Mikhail Nikolaevsky, “Military Review”
The Syrian analytical circle or, as it is fashionable to say today, “case” will not be completed without an overview of the situation of such a player as the Federation of Northern Syria. This formation in the Syrian northeast and in the Euphrates region is fully called the “Democratic Federation of Rojava and Northern Syria”, briefly in Kurdish “Rojava”, on TV and in reviews for even greater brevity all together it is called simply and without frills: “Kurds”.
The situation of this player, which since 2014 has been in the position of “the most cunning of all” (and this is not sarcasm, but a completely objective statement of fact), has become more complicated today, and very seriously complicated. The “Democratic Federation of Rojava and Northern Syria” is in real danger of becoming simply Rojava (Western Kurdistan), and this is in the best case.
For now, its military resources are sufficient to hold the fluctuations in Raqqa and the oil-rich south of Trans-Euphrates, but the pressure will increase, because one of the main factors in the fusion of the Kurds, European anarchists, Assyrians and Arabs – B. Assad, has moved to another part of the geography.
However, they still have hope for continued cooperation with the United States, and it has some grounds. But will the cooperation be in the form of a Federation? The fact is that everything is developing quite rapidly now, and the opponents of the Federation are not going to give a head start of one and a half months, and the ideas of the Federation may turn out to be useless to D. Trump.
A Necessary Retrospective – the TEV-DEM Phenomenon
Understanding the relations between the numerous military-political groups and the economic interests of this subregion is absolutely impossible without describing the ideological basis of the Federation – a set of ideas embedded in the abbreviation TEV-DEM (“Movement for a Democratic Society”), as well as its local “genesis”.
TEV-DEM, in short, is the development of the theses of the patriarch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party A. Ocalan about a stateless society as a natural normal state of this very society. These ideas are often associated with “neo-Marxism”, but not much is taken from Marxism (with or without the prefix “neo”).
Formational development in this paradigm is a consequence of the distortion of the original “normality” of man. Accordingly, the formation and development of the state is considered as the history of an initially distorted social model, social relations in it.
In this regard, any state as such is evil and a disaster, whether created with good intentions or without them. In essence, this is distilled anarchism, to which A. Ocalan will come from the original idea of creating a Kurdish state.
A. Ocalan’s followers in Syria could not create a “Kurdish state” simply because they could not create a state as such.
TEV-DEM is a network of local councils coordinated by “councils of councils”, non-national and non-confessional. In essence, a union of urban and rural local communities. Each community has a woman and a man in the top management, its own armed guard units, also female and male.
From the units, second-order forces are formed (police and intelligence – “assaish”), as well as armed formations for the protection of all settlements (“peshmerga”) – the people’s guard and the people’s militia.
The ideological supervision of all this stateless splendor is carried out by the heirs of A. Ocalan from the Workers’ Party, which was wisely transformed in local realities into the Democratic Union Party, expanding its representation at the expense of the local population. This union of cities and communities has been governing the Syrian sub-region since 2014, but how did this anarchic international end up at its head?
2011 – 2013
If we analyze the gloomy history of the “Syrian revolution” in its early stages, we must say frankly: the attitude to the Kurdish issue was one of the main mistakes of B. Assad, who largely followed the lead of his entourage, the “old guard”.
Despite all the absurdities of the Baathist ideology and its very inhumane practices, the Kurds and Assyrians as a whole did not intend to go on strike against Damascus at first. Nevertheless, it was Damascus that did a lot to make this happen.
In central Syria (Homs) and in the south (Daraa), anti-Assad protests were massive and even almost “popular”. They were fueled from the outside, but Damascus acted like a bull in a china shop, adding fuel to the fire with repressions.
In Syrian Kurdistan and in the northeast in general, there was no mass participation as such, but Damascus did little work with the political elite of the region. As a result, it is they who form the Supreme Kurdish Council (SCC), which will include both the PKK-PYD and Kurdish parties created around the idea of a Kurdish national state.
Instead of various measures aimed specifically against the political elite, Damascus began to habitually put pressure on society as such, which, in fact, de facto ensured the SCC legitimacy.
The Syrian Kurds have suffered a lot from the ideas of “pan-Arabism” in the past years, and on the wave of the Iraqi wars, several hundred thousand ethnic Kurds, who lived in Syria practically without documents (and official work), moved to Syria. The Kurdish territories are relatively fertile, and due to the drought, the population from the south moved there.
Salafist ideas, as well as the pro-Turkish part of the Turkomans and Arabs, were not very close to the Syrian Kurds. If B. Assad had been a diligent student of N. Machiavelli, he would have taken advantage of this factor, would have given the people more decent conditions, and bought the political elite (and at that time there were no other “buyers” except in neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan) or would have made it so that they would be “quietly forgotten”.
But he was not a student of the Italian and did everything the other way around, because the Syrian version of pan-Arabism did not imply concessions and decent conditions for the Kurds. After a very short time, it turned out that he had very few forces in the region, and everything that was there had to be spent on pacifying the center and south of Syria.
Here is where the second political somersault occurs, when on one side there are supporters of the Kurdish national statehood, and on the other – anarchists. But what is the “bonus” of the anarchists?
Firstly, they have no idea of a state, so they do not make demands on Damascus for autonomy, constitutions, or even a separate state.
Secondly, the PYD has paramilitary roots and cadres of the PKK, so they immediately took the military organization itself into their own hands, as well as internal intelligence and the police. Unlike their “colleagues” in the VKS, they simply knew how it was organized and worked.
Thirdly, they incorporated the Assyrians and (albeit to a lesser extent) Arabs into their ideological base much better. But the Assyrians as a whole were not as anti-Assad as somewhere in Homs. And they had political parties with ties to Damascus. As a result, the Assyrians formed their own detachments and militias, which, despite all the friction with the PYD, were closer to it.
The supporters of Kurdish statehood, like the KDP-S, had their supporters, but the anarchist (irony of terms) and Assyrian parts were too organized.
It is important that for Damascus, which was already in a difficult situation in 2013, it was the PYD that was becoming closer, and, of course, not the Kurdish nationalists. Despite all the antagonism between Damascus and the PYD, they found themselves on the same side.
In Russia, this is not very well understood, but in reality, many Kurdish politicians have always accused the PYD of playing along with Damascus, Bashar al-Assad, “erasing” the ideas of a Kurdish state, and simply betraying the Kurdish idea. They played along, of course, but they could not betray the Kurdish idea because they were not its bearers.
In that situation, the PYD was happy with the fact that Damascus was busy saving itself, but at the same time, formally, the umbrella of the Syrian state (later Russia and the USA) was open over them, and Damascus was happy with the fact that the PYD was not driving the Syrian army with sticks from some bases in Syrian Kurdistan.
What did the PYD do during that time (year) by 2014? That’s right – it squeezed the main political figures of the KDP out of Syria to Iraqi Kurdistan and Europe. And what did they do there? They criticized both B. Assad and the PYD. When Russian forces later enter Syria, the KDP-S will find themselves among Russia’s antagonists. As a result, the PYD will even open its representative offices in Moscow and will be received in our Foreign Ministry, and the KDP-S will be received there, if at all, once a year (or even less often).
014 and beyond
In 2014, the phenomenon of ISIS (banned in Russia) comes into full swing, and then a completely different life begins for everyone.
The fact that ISIS is an artificial project is actually evident from the way its “adepts” behaved in the region even towards Arab tribes. “Al-Qaeda” (banned in Russia) is, after all, a movement that took into account many local nuances, it was actually born in the region, but ISIS did not take into account anything in principle.
The most ferocious blow from this obscurantism was taken by the Iraqi Kurds-Yazidis. ISIS considered them worse than animals and killed them in ways that simply cannot be cited in print. Only some women could be “lucky” and were sent to the slave market.
Assyrian Christians and Shiite Kurds were half a step higher, but Sunni Kurds were not much further in this black hierarchy. The second onslaught was on them. The third onslaught, which few of the Arab tribes themselves expected, was on them. Those who disagreed were executed in the same way as the soldiers of B. Assad’s army, and members of the sheikh families at that. As a result, many Arabs either joined B. Assad himself, at least in the name of revenge (and they took terrible revenge on ISIS), or the PYD and his TEV-DEM ideas.
What should be especially noted is the role of anarchists and Assyrians in the Yazidi region. They were essentially the real force that physically came to the Yazidis to help fight off ISIS and helped stop them. The forces from Iraqi Kurdistan itself would come en masse later.
All this gave the PYD exclusive relations with the region of Yezidhan (Yazidi territories) on the border between Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria. And this will become a very strong factor in the future.
It turned out that the Americans, in the person of the PYD and Syrian Kurdistan, had a springboard for projecting power and fighting ISIS (as the official reason for their deployment), but Damascus also received in the person of the PYD a deterrent against Turkey, ISIS and, in general, a factor in maintaining the formal unity of Syria.
