Chapter Two

Rojava, Kurdish for “land where the sun sets,” was the name Kurds used for the areas of northern Syria they now held.
Lives had been lost a decade earlier and war continued now. But for the first time, Kurds had control of their towns, Kurdish language could be spoken freely, and Kurdish dead could be remembered without reprisal from the government that had taken their lives.
The uprising against Assad spread. Protests ballooned in size in the town of Homs and in the suburbs of Damascus. Yet even while the countrycaught fire all around them, the Kurds, who wanted their rights and came out in favor of the protests, did not join in armed resistance against Syria’s regime. There were several reasons for this: Older generations knew the regime’s brutality and wanted no problems for themselves or their children. Some were still smarting from a lack of Arab support when the Kurds protested Assad in 2004 after the Qamishli soccer match. The Kurds also feared that the armed Arab rebel groups of the FSA and Nusra fighting the regime would be no better in defending their rights—indeed might be far worse, given statements about the Kurds from some opposition leaders. When no guarantees of recognition or protection for their communities came from the largest armed opposition groups, the Kurds focused primarily on defending their region without going on the offensive against Assad.
Indeed, early in the crisis, the regime tried to win the Kurds over to its side. In April 2011, it issued Decree 49, which offered a path to citizenship to one portion of the three hundred thousand or so stateless Kurds who had been forced to live without the rights to travel abroad, own property, or take university slots because the regime had long denied them national identification cards. The Kurds saw the move as an attempt to buy their support. Eyeing developments with a wariness encouraged by their elders, many Kurds showed support for the anti-Assad marches spreading elsewhere in the country. Young Kurds—if not their political leaders—began protesting publicly, in solidarity and agreement with young Arabs taking to the streets against Assad, chanting, “The Syrian people are one.”
The Democratic Union Party was hardly the only Kurdish political party to operate in the area. Indeed, many politically independent Kurds joined the protest movement against Assad. But it was the most effectively organized, even if few outsiders had noticed it before the civil war left an opening. Opponents included the Kurdish National Council (KNC), a collection of parties with ties to Iraqi Kurdish leaders allied with Turkey who stood against the ideas of Abdullah Ocalan. Even after the two sides came to a political agreement in June 2012, the Kurdish National Council accused the Democratic Union Party of steamrolling its political competitors and imprisoning all who stood against them. In the KNC’s view, the Democratic Union Party was on a path to one-party rule at best and full-blown authoritarianism at worst. A local watchdog group accused the YPG of attacking demonstrators in the street and targeting KNC offices, while international rights groups accused the Democratic Union Party of harassing and arbitrarily jailing political competitors. The KNC offered an unequal match to the organizational and ideological strength of the Democratic Union Party, whose leaders were loath to share power amid the turmoil and willing to arrest opponents who they believed wanted to create parallel political structures.
What was clear was that the YPG, the Democratic Union Party’s armed militia, had proved itself the most effective Kurdish force capable of controlling territory and defending Kurdish areas from the growing threat of armed extremists.
In the middle of a July night in 2012, Afrin became the first heavily Kurdish Syrian town whose checkpoints the YPG would control. Controlling checkpoints signaled responsibility for an area—and that the YPG, not the regime, was now in charge of the town. Kobani would soon follow Afrin.
Prison offered Ocalan a lot of time to think, write, and further formalize his ideas, which those closest to him then shared with his followers. His goal evolved from a military campaign to create an independent and unified Kurdistan to a grassroots system in which Kurds exercised peaceful selfrule in the countries where they lived.

Among those who had shaped and influenced the evolution of Ocalan’s political thinking was a Vermont-based writer few Americans have ever heard of: Murray Bookchin. Bookchin had undergone his own decades-long intellectual journey from communist to anarchist to architect of what he came to call “social ecology.” His thought would push Ocalan from a focus on a nation-state to a belief that grassroots democracy and social justice offered the political answers he and the Kurds sought.
In 1964 Bookchin published an essay titled “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” in which he wrote that no environmental issues could be resolved until all forms of hierarchy—including gender, sexual orientation, and age—ended. 
In the early 1990s, Bookchin began arguing that the path to achieving a just society could be found in what he termed “libertarian municipalism”: neighborhood-level assemblies based on models such as the town halls of Revolution-era New England.
Leaving behind Marxism and communism and influenced by Bookchin, Ocalan came to the idea that the Kurds did not need statehood. They needed self-governance with social justice and a structure reliant only on their ideas and organization, not the state.
By 2014, this merged concept of New England–style town-hall democracy with Kurdish rights and women’s equality at its core would govern the political no man’s-land of Assad-abandoned northeastern Syria. Its founding document would reflect the intellectual voyages of both of its fathers.
At the start of the civil war in 2011, Kurds who had worked for years to organize against the Syrian regime now spotted an opening. The work they had done mobilizing women in secret would help them assemble them in public. They set out to put laws in place that guaranteed women a seat at the main table, starting now. Ocalan’s philosophy directly informed their approach and their desire to be the Kurdish political party in charge of their areas. It also informed their goal: not an independent Kurdish state, but the establishment of a new set of grassroots political structures designed to support self-rule in a local, autonomous region.

The Democratic Union Party put the Charter of the Social Contract into effect in January 2014. This constitutional law for northeastern Syria formalized the area’s “democratic autonomy” and established local councils. It outlawed torture and the death penalty, declared the YPG the “sole military force” of the region, and named Kurdish, Arabic, and Syriac the area’s official languages. Ethnic minorities would enjoy full rights and could teach their children, name their children, and speak to one another in public in their own languages.
The on-the-ground reality was that the party embraced ideas that few other Kurdish groups would in the creation of its radically new structures. The other truth was that no other party came close to matching its organizational discipline, nor its ability to provide security. This meant that it could proceed on its own political path while the chaos of the civil war swirled around it.
The charter also guaranteed 40 percent women’s representation in the new local legislative assembly and “all governing bodies, institutions and committees.” Upon its enactment, it became the most progressive governing “constitutional” document on women’s rights in the region and went further than anything the United States or any other Western ally had ever attempted.
The charter was just the beginning of codifying women’s participation. Each town the Kurds led had a civil council with a man and a woman running it jointly. And each town had a women’s council, where women organized to advocate for their own economic, social, and political opportunities, and where they could go for safety and arbitration if they faced beatings at the hands of their husbands or knew of a girl facing a forced marriage. The idea was to build women’s communes, too, where women could live together with their own schools, bakery, farm, security, and medical clinic.
For Turkey, toppling Assad was the goal at that time, but Turkey’s leader made clear he could not support and would not tolerate the rise of a PKK-linked group along the country’s border. Saleh Muslim, copresident of the Democratic Union Party, spoke often and publicly about how theirs was a Syrian, homegrown political party separate from and independent of the PKK even if related to it, but Turkey’s concerns would not be assuaged. This meant that Ilham Ahmed and her fellow Democratic Union Party members had no supporters outside their region and no international allies to turn to for backing or protection. It seemed that the Syrian Kurds would survive or die on their own as the war ground on and extremists threatened.