Ground report from North East Syria: Enduring a silent tragedy

Rojava

Susan Muhammad lights a cigarette as she recounts her life story, sitting in her office within a newly built park in Qamishli, the capital of Rojava in northeast Syria. Singing a Kurdish song of revolution, she offers me a cigarette, holding out the pack. I politely decline.

At 24, Susan is a striking young mother with a few loose strands of hair framing her face. “You are beautiful,” I tell her. She unlocks her phone and shows me a video of herself at age 14, holding a Kalashnikov rifle and singing “Azadi, azadi” (Freedom, freedom).

A singer in the Kurdish band Studio of Shaheed Walath, Susan radiates fearlessness. Living in a region where bomb blasts, gunfire and drone attacks are a daily reality, she is no stranger to danger.

“Our lives have always been uncertain, and I have never worried about any of it,” she says. Susan served in Rojava women’s military, the YPJ, which played a major role in decimating Islamic State militants in 2015.

“Do you still dream of freedom for your country?” I ask her.

“That was 10 years ago,” she says.

More than anything else, Susan values the freedom she has gained as a woman. She divorced her husband, has a two-year-old son and does not wear hijab. “I’m a true Muslim,” she says.

Freedom has come under severe threat, with new wars disrupting life in Rojava. The place is also known as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), as well as Western Kurdistan.

Rojava has changed in many ways since my first visit here in December 2019. I had then visited the refugee camps and the largest prison holding Islamic State militants—a nightmarish experience I hoped never to relive.

Yet, my interest in Rojava reignited when president Bashar al-Assad fled Syria and the militant group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) took power last December. In January, I flew to Erbil in Iraq, once again with my colleague Bhanu Prakash Chandra, and then drove to the border town of Faysh Khabur in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

Border security at Faysh Khabur was stringent. After verification of passports, all our documents were sent, unlike in 2019, to the police and military for further checks.

A Kurdish officer perked up when I mentioned we were from India. A fan of Salman Khan movies, he asked me to teach him some Hindi phrases. In return, I learned to say “thank you” in Kurdish: “supahs.” After luggage scans, two more security checks and a webcam recording of our faces, we boarded a small bus that took us across a pontoon bridge over the Tigris river to Semalka in Syria.

As we crossed the river, came news of fresh Turkish drone strikes on Rojava and its military, the Syrian Democratic Forces. Bhanu, who had been to the Ukraine warfront, spoke of potential sniper attacks. Despite the danger, more than a dozen families crossed the border along with us, with many more waiting.

Ferhan Yusuf, our fixer (guide) this time as well, met us at the Semalka border. We joined a long queue of journalists, activists and NGO workers waiting for their travel papers. “Syria is safe, don’t worry,” said Robyn Savage, a Canadian aid worker who was in the queue. “But life here is pathetic. The country is facing a massive humanitarian crisis.”

After collecting our papers, we headed for Qamishli. The drive was unremarkable, the roads flanked by oil pumping jacks in the desert. The roads were wider now, and new shops and other buildings could be spotted.

Robyn’s words lingered in my mind as I met Alan Musa, 26, at the Azadi Park in Qamishli. Musa, who works with an NGO, has spent the past five years going door to door, seeking out people in need. He has a bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering and applied mathematics but could not find work in his field of study.

“The boys in my country start working at 14, and the girls are married off young,” he said. “By 45, our lives are over. The world doesn’t understand the scale of suffering in this land.”

For Musa, the fall of the Assad regime or the takeover by HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (Jolani) offered little hope. “My people remain in poverty,” he said. “We are on the brink of a humanitarian tragedy.” Numerous lives have been lost to war, terror attacks and, lately, Turkish drone strikes.

I asked him why he did not leave Syria. He simply smiled.

“The world focuses on refugee camps and prisons in Syria,” he said, “but the reality is that every family here needs help. Have you seen how desperate the lives of the internally displaced are?”

Northeast Syria, he said, is enduring a silent tragedy. The region is struggling to cope with the influx of internally displaced people, 100,000 of them arriving in December alone. With more than five million people displaced since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, resources are stretched thin.

For 37-year-old Habiba Ahamed, the past seven years have been a nightmare. Once a salesgirl in a sweet shop in Beirut, Habiba married a frequent customer and moved to Damascus, and later to his hometown of Afrin in Aleppo. Life was peaceful for three years until she suggested a return to Lebanon. He abandoned her and their two young children, Jan and Saba, and took away all their travel papers.

When the Turkish-backed militia, known as the Syrian National Army, stormed Afrin after the fall of Assad, some residents killed themselves in panic. Habiba and her children fled: they walked for days to Aleppo and then to Tabqa, past the bodies of people killed by the Syrian National Army and the HTS. Both these forces have been fighting Rojava’s military, the Syrian Democratic Forces, better known as SDF.

