In October 2019, President Donald Trump gave Turkey the green light to launch a military operation against Syrian Kurdistan, the Kurdish-led autonomous region known as Rojava . As journalists and nongovernmental organization workers fled toward the sole border crossing linking the war-torn region to the outside world, they paused to post teary selfies at the rickety pontoon bridge that spans the border, en route to hotels in neighboring Iraq where they would pen dramatic op-eds heralding the end of the region’s bold project in direct-democratic, women-led governance in the Middle East.
At the time, I thought these dire proclamations overstated the case. On the one hand, Kurds rightly feared that Turkish drones and Islamist militias would continue to tear apart the Kurdish polity, regardless of the ceasefire deal, or else that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad would gradually reassert his brutal rule. But as the weeks turned into months into years, we could see that the Rojava revolution had survived — battered, bruised and compromised — enduring even if the flags flying overhead had changed.
Yet seven years later, as the Islamist forces that had deposed al-Assad turned their crosshairs to Rojava, it was time to make my own hasty exit from Rojava to Iraq. Taking the same potholed road toward the same makeshift border crossing, I felt a commingling of horror, nostalgia and grief. Just as on scores of previous trips I had made along that route, I reflected with sadness on the Syrian-Turkish border wall constructed from 2016 to 2018 in response to the outbreak of Kurdish-led autonomy in Rojava. That wall now separates Rojava’s desert towns from the soaring mountains that constitute the Kurds’ true historic strongholds.
As a cliché familiar from a thousand headlines puts it, the Kurds “have no friends but the mountains.” Yet the new, hulking border wall totally separates Rojava’s Kurds from their traditional mountain refuges, leaving them more alone than ever.
In another world, the Kurds and the Islamists could have united post-al-Assad and settled their post-conflict differences at the negotiating table. But the tactical differences and battlefield grievances occasioned by 15 years of civil conflict set the stage for tragedy.
From the moment his forces toppled Assad’s statues in December 2024, the reformed jihadist Ahmed al-Sharaa scrubbed up nice and was rapidly normalized into the U.S.-led regional order, soon to be found joking around with Trump and sharing a stage in New York with the very general who oversaw his 2006 arrest for opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Elsewhere in Syria, time ran backward.
But elsewhere in Syria, time ran backward. Bouts of retribution against minority religious communities seen as allied with al-Assad or linked to Israel cost thousands of lives, in a bloody precursor to the current confrontation between al-Sharaa’s Islamist forces and the secular Kurds.
The Kurds had every reason to be wary of al-Sharaa and his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an al-Qaida offshoot with a long record of chauvinist violence against minorities.
At the same time, the Kurdish authorities’ crackdowns on Arab populations longing for reunification with Damascus gave Rojava increasing aspects of a police state. Tens of thousands of Islamic State (ISIS)-linked militants continued to languish in ugly prison camps run by Kurdish forces on behalf of the U.S. and indifferent West. These developments stood in increasingly stark contrast to Rojava’s commitment to radical, grassroots forms of democracy and justice.
Throughout the first weeks of 2026 , Arab cities the Kurds had seized from ISIS during the war were taken back in a matter of hours or days by government forces, as Arab fighters formerly allied to the Kurds defected en masse.
Governing and humanitarian bodies set up by the Kurdish-led administration in those cities collapsed overnight. Pro-government gunmen beheaded fleeing Kurds, violated the corpses of slain female fighters and hacked into abandoned phones to send mocking messages to their family members.
Rohlat Afrin, right, commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces Women’s Protection Units, talks with a soldier in Qamishlo, Syria, on Jan. 31, 2026. (AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad)
In Tabqa, pro-government forces celebrated by tearing down the statue of a female fighter as a symbol of a secular, feminist agenda they could never abide. There were atrocities on both sides of the line. War-weary Kurds celebrated the execution of 21 Arab prisoners of war , sharing bleak memes and images of piles of corpses covered in tears-of-laughter emojis. As during the chaos of the early Syrian civil war, neighbor fought neighbor with rusty personal sidearms and jury-rigged tanks seized from ISIS and filmed on grainy camera phones.
No longer a functioning multiethnic statelet, Rojava was again a scattered collection of warring, isolated towns, strung out and exposed along a single potholed road.
Rojava was again a scattered collection of warring, isolated towns.
The rapid military reversal was not just an orgy of grief and bloodlust. Ever since I first arrived in Rojava in 2018, people had spoken yearningly of the early days of the revolution, before its institutionalization as a project in quasi-statist governance and military expansion, when people joined the fight without wages to protect their homes in a spirit of neighborly solidarity that the revolution claimed as its ultimate value. The return of violence in early 2026 brought a resurgence of revolutionary spirit. On the night the region’s panicked authorities announced a full-scale military mobilization, the streets of the de facto capital, Qamishlo, were exultant. I saw locals more impassioned and defiant than I had ever seen them during the years of fragile peace. People careened through the streets on appropriated armored personnel carriers left behind by the Americans and broken-down motorized tricycles alike, waving Kurdistan flags and blaring Kurdish revolutionary music through mosque speakers. Everyone seemed to be waving AK-47s in the air. They appeared in the hands of old women in hijab and young girls in flip-flops, in the doorstep of shops and homes, shooting in the air in celebration of seemingly minor victories: a television interview with the region’s military commander in chief or the arrival of an aid convoy from neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan.
