Part One.
When the ‘Arab Spring’ spread to Syria in 2011, Bashar Al Assad withdrew most of his forces from the predominantly Kurdish areas of Northern Syria to concentrate his firepower on the rebel forces in the South. The political freedoms of the Kurds had been heavily restricted by Assad, expressions of Kurdish identity were criminalised and their demographic density was diluted by Assad’s ‘Arabisation’ policy in which Arabs were resettled in Kurdish areas. The Kurds took advantage of Assad’s distractedness; under the direction of PYD (Democratic Union Party) which was influenced by the ideology of ‘democratic confederalism’ propounded by Abdullah Öcalan, jailed leader of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) across the border in Turkey, the Syrian Kurds set up a secular and ethnically inclusive, genuinely bottom-up democratic system. It is valiantly defended by men and women soldiers (YPG/YPJ) against ISIS which is unsuccessfully attempting to erode its Southern border.
This is part one of the diary I kept on my recent visit to Rojava:
