Statelet of Survivors: The Making of a Semi-Autonomous Region in Northeast Syria

by Amy Austin Holmes

A remarkable examination of an understudied aspect of the Syrian conflict that traces the genealogy of one of the most radical social experiments in self-governance of our time.

Syrian Kurds and their Arab and Christian allies have embarked on one of the most radical experiments in self-governance of our time. In defiance of the Assad regime, the Islamic State, and regional autocrats, this unlikely coalition created a statelet to govern their semi-autonomous region. In Statelet of Survivors , Amy Austin Holmes charts the movement from its origins to what it has become today. Drawing from seven years of research trips to northern and eastern Syria, Holmes traces the genealogy of this social experiment to the Republic of Mount Ararat in Turkey, where a self-governing entity was proclaimed in 1927 based on solidarity between Kurds and Armenian genocide survivors. Founded by survivors of modern-day atrocities, the Autonomous Administration does more to empower women and minorities than any other region of Syria. Holmes analyzes its military and police forces, schools, the judicial system, the economic model it has implemented, and strategy of empowering women who
were once enslaved by ISIS. An in-depth examination of the region Kurds call Rojava, this book tells the remarkable story of the people who both triumphed over ISIS and created a model of decentralized governance in Syria that could eventually be expanded if Assad were to ever fall.

272 pages, Paperback

Published January 12, 2024

Reviews

[Ellison Moorehead]

This book was recommended to me by a doctoral student being advised by a professor of mine. The professor I trust; his student I, now, do not. Unfortunately, I’ve already ordered another recommendation of his on the same topic (the Kurds in Syria). One can only hope it is better edited.

This particular work is quite literally a mess, with all due respect to the researcher, who is clearly committed to the peoples of the region and to listening to their voices and would like to offer more space to some of those voices that have not gotten as much airtime.

I realize there are a lot of moving parts in Syria, especially right now, lots of things have happened even since this book was published just last year, and there is a general ignorance of those parts and how they might all fit together. I for one do not have a good handle on any of them. I have an inkling of a handle. One might discuss Russia, the US, the first World War, one might discuss oil, Sunnis and Shias, one might discuss Christianity, modernisation, pan-Arabism, neocolonialism. Women, language, language policy, language and women, family policy, women and religion. Torture, prisons, terrorism, war crimes. Refugees, international relations, the idea of West and the idea of East, racism, radicalization. One might, just might, be overwhelmed from the outset if you say it like that. So we might look to a writer to put it all in order for us to make some proverbial sense.

And the problem with this book, however, is I feel like hardly any attempt was made to put together a viewable puzzle: we're presented with what happens when you dump out the pieces and some are stuck together (ok, a view might be coming into focus) but most are scattered. You can tell the color scheme and where some of the corners are but not much more.

I was desperate to know more about Kurds and the YPG (then the SDF, now the Syrian army?) and I must have gleaned something from this chaotic, ill-written, wandering, opinionated and thoroughly American statist book, although it says hardly anything about America, but I spent so much time slashing through repetitions with my pencil and empty propaganda-sounding terms like the editor that I am that it was hard to just read for content.

And of course the content itself was like we were given the unfinished manuscript, complete with barebones tables of information that weren't completely explained and felt like data dumps from Excel files facing poorly printed photographs of redacted ID cards in very blurry Arabic with no translations or assistance from our supposed tour-guide, the author. Serious faces of women star out at us from its pages, removed from us and from our understanding.

There is, however, and I will admit, a huge amount of information, however raw, in this book. It’s too bad I had to work so hard to decipher it and piece it together into an intelligible whole. The most interesting bits were when she very helpfully included translations of official documents from the people themselves. There the spark behind this amazing phenomenon of Rojava (then Autonomous Administration, now…) started to light up.

To start things off, the author has a bone to pick about the early 20th c Armenian genocide in what is now Turkey and spent the entire first chapter on that. Not to say that the Armenian genocide is not a fascinating topic that I would love to know more about, but I wasn't so convinced basing the entire book on that and not, say, the recently ended Syrian civil war or the PKK or Ocalan (whom she clearly does not like) or even ISIS. But ok, let's assume, as she does, that the Armenian genocide more than 100 years ago is fundamental to understanding the YPG and the Kurdish political movement in southern Turkey, northern Syria and Iraq. I also like to take the wide-angle view of things, of history, and movements, I'm a big grand narrative woman as well, but to include this topic as the first chapter in a book on the SDF seemed bold. And I wasn't convinced. As I read on, I also realized she spends little to no time on Syria itself or the Assad (father and son) regime which, one might convincingly argue, were the ultimate trigger for the entire conflict and subsequent take-over by Kurdish militias of the area. In one mention, she says that “other anniversaries of the Syrian conflict were often used by analysts and activists to remind anyone who needed reminding that the Assad regime was vicious, corrupt, utterly undemocratic, and so forth” (47). She clearly thinks we’ve gone on about that for too long and quickly moves on to other topics. I’m not so sure.

I have the sticky icky feeling part of her interest in the Armenians is that they are Christians, and that they are, as Christians, a minority. This focus on minorities, especially religious and especially against Muslims, is recurrent throughout the book (there's another chapter on the Yezidis). The very first sentence in the first chapter has the words “abandoned churches” in it, evoking a persecuted fleeing peoples, persecuted due to their (Christian) religion and fleeing leaving behind their, shall we say, cultural patrimony. This focus in all things Syria from the supposed left and the right on "minorities" against majorities in Arab Muslim countries is not, however, just hers. The unspoken but vaguely threatening Muslim and Arab (less Turkish) majority is always (lurking) in the background.