Eventually, they arrived in Qamishli and found refuge in a single room, shared with two other families, in the dilapidated Arabsthan School. We found 35 families who had fled warfronts near Tabqa and Shehba living here. Water seeped through the building’s brick walls and broken floor, and there was a persistent stench.

Habiba said the Syrian National Army had arrested her father because he had an SDF photo on his phone. “I know he was injured. I heard he is in a prison in Damascus, but I can’t leave my children to go search for him,” she lamented. She insisted that I taste the eggplants she was cooking on wood fire in the open. When I gently refused, she asked, “You don’t like our food? Or you won’t eat with us?”

Another woman, Hanifa Hameed Ali, was frying fish over a stove on the floor. Displaced a dozen times since the war began, Hanifa had fled Aleppo with her two children. Her husband, a soldier, has been missing for months.

Fullah Muhammed Ibrahim, 44, a cancer patient displaced from Aleppo, has lost her 24-year-old son to the conflict. “He went out to fight and protect us, and did not return,” said Fullah. Her chemotherapy sessions have been disrupted.

At Suhel village, 40km from from Qamishli, we met Mizgin Bakr Mohammed, her husband and their six children in an abandoned one-room house. They had walked 100km to escape from Dayr Hafir in Aleppo. Along the way, they saw people collapsing, some from exhaustion, others by gunfire. “I saw people killing themselves out of fear,” she said.

The plight of these women reminded me of what I had seen in northern Sri Lanka: in wars, women and children suffer the most. It is a recurring theme the world over. As I lay awake that icy night in Qamishli, haunted by their stories, a question lingered: “Why is it that men seem to escape, while women are left to endure?”

But, this has been a land of gender equality since the Rojava revolution of 2011. The women here organised themselves into communes and councils, and became equal partners with men at every level of the political and administrative structure and ensured co-chair systems. This feminist model of democracy is under strain now, with the Turkish drone attacks, economic hardship and human displacement.

Leylan Cemal, a television news presenter with two daughters, reflects the strength and independence of Kurdish women. Married against her will at 15, she walked out on her husband five years later to pursue her education. A single mother of two girls, Leylan dreams of leaving Rojava for a life free from violence.

Most Kurdish women do not wear hijab. They view hijab as a constraint, not a tradition. “It is imposed by fundamentalist Arab militiamen, but it is not part of Kurdish culture,” Leylan said over lunch at a rooftop restaurant in a newly built hotel. She suggested that I eat hummus with chicken rice and salad.

When I arrived in Rojava in 2019, my first stop was the SDF office in Rmelan. The office has since moved to Hasakah, though its headquarters remains in Rmelan. Travelling from Qamishli to Hasakah this time, I noticed remnants of a dozen burnt trucks along the M4 motorway. My guide said the trucks were transporting weapons to Hasakah and were hit by Israeli drones. Local people were seen salvaging scrap metal from the destroyed vehicles.

After a two-hour drive, we reached Hasakah, where a stone falcon statue stood in the middle of the highway and a five-storey wheat warehouse nearby. Although Qamishli is the official capital, Hasakah has become the centre of the autonomous administration. At the SDF office in a large, colonial-style building, two officers were talking about Russian and Israeli interests in Rojava.

Rojava is the only place in the world where Russian and Israeli interests converge, said Syamand Ali, spokesperson for the YPG, the leading component of the US-backed SDF.

He served us Suleimani tea and spoke of ongoing Turkish attacks on Kobane, Manbij and the Tishrin dam. Fearing attacks on R Cell, the only internet network provider in Rojava, the SDF has sought SpaceX’s Starlink satellite service, which is particularly useful in war zones.

“The HTS is not attacking the Kurds now,” he said. “We are ready for talks with the HTS for a civilian government in Syria that supports all ethnicities in this region.” He said the Kurds desired a political resolution rather than continued military conflict.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a hated figure in Rojava. Turkey, it is said, does not want to be infected with Rojava’s political ideologies, and has declared the YPG as terrorists. It wants to create a 40km-deep buffer zone on its border, and has aided the Syrian National Army to capture several cities in Rojava.

At the Martyr Delil Saruxan Cemetery in Qamishli, we heard a piercing cry emanate from a 60-year-old woman, Mariya Ahamed Jumhur, as she approached the graves of her son and daughter. They died fighting the Syrian National Army in December.

Clad in a long trench coat and a veil, Mariya raised her hands to the sky, her voice trembling with grief and rage. “Oh God! Don’t you have eyes? Don’t you see what has happened to my children? Don’t you see Erdogan? Don’t you have the will to punish him?” she cried, while others in the cemetery wailed in front of the graves of their loved ones.

The cemetery had more than 400 unmarked graves. “These are the graves of soldiers burned alive by Islamic State in a single day. Their identities were never discovered. That’s why these gravestones bear no names,” my guide explained as we walked past the rows of graves. Nearby, workers were digging fresh graves to bury the SDF soldiers and two journalists who lost their lives on January 6.

The funeral ceremony transformed into a poignant demonstration of solidarity and resistance. Bereaved families and representatives of Kurdish, Arab, Armenian, Syriac and Assyrian communities, as well as the administration, the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), had gathered to mourn and honour the martyrs.

Hussain Ferman, a 30-year-old activist and journalist, broke down during our conversation about the plight of journalists in Syria. He spoke of his close friends Nazim Dastan and Cihan Bilgin, who were killed in a Turkish drone attack near the Tishrin dam on December 19. “Their families weren’t even allowed to cross the Turkish border to collect their remains,” he said.

Ferman has been branded a terrorist supporter by Turkey and was a target of the Assad regime. “The moment I step out of Rojava, I will be arrested,” he said.

“Why were you labelled as a terror supporter?” I asked him.

“Because I write against Turkey and its attacks on the Kurds,” he said.

He recounted a chilling story. Syrian officers who were looking for him arrested his cousin and took him first to the notorious Falastine Branch prison in Damascus and then to Sednaya Prison. “He was hung by his hands from the ceiling for three days and brutally beaten to make him reveal my whereabouts,” Ferman said. But the cousin did not betray him. After four months, the family secured his release, paying a hefty bribe.

Sednaya Prison, located in a mountain north of Damascus, is a symbol of brutal repression. Established in the 1980s and run by the military police, it was designed to hold political detainees in two buildings, known as Red and White. It rarely released any prisoners. After the HTS stormed it in December, prisoners confirmed reports of inhuman torture, starvation and systematic killings.

Forty days after his release from Sednaya Prison, we met Abozed Ramadan in a small room in his brother Lucman’s house in Qamishli. Frail, with sunken eyes and a feeble voice, he sat staring blankly at the floor. Initially he did not respond when our guide called him by his name. “I am 125,” he then murmured. It was his assigned number in prison.

A conscript in the Syrian military, he had deserted after two days of a fierce fighting in Kobane in 2018. He fled with four friends, slept on roadsides and ate from trash cans. He was captured and sent to the Falastine Branch before being transferred to Sednaya.

He said he was crammed into a tiny, narrow cell with a low ceiling that forced him to sit hunched over. Later he was moved to a larger cell with nine others, though they were forbidden to speak to one another.

“It was utter humiliation,” he said. “We ate and drank from the same bucket that served as our toilet.” Once when he refused to eat from the bucket, he was beaten 150 times with an electric cable.

Women prisoners, he said, were raped, often in front of their children.

A dream kept him alive in Sednaya. He dreamed of marrying a Christian girl, whose father had forbidden their union. And of having children. Now, his only belongings are two pencil sketches: one of a weeping woman’s face, and another of a boy and girl gazing at a peaceful place.

“Find me a way out of Syria,” he pleaded, though he had no valid ID for crossing international borders. His brother, in tears, said, “I don’t have the money to take him out of Syria. My other brothers are refugees in the Netherlands and Germany, but they can’t help him either. They don’t even have citizenship there.”

Millions of Syrians live as refugees in Europe. Many cross the border, paying smugglers large sums. According to UNHCR, 6.6 million Syrians fled their homes in the last decade, with another 6.7 million displaced within Syria.

During the Covid lockdown Mashaba Sulaiman (name changed) tried to seek asylum in the Netherlands, despite having a government job in Rojava. “One pays $25,000 to be smuggled out of here,” he said. But, at the Turkish border his smuggler acquaintance vanished. The Turkish army arrested Sulaiman and kept him in jail for two months. He was released after his family paid a bribe of $16,000.

For people like Mahfouz Jamal, 28, staying in Syria offers a sense of purpose. “I don’t want to live as a refugee in an alien land. I want to be in my country,” he said. A nursing graduate, he runs a mobile shop in Qamishli, a business once owned by his brother, who reached the Netherlands a year ago.

A Kurdish language professor at Rojava University, Rakhan Sheikei, 61, has no desire to leave Syria. “Life or death, I will live in my country,” said Rakhan. Three of his four children live in Denmark and Sweden. “They escaped and are safe now,” said his wife, Kasumma Giro, 58, who hopes to go to Denmark for a knee surgery.

