Can the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) survive the Fall of Bashar al-Assad? The question is key for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of forces dominated by the Kurdish militiamen of the People's Protection Units (YPG), have been governing the region for 12 years. While the SDF have stepped up their overtures toward the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the country's new leading force, there have been no guarantees that HTS will tolerate the existence of an autonomous entity in the country that they intend to administer as a whole – in line with their new nationalist rhetoric and their promise to disband Syria's armed groups.
A guide to the main players involved in Kurdish issues in Syria
ANS: the Syrian National Army, an aggregate of scattered groups that are supported and armed by Ankara, whose vocation is to fight against Kurdish forces on the Syria-Turkey border.
AANES: the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, which was set up by the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which governs the north-eastern quarter of the country.
HTS: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham ("Levant Liberation Organization"), formerly the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, which has claimed to have broken with jihadism, the driving force behind the offensive that led to Bashar al-Assad's flight from Syria.
SDF: the Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance between the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia organization and Arab armed groups from Syria's northeast.
PKK: the Kurdistan Workers' Party, a separatist movement operating in Turkey, originally inspired by Marxism-Leninism, which took up arms in 1984 and is considered to be a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union..
PYD: the Democratic Union Party, the main Kurdish political movement in Syria, which Turkey has deemed to be an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party.
YPG: People's Protection Units, a Kurdish militia organization formed by the Democratic Union Party and supported by Western powers in the context of the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group.
More worryingly for the Kurds in this region – that they have named Rojava – Turkey, which is now in a position of strength, and its Syrian National Army (SNA) auxiliaries have made no secret of their intention to wipe them off the map. They may thus be removed from the quarter of the nation's map that they currently occupy, despite American efforts at appeasement. After Aleppo fell to the HTS offensive that led to ex-dictator Bashar al-Assad's flight, the SNA, which had participated in capturing Aleppo, then turned north to attack the Kurdish militias. Since then, intense fighting between the Turkish auxiliaries and the SDF, which served heroically in the fight against the Islamic State group (IS), has been raging in the west of the autonomous region, where around 100 fighters were killed in early January.
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