Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria
The Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava, is a de facto autonomous region in northeastern Syria. It consists of self-governing sub-regions of Jazira and Euphrates. The region gained its de facto autonomy in 2012 in the context of the ongoing Rojava conflict and the wider Syrian civil war, in which its official military force, the Syrian Democratic Forces, has taken part.
While conducting some foreign relations, the region is neither officially recognized as autonomous by the government of Syria, state, or other governments institutions except for the Catalan Parliament. Northeastern Syria is polyethnic and home to sizeable ethnic Arab, Kurdish, and Assyrian populations, with smaller communities of ethnic Turkmen, Armenians, Circassians, and Yazidis.
Independent organizations providing healthcare in the region include the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Syrian American Medical Society, the Free Burma Rangers, and Doctors Without Borders. Since 2016, Turkish and Turkish-backed Syrian rebel forces have occupied parts of northern Syria through a series of military operations against the SDF.
Following the January 2026 northeastern Syria offensive by government forces, the DAANES lost 80% of the territory it had controlled, and the SDF retreated to Al-Hasakah Governorate.
Polity names and translations
Parts of northern Syria are known as Western Kurdistan, or simply Rojava among Kurds, one of the four parts of Greater Kurdistan. The name "Rojava" was thus associated with a Kurdish identity of the administration. As the region expanded and increasingly included areas dominated by non-Kurdish groups, mostly Arabs, "Rojava" was used less and less by the administration in hopes of deethnicising its appearance and making it more acceptable to other ethnicities. Regardless, the polity continued to be called "Rojava" by locals and international observers, with journalist Metin Gurcan noting that "the concept of Rojava a brand gaining global recognition" by 2019.The territory around Jazira province of northeastern Syria is called Gozarto, part of the historical Assyrian homeland, by Syriac-Assyrians. The first name of the local government for the Kurdish-dominated areas in Afrin District, Ayn al-Arab District, and northern al-Hasakah Governorate was "Interim Transitional Administration", adopted in 2013. After the three autonomous cantons were proclaimed in 2014 together with a written Social Contract, Territories governed by the Democratic Union Party .
The updated December 2016 constitution of the polity uses the name Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. On 6 September 2018, the Syrian Democratic Council adopted a new name for the region, naming it the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria also sometimes translated into English as the Self-Administration of North and East Syria, encompassing the Euphrates and Jazira regions as well as the local civil councils in the regions of Raqqa, Tabqa, and Deir ez-Zor. In December 2023, the region adopted a new constitution, with a new name for the region, the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. The YPG/PYD have at times used the names Federal Northern Syria and the Democratic Confederalist Autonomous Areas of Northern Syria.
History
Background
Northern Syria is part of the Fertile Crescent, and includes archaeological sites dating to the Neolithic, such as Tell Halaf. In antiquity, the area was part of the Mitanni kingdom, its centre being the Khabur river valley in modern-day Jazira Region. It was then part of Assyria, with the last surviving Assyrian imperial records, from between 604 BC and 599 BC, being found in and around the Assyrian city of Dūr-Katlimmu. Later, it was ruled by different dynasties and empires – the Achaemenids of Iran, the Hellenistic empires who succeeded Alexander the Great, the Artaxiads of Armenia, Rome, the Iranian Parthians and Sasanians, then by the Byzantines and successive Arab Islamic caliphates. In course of these regimes, different groups settled in northern Syria, often contributing to population shifts. Arab tribes have been present in the area for millennia. Under the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire, different tribal groups and mercenaries were settled in northern Syria as military colonists; these included Arabs and possibly Kurds. Jan Retso argued that Abai, an Arab settlement where the Seleucid king Antiochus VI Dionysus was raised, was located in northern Syria. By the 3rd century, the Arab tribe of the Fahmids lived in northern Syria.By the 9th century, northern Syria was inhabited by a mixed population of Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds, Turkic groups, and others. Kurdish tribes in the area often operated as soldiers for hire, and were still placed in specific military settlements in the northern Syrian mountains. There existed a Kurdish elite of which Saladin, the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty and the Emir of Masyaf in the 12th century were part of. Under Saladin's rule, northern Syria experienced a mass immigration of Turkic groups who came into conflict with Kurdish tribes, resulting in clashes that wiped out several Kurdish communities.
During the Ottoman Empire, large Kurdish-speaking tribal groups both settled in and were deported to areas of northern Syria from Anatolia. By the 18th century, five Kurdish tribes existed in northeastern Syria. The demographics of this area underwent a huge shift in the early part of the 20th century. Some Circassian, Kurdish and Chechen tribes cooperated with the Ottoman authorities in the massacres of Armenian and Assyrian Christians in Upper Mesopotamia, between 1914 and 1920, with further attacks on unarmed fleeing civilians conducted by local Arab militias. Many Assyrians fled to Syria during the genocide and settled mainly in the Jazira area. Starting in 1926, the region saw another immigration of Kurds following the failure of the Sheikh Said rebellion against the Turkish authorities. While many of the Kurds in Syria have been there for centuries, waves of Kurds fled their homes in Turkey and settled in Syrian Al-Jazira Province, where they were granted citizenship by the French Mandate authorities. The number of Turkish Kurds settled in al-Jazira province during the 1920s was estimated at 20,000 people, out of 100,000 inhabitants, with the remainder of the population being Christians and Arabs.