Rakhan is proud of his Kurdish heritage and language. “Teaching Kurdish at the university was incredibly difficult before the Rojava Revolution of 2011,” he recalled. Arabic was imposed as the sole medium of instruction, while Kurdish language and cultural expressions were systematically suppressed. In fact, the Kurds could not even build their own houses. It was akin to slavery, Rakhan said.

The Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt inspired the Kurds in Syria to resist state oppression and assert their right to identity, language and autonomy. The autonomous administration of Rojava was established in 2014, and the YPG defeated Islamic State militants in 2015. In the same year, the YPG formed the SDF along with other anti-jihadist groups.

The seeds of the Rojava revolution were sown long before 2011. In 2004, riots rocked Qamishli after a soccer match between Kurds and Arabs turned violent. It eventually led to the formation of armed defence units like the YPG.

At the Cocab military base on a mountain near Hasakah town, we watched the SDF training for the warfront. Hussain Salmo, commander of the Shahed Dyar battalion there, warned us not to venture downhill as the area was full of landmines left behind by Assad’s army.

He was once a construction worker and a communist follower of Kurdistan Workers Party leader Abdullah Ocalan. In 2004, Salmo was imprisoned in Hasakah for a month for inciting violence at a football match. After his release, he joined the Syrian military to get the charges against him dropped. As Arab officers tormented him and other Kurdish recruits, he left the service after two years.

Now, as an SDF commander, Salmo ensures that soldiers from all ethnicities are treated with dignity. Among them is Vasqen Melkonyan, 23, who joined the SDF to protect his Armenian community. “If we don’t defend ourselves, there could be another genocide like in 1950,” Vasqen said. Fadhil Zaed Alfaraj from Damascus is one of the Arabs in the SDF.

A makeshift military hospital lay hidden beyond the Cocab mountain. As we entered the hospital, an SDF soldier came rolling his wheelchair to greet us, both his legs in bandages. The man, Eva Derek, 33, was still in pain but sang Kurdish songs and made jokes, cheering up other wounded soldiers. Soon it became a music party. “Our soldiers never lose their spirit,” said a commander.

Widows and children of important Islamic State militants from abroad live in Al Roj refugee camp near Rmelan city. It holds 768 women and 1,466 children. “Are there any Indians,” I asked the camp administrator, Hukmiah. Looking into her laptop, she said Rudwana, wife of an Islamic State militant from Kashmir, had died of illness in the camp in 2021. An Arab woman who was raising Rudwana’s three daughters in the camp did not let me meet them.

Two other Indian women, Sanchita Ali and Fatima Farooq, lived the camp, but no one could locate them.

Hukmiah spoke with concern about radicalisation within the camp. Many women, she said, refuse to send their children to school, and instead teach them extremist ideologies.

The camp had its surprises as well. In one tent, a 34-year-old German woman recently gave birth to a child fathered by a 14-year-old boy. But, while being liberal in outlook, the western women here preach Sharia to their children as they foresee a revival of Islamic State.

A Sri Lankan woman, Chandra Latha, sought me out at the Al Roj office, with her 12-year-old son. She said she had been an assistant at the Lankan embassy in Lebanon, but could speak neither Sinhala nor Tamil. Later, I remembered meeting her in Al Hol camp in 2019 and telling me that her name was Geeta Raj.

A young Australian girl, Laila, walked about in the camp with a toy unicorn. Her mother, Zainab, was keen to know about how to get back to her country. Another Australian woman, Kirsty Rosse-Emile, married off at 14 to a Moroccan man, lamented her life: her husband is dead and her parents had recently divorced. “If they had divorced 15 years ago, my life would have been different,” she said. She writes poetry on the walls yearning for freedom.

Next day we went past Hasakah to Al Hol camp, which was a chaotic place during our 2019 visit. It is now divided into five sections, and the foreign annexe separated from the civilian areas. It has 40,000 inmates, mostly children, from 4,000 families. The previous day, 1,600 Iraqi families were repatriated from the camp. Jihan Hana, manager of the camp, said there was a shortage of food.

Inside the market area in the camp, a 12-year-old boy, Abdellah Hameed, asked me where I was from. When I said India, he touched his forehead and mocked, “Hindi, Hindi.” He meant bindi. He uttered an Arabic prayer, challenging my faith.

Heightened restrictions at Al Hol camp thwarted my plans to meet Fatima Hussain, an Indian woman I had interviewed in 2019. As I left, I couldn’t shake off the sense that Islamic State could feed on Al Hol and Al Roj camps.

Back in my room in the evening, I was startled by the sound of a series of gunshots. “It’s routine here,” our guide Ferhan said, with a shrug. “It could be a fight, fireworks for a wedding, or someone just losing their mind.”

In 2019, Ferhan had carried a pistol, but not this time. “We only fear Turkish drones now,” he said. A pistol was of no use against them.