This revolutionary defiance had a dark side. The masked young gunmen of the Kurds’ hardline Revolutionary Youth organization conducted ad hoc stop-and-searches of Arab-speaking locals , operating with little apparent oversight from the region’s authorities. Paradoxically, Rojava has always relied on a strong spirit of Kurdish nationalism to inspire the young to sacrifice their lives in service of a revolutionary project that repudiates nationalism.
In practice, Rojava’s commitment to an interethnic participatory democracy has thus always been limited by the Kurds’ leading role in the fight against ISIS and subsequent need to exert hardline control of an ongoing Islamist insurgency. Now some fighters on the front lines openly mocked the slogan “brotherhood of peoples.” They were fighting to defend Kurds and Kurdish homes, not any utopian dream of interethnic cooperation.
Around the leaky diesel stove of a local commune building I witnessed the dream of interethnic brotherhood dying in real time. Communes like this were intended to be the building blocks of neighborhood and village-level democracy, used as administrative centers for accessing subsidized bread and diesel, as well as disseminating information and party propaganda. The centers had served this purpose during wartime, with locals providing blankets, food and charitable donations in the revolution’s original neighborly spirit.
But as the Arab regions fell without a fight and Islamist forces arrived at the gates of Kurdish cities, commune members found themselves up against another tragic paradox.
The ratcheting tensions and violence stoked intercommunal fears and made it seem naive to trust one’s neighbor, whatever the party ideology might claim. Their new task was disarming displaced Arabs suspected of forming pro-government sleeper cells, stockpiling arms with plans to treacherously join the expected Islamist onslaught. As the local Kurds were reminded by the party cadre overseeing the meeting, the whole point of this revolution was to overcome exactly this type of interethnic prejudice and mistrust.
In the same breath, the party cadre both lectured the local men over their anti-Arab chauvinism and urged them to collect sensitive documents held by Arab neighbors. Even as they recalled sharing food and water with these same refugees, burly Kurdish men referred euphemistically to the Arabs living in their midst as “those who don’t speak our language.” And there was a grim logic to their paranoia. To speak of the “brotherhood of peoples” now was to risk a bullet in the back.
Armed Kurdish volunteers stand guard at a checkpoint while patrolling overnight in Qamishlo, Syria, on Jan. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad)
At the same time, the Syrian Kurds face deepening global isolation. ISIS’ terrible atrocities against the Kurds and the Yazidi minority were a decade ago, and there are new regional imperatives at play for Western powers. As al-Sharaa’s forces stormed up to the gates of Rojava’s ISIS detention centers, the U.S. Air Force flew thousands of ISIS detainees to safety in neighboring Iraq . Kurdish fighters patrolling the streets around the emptying detention centers pointed at the helicopters and laughed bitterly: None of them would ever be airlifted to safety in a U.S. Chinook, unlike the very Islamists they defeated and jailed at Washington’s behest.
During the chaotic weeks following Assad’s collapse, the West’s refusal to offer substantial military support to the Kurdish fight against ISIS was widely perceived on the Kurdish street as a betrayal. Old women at the front of protests would grasp your arm to repeat desperate mantras appealing vaguely for international intervention: “Where are the United Nations? Where are our human rights?”
To speak of the “brotherhood of peoples” now was to risk a bullet in the back.
The Americans are gone now, leaving empty bases where Kurdish hunger strikers once gathered around tire fires to appeal in vain for help. Expectations of reciprocal support have been replaced with a harsher and more realistic assessment. People curse Trump, but they no longer hold any illusions about deliverance from the United States.
Russian forces, long stationed in this region, also fled as the clashes raged on, leaving bases piled with garbage and unpaid debts for cigarettes at corner shops.
The post-Assad interregnum saw some Kurdish representatives engage in desperate, Hail Mary appeals to Israel for protection against a shared Islamist threat. Kurdish-Palestinian tensions over the two stateless peoples’ respective engagements with Israel and Turkey have steadily divided two movements that once recognized how much they had in common. But Tel Aviv likewise stood aside , to the somewhat perverse relief of Rojava’s progressive supporters the world over.
Among the global left, meanwhile, international solidarity with Rojava has steadily faded. When I joined Yazidi patrolmen gathered around braziers in singing a Kurdish version of the old partisan anthem “Bella Ciao,” it felt like I had been transported back to 2016, when leftist and feminist interests improbably aligned with the U.S.-led war against ISIS. That temporary conurbation of interests, always a site of grave ideological tension, has vanished altogether.
