Since late 2025, forces aligned with the jihadist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, an offshoot of Al Qaeda) have intensified military operations against Rojava, the western region of Kurdistan which is within the territory of northeast Syria. HTS operates as the core of Syria’s reconstituted armed forces within the imperialist-aligned ‘Transitional Govern-ment’ since HTS ousted the government of President Bashar Al-Assad in December 2024. What is at stake is the violent reassertion of imperialism over a revolutionary national movement.
The attacks on the Kurdish people are reinforced by Turkish-backed militias and accompanied by political pressure to dissolve the autonomous structures of Rojava and force the Kurdish armed movement to integrate into the Syrian national military. At the time of writing, the Kurdish-led Syrian Demo-cratic Forces (SDF) have been coerced into a ceasefire deal with the Syrian government which the SDF says will preserve Rojava’s institutions while beginning an integration process.
100,000 Kurds have been displaced by the attacks which forced the SDF to withdraw from Kurdish areas of Aleppo, Hasaka, Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa. HTS forces have raided SDF camps and prisons, freeing ISIS terrorists. Kurdish-held Kobane remains besieged and faces a humanitarian crisis; the Syrian government says it will lift the siege on 2 February.
The assault on Rojava is a calculated counter-revolutionary offensive driven by imperialism and regional reaction, aimed at destroying one of several significant challenges to imperialist domination in the Middle East, alongside the struggles within Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen. Kurds across the world, from Erbil to the streets of British cities, have demonstrated in solidarity with their people in Rojava.
Rojava and the Kurdish national question
The Kurdish people constitute one of the largest oppressed nations in the world, deliberately divided by imperialism after the First World War. The borders imposed by Britain and France in the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement fragmented Kurdistan between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, ensuring permanent instability and repression. Lenin insisted that communists must support the right of oppressed nations to self-determination not as an abstract principle, but as a necessary component of the struggle against imperialism.
Rojava emerged from this history of national oppression. When the Syrian state retreated from the north in 2012, Kurdish organisations aligned with the Turkey-based liberation movement, the Kurdistan Workers Party, filled the vacuum, constructing autonomous institutions based on local councils, women’s revolutionary leadership, and armed self-defence. This programme offered a direct challenge to both imperialist control and the reactionary nation-state system that enforces it.
The importance of Rojava lies not in romanticism but in material reality. Kurdish forces defended territory, organised production, and – crucially – mobilised the masses. Women’s militias, communal decision-making and multi-ethnic participation were concrete expressions of resistance to imperialist social relations. That is precisely why Rojava is now under attack.
Imperialist manipulation
The US and Britain cynically armed and supported Kurdish forces during the fight against ISIS. This was about outsourcing ground combat while maintaining imperialist control over airspace and access to oil resources. Tens of thousands of Kurdish fighters were killed or wounded defeating ISIS between 2014 and 2019. National liberation movements have the right to form tactical alliances; the Rojava revolutionaries have no illusions about the role of imperialism and never sold their struggle for liberation for a rifle. It is not for communists in Britain to criticise their strategy but build solidarity to relieve pressure on the national liberation movement.
Imperialism may temporarily support a national movement, but only insofar as it weakens rivals. Once that function ends, yesterday’s ‘partners’ become today’s obstacles. This is exactly what we see now. The US and Britain refused to intervene against the HTS-dominated Syrian state’s assault on Kurdish areas. Imperialism aims to reorganise the region as it has many times before; all to maintain a ‘friendly’ region, with ‘friendly’ markets to assert its economic, military, and political control throughout the Middle East and beyond.
HTS, Turkey and the bourgeois state
HTS was never a force for democracy. It is a reactionary terrorist organisation that now functions as the armed backbone of a new bourgeois Syrian state. Its aim is centralisation, discipline of labour, suppression of autonomous organisation, and reintegration into global capitalism. It now exists only to reassert the instrument of the state against all who oppose its capitulation to the imperialists.
Turkey’s role is equally clear. The Turkish state acts as a regional imperialist power, determined to crush any form of Kurdish self-organisation that threatens its own internal colonial, genocidal domination of Bakur (North Kurdistan). Turkish intelligence, weapons and proxy militias are deeply embedded in the current offensive. Ankara’s goal is to crush all Kurdish resistance wherever it still stands.
Britain and the US are fully complicit. British arms exports to Turkey, intelligence sharing, and the criminalisation of Kurdish organisations all contribute to the assault on Rojava. Imperialism operates both abroad and domestically. We must oppose any conditions imposed on the Kurdish people to deprive them of their self-determination.
Victory to the Kurdish Resistance!
Imperialism out of the Middle East!