Syria's independence and rule of the Ba'ath Party
Following Syria's independence, policies of Arab nationalism and attempts at forced Arabization became widespread in the country's north, to a large part directed against the Kurdish population. The region received little investment or development from the central government and laws discriminated against Kurds owning property, driving cars, working in certain professions and forming political parties. Property was routinely confiscated by government loansharks. After the Ba'ath Party seized power in the 1963 Syrian coup d'état, non-Arab languages were forbidden at Syrian public schools. This compromised the education of students belonging to minorities like Kurds, Turkmen, and Assyrians. Some groups like Armenians, Circassians, and Assyrians were able to compensate by establishing private schools, but Kurdish private schools were also banned. Northern Syrian hospitals lacked equipment for advanced treatment and instead patients had to be transferred outside the region. Numerous place names were arabized in the 1960s and 1970s. In his report for the 12th session of the UN Human Rights Council titled Persecution and Discrimination against Kurdish Citizens in Syria, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights held that "Successive Syrian governments continued to adopt a policy of ethnic discrimination and national persecution against Kurds, completely depriving them of their national, democratic and human rights an integral part of human existence. The government imposed ethnically-based programs, regulations and exclusionary measures on various aspects of Kurds' lives political, economic, social and cultural." Kurdish cultural festivals like Newroz were effectively banned.In many instances, the Syrian government arbitrarily deprived ethnic Kurdish citizens of their citizenship. The largest such instance was a consequence of a census in 1962, which was conducted for exactly this purpose. 120,000 ethnic Kurdish citizens saw their citizenship arbitrarily taken away and became stateless. This status was passed to the children of a "stateless" Kurdish father. In 2010, the Human Rights Watch estimated the number of such "stateless" Kurdish people in Syria at 300,000. In 1973, the Syrian authorities confiscated of fertile agricultural land in Al-Hasakah Governorate, which was owned and cultivated by tens of thousands of Kurdish citizens, and gave it to Arab families brought in from other provinces. In 2007, in the Al-Hasakah Governorate, around Al-Malikiyah were granted to Arab families, while tens of thousands of Kurdish inhabitants of the villages concerned were evicted. These and other expropriations was part of the so-called "Arab Belt initiative" which aimed to change the demographic fabric of the resource-rich region. Accordingly, relations between the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurdish population were tense.
The response of northern Syrian parties and movements to the policies of Hafez al-Assad's Ba'athist government varied greatly. Some parties opted for resistance, whereas others such as the Kurdish Democratic Progressive Party and the Assyrian Democratic Party attempted to work within the system, hoping to bring about changes through soft pressure. In general, parties that openly represented certain ethnic and religious minorities were not allowed to participate in elections, but their politicians were occasionally allowed to run as Independents. Some Kurdish politicians won seats during the Syrian elections in 1990. The government also recruited Kurdish officials, in particular as mayors, to ease ethnic relations. Regardless, northern Syrian ethnic groups remained deliberately underrepresented in the bureaucracy, and many Kurdish majority areas were run by Arab officials from other parts of the country. Security and intelligence agencies worked hard to suppress dissidents, and most Kurdish parties remained underground movements. The government monitored, though generally allowed this "sub-state activity" because the northern minorities including the Kurds rarely caused unrest with the exception of the 2004 Qamishli massacre. The situation improved after the death of Hafez al-Assad and the election of his son, Bashar al-Assad, under whom the number of Kurdish officials grew.
Despite the Ba'athist internal policies which officially suppressed a Kurdish identity, the Syrian government allowed the Kurdistan Workers' Party to set up training camps from 1980. The PKK was a militant Kurdish group led by Abdullah Öcalan which was waging an insurgency against Turkey. Syria and Turkey were hostile toward each other at the time, resulting in the use of the PKK as proxy group. The party began to deeply influence the Syrian Kurdish population in the Afrin and Ayn al-Arab Districts, where it promoted Kurdish identity through music, clothing, popular culture, and social activities. In contrast, the PKK remained much less popular among Kurds in al-Hasakah Governorate, where other Kurdish parties maintained more influence. Many Syrian Kurds developed a long-lasting sympathy for the PKK, and a large number, possibly more than 10,000, joined its insurgency in Turkey. A rapprochement between Syria and Turkey brought an end to this phase in 1998, when Öcalan and the PKK were formally expelled from northern Syria. Regardless, the PKK maintained a clandestine presence in the region.
In 2002, the PKK and allied groups organized the Kurdistan Communities Union to implement Öcalan's ideas in various Middle Eastern countries. A KCK branch was also set up in Syria, led by Sofi Nureddin and known as "KCK-Rojava". In an attempt to outwardly distance the Syrian branch from the PKK, the Democratic Union Party was established as de facto Syrian "successor" of the PKK in 2003. The "People's Defense Units", a paramilitary wing of the PYD, was also founded during this time, but remained dormant.