As my followers know, I am a supporter of the remarkable project of bottom-up, women-led, ecological democracy of Rojava - to use its Kurdish name - in North East Syria. I've updated readers about the situation there several times in the past. This update covers what's been happening in the last couple of months, very much looking at events that you are not seeing in the regular Western press, most of whose journalists have gone home after the fall of the Assad regime and the liberation of its horrific prisons.

Obviously, Syria as a whole is in a very fragile and dangerous period. While everyone welcomes the fall of Assad, instability and violence continue and the new government of Ahmed Al-Shara has yet to provide security to all the people of Syria - far from it. Most particularly, violence continues against Alawites in western Syria, with killings on pretty much a daily basis, and people driven into hiding to escape militias - Islamist extremists - associated with the government. People in the region say that the killings are also directly perpetrated by government forces. A family - grandparents, parents and children - was murdered just a couple of days ago. Meanwhile, in southern Syria and suburbs of Damascus, there has been violence between government-associated militias and Druze groups, which has only recently abated. In Damascus and other towns, there are many reports - and videos - of intimidation of Christians (such as forcibly shaving their heads), for instance, raids on bars selling alcohol, and arrests - and sometimes beatings - of men and women out together who cannot prove they are married.

This is a very different picture from the rose-tinted view of Al-Shara's new government that you tend to see in the West, that al-Shara is wholly reformed from his days as an Islamist extremist, first with Al-Qaeda and then with the Al-Nusra front. One indicator of the situation is the interim constitution that al-Shara recently announced which declares that Islam is the sole source of law and gives the president - al-Shara - far-reaching powers to dismiss legislators, judges and others: in other words, complete control over the main branches of government. Minority and women's rights, while mentioned, are not given sufficient protection either. Al-Shara has also said, without giving reasonable grounds, that there will be no elections for a further five years - that's 2030.

Looking at this picture, it's unsurprising that there is considerable scepticism about al-Shara's government, which includes former extremist fighters, in the North East. But the autonomous authority of the North East is nonetheless a willing to work with the government to agree constitutional arrangements, including those covering the North East. In March, the leader of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF, the military force of the North East), General Mazloum Abdi, signed an agreement with the government that the SDF would join the Syrian national army and that the North East would be governed as part of one Syria. However, the agreement did not detail what this really means. Who will run the police, the courts, man the borders, spend tax revenues etc.?

These details have yet to be hashed out. General Mazloum agreed that there would be a negotiation of these issues with a deadline of the end of the year. A delegation from the North East visited Damascus in the last few days to begin those discussions. The talks are apparently still continuing. One symbol of the differing world views that the two sides represent: the delegation from the North East was comprised of four men, three women, and included Christian, Assyrian and Arab as well as Kurdish representatives. The government delegation was composed of seven men, all Muslim, all bearded. Nevertheless, let's hope that these negotiations, which we can expect will last many months, are successful. No one wants renewed civil war.

But the gap between the two visions of the state - the North East's and that of al-Shara's government - is very wide, as I have written before. Al-Shara's vision, already being implemented, is of a top-down, highly centralised state with few if any powers devolved to the regions. Clearly, the aim is also an Islamist state. Perhaps the closest analogy would be Erdogan's Türkiye, which is no surprise given the closeness of Erdogan, the authoritarian and repressive leader of Türkiye, and the new Syrian government. Türkiye is reportedly establishing large military bases in Syria; its militia, the Syrian National Army, still controls the region of Afrin in the North West, which was ethnically cleansed of Kurds when Türkiye bloodily invaded the area along with its SNA allies in 2018 (though, happily, some Kurds are now returning).

Meanwhile, the vision of the North East for Syria's future is very different - a decentralised state with women and minorities at the forefront, governed from the bottom-up, with very limited powers for the centre. One of the leaders in the North East, the highly-impressive Ilham Ahmed, whom I have known for several years, has written an oped in the New York Times (the linked version is not paywalled) describing the stable, peaceful and successful democratic dispensation in Rojava as a model for the kind of state Syria should be. It's not easy to see how a compromise might be found between these two visions.

