confederalism" and to the theories of Abdullah Öcalan, adopted by the Autonomous Administration as an alternative to the centralised nation-state. Practice on the ground exposed a sharp contradiction. While the talk was of communes and grassroots popular democracy, military and financial decision-making stayed concentrated in the hands of unelected party and military cadres who operated with a rigidly centralist mentality.
Then there is the language of ecology, feminism and anti-statism, deployed as a rhetorical cover before Western and especially leftist opinion, on behalf of a one-sided military authority that worked closely with American military and security institutions and received funding from them. In my view this does no service to leftist thought. It empties that thought of its content and turns it into a force operating on behalf of those very institutions.
When movements that present themselves as revolutionary or liberationist come to depend on American money and weapons, this is no passing tactical matter. It reshapes their internal nature, step by step. As the centre of gravity shifts from popular mobilisation to external funding, a movement changes from a social force rooted in a popular base into a paid military force. Its survival then hangs on the continuation of international support more than on the mass base that will ultimately decide its future. The moment the backer's priorities change, the structural fragility stands exposed all at once. This is precisely what happened, and it is what I pointed to in earlier articles as far back as 2018.
Washington lifted sanctions on Damascus in May 2025. It received Ahmed al-Sharaa at the White House in November 2025 and brought Syria into the international coalition against ISIS. The January 2026 campaign then unfolded amid American and Turkish understandings. The American envoy Tom Barrack stated openly that his country does not support federalism in Syria and that the original purpose of those forces had effectively come to an end. A former American envoy refused to call what happened a betrayal, explaining that Washington had always regarded the alliance as temporary, tactical and transactional. The testimony of the decision-makers themselves makes any further analysis of the wager on the great capitalist powers unnecessary.
The structure presented as an alliance among the region's communities also came apart at the first serious test. Before that, its leadership had accepted, as a matter of fact on the ground, the role of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (the Barzanis) as the primary national reference point for the Kurds. This came despite that party's family and tribal rule, its corruption and its hereditary transfer of power. It became plain when negotiations moved to Erbil and Masoud Barzani took on the role of mediator and guarantor.
This is not a conclusion I am advancing today, after the SDF experience has ended, since I wrote in this direction years ago.
In an article titled "The Nation-State? Or the State of Citizenship and Rights?" published in 2018, I wrote the following about the experience of the Kurdish nationalist left in Syria:
"In my view, the experience of the Kurdish nationalist left through the Democratic Union Party and its affiliates in Syria, however far it develops, will amount to reforms of a leftist and radical civil character, resembling the Baath Party's rule in Iraq and Syria in the 1970s, which was among the most significant historical experiences of nationalist left government in the Middle East, and every one of those experiences turned into a corrupt dictatorial and authoritarian regime."
In the same article, I also warned about the nature of the alliance with the United States, writing:
"America, as the largest capitalist power, supports most of the reactionary and racist regimes in the world, and has never once stood on the side of oppressed peoples or of humane and liberationist values. It is present in Syria solely to secure its strategic interests there and in the region and to counter Russian influence. In my view, America's alliance with the Syrian Democratic Forces serves to fill an American gap, the absence of large ground forces of its own on Syrian territory, whether regular troops or security companies, so it relies on the human military capacity of the Syrian Democratic Forces to carry out its agenda inside Syria. This alliance resembles the alliance that parts of the Iraqi opposition, through the Iraqi National Congress, formed with America politically and militarily on the eve of the overthrow of the Baathist dictatorship in Iraq. I believe it is a temporary and fragile alliance that follows American interests, that it lends legitimacy to American intervention and practices in Syria, and that it also helps to prettify America's ugly and grim face locally, regionally and globally. America is known for abandoning its allies once their tasks are over, or when they conflict with its agenda, and we have many other examples of this. Its strategic interests with Turkey remain the most important and the decisive ones, and the matter is a question of time, nothing more."
Similar Nationalist Cliques Speaking Different Languages, and Questions That Admit No "But"
I have noted in earlier texts that no fundamental differences exist among the ruling nationalist cliques. This holds in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and among those that governed north and east Syria, and it holds between them and the ruling nationalist regimes and bourgeoisies of the region, in Baghdad, Damascus or Ankara. The similarities in the nature of their power and in their class interests run deep. What divides them concerns shares, influence, resources and the division of power, never the character of rule or the interests of the labouring classes. All of them share, in varying degrees, in impoverishing the masses, suppressing freedoms and violating economic, social and political rights, whatever their national or religious starting point. Events and realities in both the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Syria have confirmed this reading to a considerable extent.
It is therefore not enough for the left to declare its solidarity with "the Kurdish people" in the abstract. Peoples are not homogeneous blocs. They are class formations in which national contradictions intersect with class contradictions, and no people or ethnicity is so pure as to be free of internal class struggle. The left has to settle its position, and the question is simple: which class of the Kurdish people does it stand with? With a rentier bourgeoisie and party elites that monopolise power and wealth, or with the working women and men by hand and by brain among Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and the other nationalities living in those areas, who suffer authoritarian rule, poverty, unemployment, marginalisation and collapsing services, whose right to independent trade union and political organisation is restricted, and who alone pay the price of nationalist wars with their blood and with the future of their children?
