The hottest part of the year is not the ideal time to travel to Northeast Syria, a region whose local government is the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES). But I traveled there this past August, prepared for the soaring temperatures and the unrelenting sun. I spoke with a wide variety of officials and residents about the new realities in Syria. I also viewed with my own eyes the systems that people are living under, and the drumbeat of everyday life. After fifteen years of war, hostilities, and resource shortages, following decades of neglect by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, you would think that the region would be totally devastated.
The everyday people of the region are living remarkably stable lives, the children are going to school, the stores are full of food and products, and – most of the time – the lights turn on and there is water in the tap. In the the dust and heat, the people of Northeast Syria have built a functioning system, organized governance, decent electricity, water, and sanitation, the presence of local police forces, and even traffic and parking enforcement. I was surprised to see, on a main street adjacent to the city center in Qamishlo, near the so-called “Jewish market,” a set of pay-parking spots, hosting several cars with freshly-issued parking tickets on the windshields.
Northeast Syria is protected by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US ally in the fight to defeat ISIS. The region was ravaged by the brutal battles against ISIS, and has not seen a presence of the central Syrian government since 2011. Although the occasional Turkish bomb still falls on the region, and although the new Syrian military has engaged the SDF in small skirmishes at the southern tip of the region, Northeast Syria is full of people doing business, innovating, creating art, getting married, starting families, and living lives of an unlikely peace – given the circumstances.
This stability is especially notable for those who are interested in US policy toward the region, because for the entire year, the US government had been normalizing with the new government in power in Damascus, which controls the other two-thirds of Syria, and largely ignoring the northeast part of the country, which has been a reliable US ally, with US troops stationed in their region. The new government in Damascus is largely made up of militants associated with the religious extremism of Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham and the Al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat Al-Nusra. While I was traveling in the northeast, residents in the Damascus-controlled region were describing cities where police are absent, petty crimes occur frequently, and many people are out of work and can’t pay for basic needs. Many said they hadn’t seen the new government anywhere.
While there, I was able to meet with the co-mayor of Qamishlo, Northeast Syria, a city of about 180,000 residents. From her busy office, she described how the city funds these basic services, in between her assistants poking their heads in the door to ask questions about meeting times and contacts. The city of Qamishlo has 22 employees who go door-to-door through the neighborhoods, and collect 10,000 Syrian pounds (about $1 USD, or 1% of the average worker’s income) from each home. If a family is poor and cannot pay, she says, “the employee will look at their house and situation,” and if they appear poor, they just say thanks and walk away. No penalty. No service cut-off. They just do the compassionate thing and leave, without trying to collect.
I also met with the co-mayor of Hasakeh. Walking past residents bustling into and out of the busy municipal government building in the city center as they clutched papers and stacks of the undervalued Syrian pound, we found the co-mayor in a modest office under the loud whir of an air conditioner. She described the careful task of providing water for the 420,000 residents of the city since 2019 when the Turkish Armed Forces seized the Allouk water station, which was the main water source for the city, closing it down. In addition, in the past few decades, Turkey has built a series of dams on the Euphrates River in the southern part of Anatolia, Turkey, the Kurdish region, which severely restrict the water flow into Syria. The municipal government of Hasakeh has been trucking in water in giant water tankers, which are visible throughout the city. They fill privately-owned rooftop water tanks. In addition, the municipal government coordinates with several NGOs, who truck water in to fill public water stations, so anyone can access the water for drinking, cooking, and light washing. She also mentioned that 20% of residents also have access to water from wells, but this water is salinated and contains other toxins, so can be used only for washing and other purposes. This is paid for by taxation, including both household and business taxes. Business taxes are applied according to the footprint of the business in square meters.
The delivery of services in Northeast Syria is a complex, deliberate, and carefully administered system, which is functioning well. Until recently, when the new Syrian government began attracting refugees back into the Damascus-controlled region, Northeast Syria was more stable and prosperous than the rest of Syria.