In the meantime, the North East maintains its own separate autonomous administration; the police and army - the SDF - have not changed. The status quo that pertained before Assad's fall essentially remains intact. And I don't see the autonomous administration giving up those powers lightly. Why would they, given the record of the Al-Shara government in protecting women and minorities, and the growing signs of a kind of quiet authoritarianism? But - in very welcome news - Türkiye's attacks on the North East seem for now to have stopped, although there are still attacks from its proxy forces, the SNA. This 'ceasefire' was brokered locally by the US and France, but can also be seen as part of a bigger story about Türkiye and the Kurds, where the Kurdish Workers Party - the PKK - has announced that it is giving up the armed struggle against the Turkish state, instead pursuing a political path.

This historic announcement may or may not lead to a new settlement between Türkiye and its large Kurdish minority. We'll see. But for now, Türkiye's argument to justify its aggression towards Rojava - that the SDF is just the PKK in different clothes - has been undermined. The tectonic plates underpinning Rojava's fragile situation are shifting. Some things however do not change, including the continuing threat from ISIS cells across the region, whom the SDF has been fighting for a dozen years at the cost of 13,000 lives of male and female SDF fighters. Indeed, there are some reports that the threat has deepened since Assad's fall. Will al-Shara's declared rejection of ISIS prove reliable?

In terms of the geopolitics, it's also a very unstable time. Trump of course recently met Al-Shara in Saudi Arabia, apparently at the suggestion of Mohamed Bin-Salman (MBS), the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, a big supporter of Al-Shara, like the other Gulf states. But I also detect Türkiye's hand - Erdogan reportedly joined the Trump/MBS conversation about Syria on the ‘phone. As we all know, Trump tends to do whatever who last spoke to him wants, and in this case it was Erdogan.

Trump's meeting reversed the trend of US Syria policy which was very much one of scepticism about Al-Shara, a scepticism also driven by Israel, which will not have welcomed the Trump/Shara meeting, but there is of course much still to play for, including any conditionality for the lifting of sanctions, which for now have been lifted only for six months. And, as we all know, Israel is highly influential in Washington.

For its part, Israel now occupies, it seems permanently and of course illegally, a substantial chunk of southern Syria, including hills overlooking Damascus. For months since Assad's fall - and indeed before - it has been systematically bombing weapons sites across Syria, including destroying gunboats and warships in Syria's ports. It also reportedly mounted a bombing raid close to the presidential palace in Damascus. This was during the Druze/government fighting a few weeks ago and was, it seems, a way of 'sending a message' to al-Shara to stop attacks on the Druze, Israel having appointed itself as the kind of 'protector' of the Druze (a role the Druze did not themselves request), part of a long-standing Israeli strategy of trying to build relations with minorities in neighbouring predominantly Arab states, a strategy designed to weaken them. This is not exactly the best way to start relations off with al-Shara on a warm footing.

Yet Trump also suggested to al-Shara that he join the 'Abraham Accords' whereby Syria would recognise Israel - including presumably accepting Israel's occupation of Syrian territory including, let's not forget, the Golan Heights, which it occupied in 1967. At first sight, this seems unlikely, except that after the Trump/Shara meeting, the Americans briefed that Trump had 'expressed the hope' that Al-Shara would join the Abraham Accords. If Trump 'expressed the hope', that means Al-Shara, ever the pragmatist, is likely to oblige if he wants to keep the Americans onside.

Once normalisation of relations with Israel would have seemed implausible, given Al-Shara's background and Israel's military aggression against Syria (and the impossibility of it ending its occupation of Syrian territory), but it's a very strange time with many assumptions about the Middle East going up in flames and smoke. My friends in Rojava are wisely preparing for any eventuality.

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