I’m aware of the ML cynicism regarding it, but I’ve had a few friends ask about Rojava and I honestly haven’t heard anything about it for a while.
They’re still around and self-governing and stable, they’ve had to submit to Syrian protection but are still nominally independent. The loss of Afrin, their most developed area was a huge blow.
There are some nationalist and centralist tensions in the government, but still, they’re overall based and just trying to hold on and preserve something of what they had under Syrian reunification. They’re still kicking goals in terms of education, minority involvement, and social structures, but they’re very poor and resources are almost nil.
I don’t know many MLs who were opposed to Rojava, aside from a weird Maoist or two and Hakim’s insistance that it’s primarily a nationalist polity (which seems to be obviously untrue despite the presence of Kurdish nationalists)
The main critique was accepting the poisoned chalice of US help, rather than cutting a deal with Assad. I can’t blame them too much, they had a hard, hard choice and a deal with the devil in exchange for true independence might have seemed very attractive.
Rojava is a tragedy, but maybe, like the original Greek tragedies, restoration and justice will follow despair.
The main critique was accepting the poisoned chalice of US help, rather than cutting a deal with Assad. I can’t blame them too much, they had a hard, hard choice and a deal with the devil in exchange for true independence might have seemed very attractive.
Occasionally I read news sites based in Rojava and I feel like one thing that some leftists don’t understand is that a lot of the people in that region legitimately hate Assad and the Syrian Government, so accepting the return of the Syrian government would have been a very bitter pill for people to swallow. Not only was the Syrian government discriminatory towards Kurds and treated Northeast Syria as an internal colony, but apparently it was also just incompetent, corrupt, and centralized to such an insane degree that municipalities were incapable of maintaining themselves properly.
The thing is, the US is a known genocidal empire. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that it gives context, but it’s pretty clear why a lot of people were sketched out by any amount of aligning with US interests.
Like if the US invaded Mexico and the Zapatistas aligned with them in any way, it would be… pretty fucked, no? Not a perfect analogy, but the point remains. Or if the US invaded India and the Naxalites aligned with them at all, the Philippines and the CPP, etc.
I think a lot of people here don’t realise how fash Assad and Ba’athist Syria is and has been.
They’re explicitly an ethnostate, the full name of the nation is the Syrian Arab Republic, they have a whole load of oppressive laws that apply only to jews (although in 1992 they expelled almost all of the remnants of Syria’s jewish population), have published 3 new editions of The Protocols of The Elders of Zion in the last 25 years, gave fleeing Nazis government jobs during the cold war, support almost every Western Neo-Nazi group there is and in 2017 hosted David Duke (the former Grand Wizard of the US KKK) for a state visit, gave him medals and got him to do rallies on national TV. Until 2020 killing a female relative who had “dishonoured” you or your family by “engaging in an illegitimate sexual act” was a seperate, lesser offence than murder under the Syrian penal code (and in 2014 Syria kicked up a fuss about the Rojava just treating it as murder) and to this day in Syria it’s legal for 13 year old girls to be married and women have to go through a religious court to get a divorce while for men talaq talaq talaq is legally binding.
Like, yeah they’re a lesser threat to the world at large than the US, but it’s hard to blame Rojava for choosing to accept the military protection of the US rather than fully throwing themselves on the mercy of Ba’athist Syria.