In light of the documented reports, the left has to put decisive questions to itself. Do we reject dynastic rule and demand genuinely democratic elections? Do we condemn arbitrary detention, assassination and torture, whoever the perpetrators may be? Do we defend the freedom of Kurdish journalists and activists, and the right of Arabs, Turkmen, Syriacs and others to full equality? Do we reject the recruitment of children and demand humane treatment and fair trials for everyone in detention? Do we call for independent investigation and accountability for every violation, and for national, linguistic and cultural rights to be secured in the constitution? Do we defend the social and economic rights of the labouring masses, and demand public services, jobs and fair wages, and confront poverty, unemployment, corruption, the plunder of public money and the monopoly on wealth held by party and family elites? And do we refuse to let leftist and liberationist forces become attached to the military and security systems of imperialism, or take funding from them?
These questions do not concern Syria alone. They apply equally to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where part of the left needs to review its positions on the authorities and the ruling parties, and to defend democracy, freedoms, human rights, activists of both sexes and equality among all communities, at a distance from party or national calculations.
If the answer begins with "yes, but the circumstances are exceptional," or "the timing is wrong," or "the context has to be taken into account," that is where the problem starts. Human rights and leftist principles should never be applied selectively, because justifying violations by invoking exceptional circumstances brings leftist discourse close to the opportunism and double standards we criticise in capitalism.
What has happened in Syria, and what is happening in the Kurdistan Region, make this reassessment all the more urgent, and it does not concern Kurdish nationalists alone. Part of the left in the Arab world defended dictatorial regimes for years, among them the Baathist nationalist regimes in Iraq and Syria, while another part defended other nationalist models and parties. What is required, then, is not to abandon solidarity with peoples and their right to determine their own future. It is to reconsider the relationship between the left and authoritarian nationalist parties and regimes, and to free that solidarity from the uncritical justification of violations and of the authorities and political forces committing them, whatever their national or ideological identity.
The Alternative: A Citizenship State and Social Justice
I am fully convinced of the right of all oppressed peoples to self-determination. Even so, local, regional and international conditions, and the realities on the ground, do not allow for the formation of an independent Kurdish nation-state in the foreseeable future, and no serious international support exists for such a path. The events of 2026 offered clear proof. A quasi-state entity, the Autonomous Administration in Syria, backed by the largest imperialist military power in the world, effectively came to an end within months, as soon as the calculations of its funders shifted and the regional and international balance of forces changed. These developments could also be reflected in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, in line with shifts in American interests and alliances and in regional and international power balances.
At the same time, I believe that humanity's intellectual and legal development, and the growing weight of the values of human rights, social justice and citizenship, compel a rethinking of nation-state projects built on ethnic and religious loyalties. The more worthwhile struggle, in my view, is a common struggle of the Kurdish people together with the other peoples of the region and its labouring masses. Its aim is to move beyond the exclusionary nation-state, and to keep workers and the labouring poor from being turned into fuel for destructive nationalist wars that in the end serve the interests of nationalist bourgeoisies and elites.
The alternative, as I see it, concerns more than the Kurdish question alone. It offers a framework for addressing the various national and religious problems of the region: the democratic citizenship state. Such a state rests on a constitution grounded in international human rights conventions, on the neutralisation of nationality and religion within the state, on guarantees of national and cultural equality for all communities, and on the rejection of every form of national domination. It rests as well on a decentralised, democratic federal system with fair geographic and administrative foundations, allowing broad self-government within a unified state. With it come honest elections, party pluralism, separation of powers, an independent judiciary, freedom of the press and of trade union and political organisation, and a complete break with authoritarianism, hereditary power and family and tribal rule.
Such a state cannot be complete without social justice. That means guaranteeing the rights of the labouring masses of every nationality and religion, protecting the public sector, and rejecting the privatisation and neoliberal policies that impoverish the masses and enrich the elites. Within this framework, the national and cultural rights of all nationalities, religions and communities can be secured, without placing any nationality or religious group above another.
The Kurdish cause is a just cause deserving genuine and principled solidarity. Genuine solidarity, however, does not mean granting nationalist parties and elites political or moral immunity. It means supporting the struggle of the Kurdish people and of all the peoples of the region for their rights, freedoms, dignity and social justice. And it means refusing to let the national question be turned into an instrument for entrenching the power of elites and protecting their class privileges.
From this it follows that criticising the SDF is not criticism of the rights of the Kurdish people. Criticising the ruling parties in the Kurdistan Region is not criticism of the Kurdish cause. Rejecting the nation-state is not a rejection of national identity and national rights. It is a leftist position, one that calls for national solidarity to be freed from subordination to elites and authorities, for the question of national liberation to be tied to the struggle for democracy, equality and social justice, and for the united struggle of working women and men by hand and by brain across every nationality and community.
Sources and References
I. Recent Developments (2026)
How Syria's Sharaa captured Kurdish-held areas while keeping the US onside, Reuters, 21 January 2026
II. Reports on the Kurdistan Region of Iraq
Freedom of Expression Increasingly Curtailed in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, UN OHCHR, 2021
2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Iraq, US Department of State
III. Reports on North and East Syria
World Report 2025: Human Rights Conditions in Syria, Human Rights Watch
Aftermath: Injustice, Torture and Death in Detention in North-East Syria, United Nations / OHCHR
Children and Armed Conflict: Report of the Secretary-General, United Nations, 2024
Syria: Kurdish Forces Violating Ban on Child Soldiers, Human Rights Watch
Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, UN OHCHR, 2025
IV. Related Article by the Author
*******************
Rezgar Akrawi is a leftist writer and researcher focused on technology, AI, the digital revolution, and the development of contemporary leftist thought and practice in response to these transformations. He works as an expert in systems development and e-governance and is a theorist of the concept of the “Digital - Electronic Left.”
[email protected]
Comments