Ecologistas en Acción joins the call for solidarity from the Mesopotamia Ecology Movement in defense of the democratic achievements, the revolutionary project of Rojava, and the self-government formed by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war more than a decade ago, a democratic and communal experiment has been taking place in the midst of armed conflict. In the territory known as Rojava (northern Syria, western Kurdistan), a model of self-government has been developed based on the commune as the basic form of organization, women’s leadership in all areas of life, equality regardless of gender, ethnic or religious origin, as well as care for nature, with the creation of the Ecology Council (equivalent to a Ministry) in the Autonomous Administration responsible for environmental policies as a milestone.
War is not only a humanitarian catastrophe, it is also always an ecological disaster. Access to and control of natural resources are weapons of war. It is no coincidence that Turkey has reduced the flow of the Euphrates River to suffocate Rojava, that there have been constant bombings of the Tishrin Dam, one of the main sources of electricity production in the region outside of oil, or that there has been massive deforestation of olive trees in the Afrin region to destroy the local economy and traditional livelihoods.
The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the seizure of power by reactionary and authoritarian religious groups has posed a constant threat to the populations of Syria who do not share their ideology and national project. This threat has materialized in military attacks and massacres against Druze, Alawite, and Kurdish civilians. While the Autonomous Administration in Rojava represents a project for a federal, decentralized, plurinational, egalitarian, and democratic country, the new Syrian state aims to build an Arab, religious, centralized state without basic political freedoms. All this has been done with the approval of the governments of Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, as well as Western powers, which have gone from including the leaders of these groups, such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham —an entity linked to Al Qaeda in Syria—on their lists of most wanted terrorists to turning them into “allies,” lifting economic sanctions against them, and supporting their neoliberal and confessional political project.
Several aspects of the 2025 agreement between Ahmed Al Shara’s transitional government and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have not been respected, and there appear to be no signs of a democratization process taking place throughout the country. The dreams of those organizations and individuals who mobilized against Assad in search of freedom and democracy have been buried with the rise to power of reactionary groups led by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham.
The hope for a democratic Syria lies in its peripheries, on the one hand, as in the case of Rojava and the peoples who will resist assimilation and domination, and on the other hand, in the process of women’s liberation that has gone beyond Rojava, bringing together thousands of Arab women who today represent a hope: those who have achieved freedoms will not allow a return to the times when women in Syria were oppressed and mistreated, as reflected in the feminist slogan originating from the Kurdish women’s movement “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”).
At Ecologistas en Acción, we will continue to show our solidarity and support the struggles of peoples for their emancipation, the resolution of conflicts through dialogue, with peace and social justice as our goal, the creation of conditions for the safe return of all refugees and displaced persons, and the development of democratic models that guarantee political rights, freedom, and equality.
La entrada Democracy, peace, and freedom in Rojava and Syria aparece primero en Ecologistas en Acción.