The day I left for my return to Iraqi Kurdistan, the mood was somber.
Caffeinated, chain-smoking Kurdish soldiers drove me along the familiar border road, past snow-covered fields slowly turning to mud. Al-Sharaa’s Islamist troops were arriving for the first time in Qamishlo as part of a U.S.-backed ceasefire and integration dea l seen as highly unfavorable by many Kurds, even if it averted full-scale ethnic violence. Masked soldiers rolled into the city center atop armored vehicles with single fingers aloft in the Islamist salute; Kurdish women responded by flashing the peace symbol associated with Kurdish resistance.
Since the Kurdish administration had imposed a strict shutdown, the only gunfire we heard was celebratory — local Arabs shooting defiantly into the sky as state forces made their symbolic entry to the former Syrian Kurdish capital. The road home felt more vulnerable than ever as the government’s heavy weapons stood just out of sight, ready to fire up again should the integration deal fail.
Guns set down the day I departed still remain silent.
My Kurdish companions in the car to the border swore defiantly to battle on. But the more likely outcome is that Damascus will continue to gradually reassert its control. Indeed, guns set down the day I departed still remain silent, and though locals continue to scuffle and protest the reintegration agreement, Northern Syria has rapidly become the quietest corner of the Levant. When a stray Iranian shell fell at random outside Qamishlo, friends and shepherds ambled over to take selfies beside it.
All is not lost. The formalization of Kurdish language and cultural rights is a positive step, though still far from the truly devolved political and financial autonomy the region’s minorities once dreamed of. To many, the struggle to retain Kurdish-language signs over institutions they no longer control hardly seems worth the sacrifice of so many lives.
In particular, the radical autonomy Rojava granted to tens of thousands of women is the revolution’s clearest, most undeniable achievement. The autonomous women’s fighting units and equivalent political and civil-society structures can hardly stomach the thought of submitting to al-Sharaa’s misogynistic, Islamist rule. For women raised in conditions of unexpected and transformative freedom, it’s impossible to imagine being driven back into the marital home.
A shepherd boy walks away from an unexploded Iranian projectile that landed in an open field in the outskirts of Qamishlo, Syria, on March 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad)
But whereas the Kurdish female fighters I met in January swore to resist the Syrian army at any cost, they now launch hashtag campaigns aimed at achieving integration into that very Syrian national army. Adapting as ever, to new realities , they tacitly acknowledge the unavoidable fact that Rojava, as the world knew it, has ended.
With the handover of the region’s oil resources, there is no money left to pay salaries. All-woman autonomous spaces will be shuttered, their funding streams cut off. People have given their lives to the revolution — militants who have known only armed struggle, teachers whose qualifications are only recognized by the Kurdish administration’s universities — now speak about beginning a new life elsewhere. At the offices of the political and civil-society organizations that are steadily being brought back under Damascus’ control, the lights are literally going off.
What does it mean for a revolution to end? Did the French revolution end with the Terror, with the rise of Napoleon or with the return of the monarchy? Did the broader Syrian revolution end as its opposition was overrun by conservative Islamists, or was it achieved with the ouster of Assad? Did the Rojava revolution end when the Kurds defeated ISIS? When it claimed autonomy and a third of Syria up to the Euphrates? Or conversely when it was brought back under Damascus’ control?
The Kurdish movement’s ideologues argue that the Rojava revolution was always aimed at transforming the minds and hearts of individual people and can thus continue as a social movement irrespective of the return of formal state control.
The Rojava project was brief, flawed and beset on all sides.
This claim has been sorely tested by the realities of war. But it also brings to mind a moment during the January clashes. In the early hours of the morning, a wired and sleepless Kurdish friend burst into the room to tell me he had found three Arabic-speaking men living in an abandoned construction site below our house. My first assumption was that he thought these men were another of the pro-government sleeper cells that paranoid Kurdish eyes were seeing everywhere in Qamishlo during those febrile nights.
On the contrary, he wanted to tell me that he had taken the refugees (one Arab and two Alawite) to the commune to find them food and blankets and register them as displaced people, thus ensuring they would be left alone by the night patrols. Not for the first time in Rojava, I was embarrassed to have assumed the worst. Hearts have indeed been changed by this revolution, in ways not always obvious to the outsiders.
And so has mine. I will always be grateful for my years in Rojava and the lessons the revolution taught me about hope, wisdom, solidarity, friendship and comradeship, as well as betrayal, death and defeat, all part of Rojava’s revolutionary story.
As we rolled past the snow-covered fields heading east of Qamishlo, I had the bittersweet thought that the revolution’s end would at least enable a reassessment of the achievements that seemed to tarnish as the war years ground on.
The Rojava project was brief, flawed and beset on all sides. But it was a historic crystallization of noble ideas that defined the post-Arab Spring Middle East. If Rojava was ultimately more Paris Commune than October Revolution, it was a revolution nonetheless.
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