She is also under a very European impression that the only thing worth having in the world is a nation-state. By that I mean, and most people mean, one nation (or ethnicity or culture) under one state (legal, governmental and military organization of that nation) with borders. In traditionally multi-cultural (excuse the expression) places in the world like Syria, this is difficult to bring about, of course, although the imperial powers tried when they broke up the Ottoman Empire and when they founded Israel some years later, the need for ethnic cleansing to make it happen be damned.

She never says this, but she is firmly entrenched, even when it is at odds with the expressed opinions of the actors themselves, in the idea that a state is needed for these people, one each. Pan-Arabism, the joining of Syria and Egypt in the late 50s, is clearly distasteful to her, explicitly because it “erases” non-Arab identity, but I would also wager that it’s because it ignores the common sense, of-course-we-must-have-it nation-state. I would counter-argue that imposing nation-state lines on geography and peoples that hitherto did not have them has only caused violent problems in the very region she is analyzing.

This assumption that one needs a nation-state is not only problematic on a theoretical level, in general: it’s problematic for a book written on one of the best contemporary examples of non-state governance in the world, carried out by people who know exactly what they’re doing and theorize about it quite extensively. She acknowledges this theory, but talks very little of it, rather choosing to concentrate almost exclusively on ethnicities and religions and “women” as categories, especially if those categories are minorities and are in need of saving (the very vocabulary employed of victim/survivor comes straight out of the perhaps passé feminist rape hotline manuals).

In some more form-related general complaints I have, she repeats herself endlessly, which is her own chaotic writing but mostly and overall the fault of the editors, which I doubt existed, who could easily have just taken them out. I’m shocked at the quality of the editing out of a publisher like Oxford. The repetition occurs so often that not only is it tiresome, but it makes the book feel almost circular, almost content-less. She repeats the fact that European states refuse to take back their citizens (and try them) who participated in ISIS multiple times at the beginning, and then multiple times at the end of the book. This is of course something an editor should have pointed out and rectified. She uses and abuses bullet points, like ideas she had that she didn’t have time to flesh out, also something an editor could have fixed. She also is wildly inconsistent with acronyms (defining them after using them, and not the first time as is helpful, and using different ones for the same organization, most glaringly in the case of ISIS, which she calls alternatively Daesh and ISIS without explaining), another error an editor should have cleaned up for her.

I was thoroughly disappointed with this book because it was nearly unreadably messy in form and content and bounced around without any driving narrative, even when there is a perfectly fine chronological one on hand one could easily use. Her contextualization was nearing on random and her theorizing on gender parity almost at the (baseline bad) corporate understanding level. Her leaving out of all Arab and/or Muslim elements reeked to me of Orientalism, as did her focus on what’s important to us (women on boards and gender quotas) and not what’s important to them (democratic confederalism, and/or other things I am not any more aware of now than I was before I read the book). She is constantly surprised they don’t want to secede and mentions it many times (see my complaint about repetition above). She had no interest in (or a limited understanding of) their political theories, and I can say this as an anarchist myself, and only in whether women were high on their list of priorities. This sort of gender essentialism, single issue focus, really grates on me personally, and the focus on minorities that need to be protected just sounds like American constitutionalism transferred to the context of northern Syria. Unsurprisingly, she acknowledges in the beginning that she now (at the time of publication) works advising the US government. And so it goes.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This excellent book looks at the predominantly Kurdish region that emerged as a de facto independent area in northeastern Syria during the Syrian Civil War. The book is based on the author's extensive trips to the region, as well as significant archival research.

The author begins the story by discussing the ethnic makeup of the region. Although it is protected by a Kurdish militia (the SDF) the region also includes Arabs (who made be a majority of the inhabitants), as well as Armenians, and other Christians (mostly Assyrians). She discusses the pogroms that these communities experienced in late Ottoman times, culminating in the genocide of Armenians in 1915. She argues that the survivors of many of these communities wound up in northern Syria. She then traces their history, particularly their efforts to get independence in the 1920s, as well as the return of their ancestral homes in eastern Turkey. She looks at cases where Armenians and Kurds worked together against mistreatment by the Ataturkist state.

Then, the author turns to the present day, and looks at how the region's residents have built a de facto independent region, with support from refugees from other parts of Syria. She looks at the region's military, justice system, education system, and international outreach. It is a very impressive discussion. She discusses the region's difficulties under ISIS, and how regional leaders are trying to prosecute ISIS detainees in their custody.

The author has a very positive view of the region and its Kurdish leaders. While I agree with her overall, I think she may be assuming the best of people who are deliberately trying to appear in a positive light. She ignores or explains away allegations of abuses in the past. She also refers to the region as the Autonomous Administration, and never develops a shorter acronym for this. The book was published before the fall of the Assad regime, so it isn't completely up to date, despite being published last year. It still provides excellent insight, that can be used to help determine Syria's future.

[Luna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important real-world project envisioning what a country could look like after the nation-state model. The book struggles at first to properly paint the ethnic complexities along the border between Turkey and Syria, so everyone (me) who isn't already versed in kurdish history, the PKK or the ISIS caliphate will be lost at first. It becomes clearer when Holmes talks about AANES itself and especially the chapters on issues of feminism and education are nothing short of inspiring.

[Matthew Petti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review posted to Reason Magazine: https://reason.com/2024/03/30/statele...

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended to anyone wanting to understand the AANES and how it came into being. I especially loved the sections in women’s political and economic empowerment as well as religious freedom.