The US began to actively cooperate with the PYD\TEV-DEM in 2014, and later they would alienate Kurdish nationalists. But initially, the issue was not even about ISIS, but about the fact that the US did not support the very idea of a single Kurdish state (Iraq + Syria). Or rather, there was no consensus on this matter. But the presence of such a factor as the PYD\TEV-DEM allowed the entire region to be kept “on its toes” at once. And here the anarchists turned out to be more useful than others. Their ideology was quite compatible with the US idea of creating the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) — an alloy of armed units of the PYD/YPG, Arabs and Assyrians as an internationally recognized force against ISIS. Before that, they had heroically, but with difficulty, repelled ISIS attacks, and now they could go on the offensive and received an influx of weapons, air support, and special operations forces.
The TEV-DEM ideology, due to its non-confessional and non-national nature, allowed them to hold together previously incompatible elements: Kurds, Assyrians and Arabs. And when the US gave the PYD access to oil fields, it turned out that the Kurds had one significant bonus over the Arabs of the Trans-Euphrates region — transit through the Yazidi region and the main border. And this meant that the Arabs and the PYD were forced to bargain over shares — some had oil, others had access to the market and the US umbrella. But bargaining is not war, with such bargaining it was already difficult to pit these players against each other. Last year this opportunity arose, but Damascus, Tehran and Moscow happily missed it.
The PDS conducted endless negotiations with B. Assad and especially with Russia “about everything” – they did not leave Syria, they did not obey the state, and they could share oil with Damascus for money, grain, and also negotiate on generating electricity from Tishreen. The Assyrians occupied a slightly closer position to Damascus, at one time Damascus almost pulled them over to its side, but, as usual, did not follow through. And apparently did not strive to.
PDS\TEV-DEM and the leftist agenda
A rather perverted “leftist agenda” is in vogue in Europe. Current European leftism is a protest for the sake of protest based on the equality of “something” and the rights of minorities (any). The advantage of such a “base” for the financial beneficiaries is that it can be directed anywhere, at anyone and in any way. The left in Europe are balls of plasticine, which, if necessary, are rolled into a ball and thrown in the right direction.
If earlier the Kurdistan Workers’ Party was perceived as part of “Marxism” and something from the “red spectrum”, then the current TEV-DEM is an almost ideal product for the current left. It has almost everything that the left loves: gender equality, non-nationality, non-confessionalism, no tyrants, dictators and the fashionable “autocrats”.
It is no coincidence that such an odious character as B. Henri-Levy is constantly written in for them. In general, he is written in everywhere where traditional institutions need to be destroyed.
B. Henri-Levy is a plague bubo of liberalism, if it has appeared and is not treated (they kick it out), then usually the lethality for the state is almost 100%, because it is a symptom of what has already begun to be done to the state.
But PDS/TEV-DEM is immune to this – they do not have a state, but through the influence of deep ideologists like B. Henri-Levy they have the favor of European and partly American design institutes and those who are today succinctly called “globalists”.
When B. Assad or Turkey began to put pressure on these anarchists, then all the leftists of Europe, Soros organizations and so on down the list howled like a siren for them. And they already indirectly influence credit money for the same Turkey. Ankara cannot completely ignore this howl on the Greenspan quagmires.
Thus, PDS/TEV-DEM immediately received an ideological base in the EU and the USA, which (under the Democrats for sure) could not be ignored. Without an ideological base, the benefits for the US were already huge, but with a base, it gave additional bonuses.
Another extremely significant factor worked for PDS/TEV-DEM: leftists from the EU and the US came to them, both to live and to fight. At the peak of their popularity, there were more than 15 thousand leftists from the US and the EU in their ranks, and this is a military force with support from the same EU and the US.
All this is difficult to understand, but this is the only way to understand what was meant by the position of “the most cunning player of all”. PDS\TEV-DEM simultaneously prevented B. Assad’s Syria from falling apart, and prevented the US from putting Syria together.
In the past, theses were often heard in Russia: “We need to negotiate with the Kurds.” But, firstly, it is not so much the Kurds as it is TEV-DEM, and secondly, the adherents of this ideology sincerely despise all of us taken together: the USA, Russia, Turkey, Syria, Iran, China, the EU, Guinea-Bissau, etc.
For them, all players are a banal tool, they live on the contradictions of “greedy and miserable states” and believe that the more contradictions, the better. Unlike others, it seems they have read N. Machiavelli, and, it must be said, they have been gaining an advantage for quite a long time.
They will not abandon this paradigm, so in the TEV-DEM offices they have already hung new “revolutionary” flags of Syria with three stars and declared that they are ready for negotiations. However, in this case, everything may not go according to the usual scenario.