I emphasize this comparison because although the West seems intent on normalizing with the new Syrian government in Damascus, the reality on the ground is that Northeast Syria has substantive power. It must be reckoned with, not ignored. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have over 100,000 professional soldiers, men and women who were trained-and-equipped with help from the US Armed Forces and are battle-hardened over the past decade by the fight against ISIS. The forces of the new Syrian government, including affiliated militias, number at about 35,000 troops, with varied levels of training and experience.
While in Northeast Syria I visited the Free Syrian Women’s Foundation center in Qamishlo. Their women’s centers offer low-cost physical fitness gyms for women, women’s literacy and language classes, artisan workshops, and women’s empowerment lessons. They offer low-cost training centers for women to learn how to open a business in a trade such as tailoring and hairdressing, so that women who leave their husbands have a source of income. They also own and run a mobile health unit for women in rural villages, because traditional Muslim men will often not allow their wives or daughters to travel into town to seek medical care.
At this organization, they are afraid that Syria will become the next Afghanistan, and they will [see] the gains they have made rapidly stripped away.
“When the HTS comes here, everyone will be killed,” said one of the directors.
These women are terrified of the new government in Damascus. “They don’t accept strong women,” the director said. “They don’t accept our consciousness, and we don’t accept theirs. They want women to obey, and we want women to be stronger.”
“I am an old woman, but still, I am ready to pick up the gun to defend myself against the terrorists,” a 66-year old woman told me in Qamishlo, northeast Syria, when asked about women’s rights under the new Syrian government. The woman, who was nearly six feet tall and sturdily built, did not appear to be bluffing.
I heard a similar message when I met with a representative from the YPJ Women’s Protection Units. These women’s units of the SDF are known as the Kurdish women who battled ISIS in the trenches and won their freedom against the brutal system of ISIS, wherein they may have become slaves. These women’s militias are cautiously optimistic, but at the same time are remaining vigilant, trained, equipped, and prepared, in case they need to fight a new battle for their freedom.
The women of Northeast Syria carry the memory of extremists who abused and executed women who were too headstrong. They saw how independent women in Raqqa were dragged to the city center by ISIS and beheaded for the crime of speaking back to their husbands. They have now borne witness to violations, murders, and kidnappings of Alaawi women in Latakia in March. This time, it was not ISIS committing atrocities, but the very militants who now are making up the Syrian military. The world has additionally witnessed further terror in July and August — against women, men, doctors, patients, children, the Druze people — by these same militants in Suweyda, southern Syria. This prompted even the Israeli government to engage their military, until the violence ceased. While the new Syrian government promises to investigate the horrific events in southern Syria, the people of Northeast Syria have already arrived at the conclusion that the new Syrian government is to blame for the atrocities.
These women fear that, if the northeast falls to extremism, they will lose their freedom — and possibly their lives, just as Alaawi and Druze women did earlier this year.
For most of this year, US policy on Syria has focused on rapid normalization with the new president, Ahmed Al Sharaa, instead of slowing down and seeing whether he can even assert control outside Damascus. It also remains to be seen how the new Syrian government will respect the rights of women, and protect the gains of the women in Northeast Syria, or whether the region will take the painful path of Afghanistan, where women’s rights were rapidly put in shackles and hidden under a veil when the US withdrew support from the region.
The summer heat has now faded and given way to cooler weather. In December, the new Syrian government will have been in power in Damascus for a full year. Damascus has been in negotiations with the DAANES over how much and how soon Northeast Syria will be integrated into the rest of Syria. These negotiations are taking place on the edge of a knife – the religious extremism of the new government in Damascus pushes in the opposite direction than the more democratic ideologies in the northeast.
No one wants to see Syria fall back into civil war. But the task of uniting a diverse country with many different peoples is not a small one. A lasting solution will be one that reckons with the realities of an intact, effective government in Northeast Syria, as well as a large number of women who do not wish to give up their gains.