From anarchists to Kurds again
On December 7, when fans were just getting ready to celebrate the victory over the tyrant B. Assad, although they had no idea of its final scale, the elected US President D. Trump invited the head of the SDF M. Kobani to the inauguration ceremony. In Turkey, he is not called anything less than a “terrorist”.
The US itself currently has no more than a thousand “bayonets” in the region. Such a number was rational in the past, but now it is not enough for such a territory.
An invitation to the inauguration is a serious symbol, because now, to put it mildly, the Turkish ambassador will be in a difficult position. However, the event is “ambassadorial” for external players, and in general it is an internal holiday for the people. To what part was M. Kobani invited: maybe to a ball or a parade? D. Trump invited Xi Jinping there too. No one can forbid him, but this is a kind of nonsense. On the other hand, the head of the SDS is not a figure whose invitation cannot be simply cancelled, i.e. D. Trump sent a signal that “the king is thinking”, and while he is thinking, the SDS should not be touched too much. But should it not be touched too much and how much?
This seems to sound encouraging for the PDS, since it allows manipulating theses about American support, but for an experienced player like R. Erdogan it means a chance for a smart game.
The Federation was held together by several factors. ISIS, which seems to have been defeated, but release these characters from prisons in the same Raqqa and unite them with the forces of HTS (banned in the Russian Federation), and at least a third of the same Raqqa and the surrounding territories will wrap themselves in black flags. The Arabs “from below” will not be too against it, but the local sheikhs will definitely be against it. The Assyrian militias will work with the Kurds and anarchists in the face of such a threat. This works to the advantage of the Federation.
The second factor was the “collective B. Assad”. He is no longer there, so the new “democratic” government can talk to all the players separately. First of all, with the Arabs beyond the Euphrates River and the Arabs of Raqqa. If the “democrats” offer to buy oil at the market price, and also send it at the market price to the external market, then why should the Arabs of the Euphrates share with the PDS, because they are no longer the only force at the trade gates? This factor works to the deep minus for the PDS. Those tribes under Turkey did not express a desire to go either in the past or in the present, but they sold there directly or indirectly, and now this is not necessary.
The third unifying factor was the United States, which provided not only military and political cover, but also weapons, light armored vehicles, and communications. Well, actually, the capture of the main wells in the oil fields was impossible without displacing US forces from there and reaching an agreement with the tribes. They hate ISIS after massacres, they tolerate the PYD with difficulty, they were generally neutral towards Damascus, and the coordination between the PYD and SDF and the tribes was in the hands of the United States more than the United States – and in the last year there were constant clashes with Kurdish units, shares were distributed with difficulty.
What would be easier for them to do – work with the transitional government, if it distances itself from any reincarnation of ISIS (direct or indirect). US soldiers will remain in place with the flag raised, but the oil has returned to the supposedly legitimate government.
The signal for the inauguration is all D. Trump in his chosen style. PDS\TEV-DEM as a factor in principle should remain, and feel the limits yourself. But this is not the same position of “the most cunning and irreplaceable player for everyone” that worked for so long.
It will be impossible to force M. Kobani and Co. to sell oil through themselves if the tribes decide to send it to the “democrats” in Damascus. And here it is only a question of price. No oil – the most important bond of TEV-DEM – the financial one – is loosened.
The Kurds and anarchists in some ways repeat the collision of Russian politics with its “central position”, to be between everyone at the same time. But the basic element falls out of the scheme, and the central position turns out to be peripheral. You can be in the center only if the balance is maintained, if there is no balance, the central player immediately goes to the periphery, and someone drops out completely.
Without oil, PDS\TEV-DEM not only becomes a periphery, but due to its non-national and non-confessional nature of the “councils” risks falling apart in principle. Without oil, they should simply become “Kurds” and “Assyrians”.
Everything here will depend on the price that the democrats in Damascus will offer the tribes, not even on the pressure from Turkey. It is generally easier for Turkey to present this as an analogue of a “popular revolt” without its direct participation, maybe they have enough experience for this. The leftist agenda that has long allowed them to work with Western politicians? And D. Trump does not need it, it will not give them any more political advantages.
But PDS\TEV-DEM will have only one unifying option left – to release the remnants of ISIS for this revolt in order to once again demonstrate “usefulness” to the US. And something tells me that this option is not improbable in the black vaudeville that is again being performed on Syrian soil.
Syria is currently receiving a lot of attention, but the situation is such that strong players cannot fail to take advantage of such chances. The window of opportunity is still open for them, and whoever can tear out as much as they can, will carry away as much. And they tear out and carry. Iran should think hard here and prepare for trouble, look up and recount its assets in Iraq.