Since 9 October 2019, the Turkish army has been present in northeast Syria, where it controls a strip of land 150 kilometres long and 30 kilometres wide, between the towns of Tell Abyad and Ras Al-Ayn (Serekaniyé in Kurdish) (1). Turkish troops were already present further west since Turkey’s invasion of Afrin and its surroundings in January 2018. Their presence has prevented territorial continuity in this Kurdish region, known as Rojava (‘the West’ in Kurdish) or the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, which has been politically autonomous since 2013.
From there, Ankara directly threatens the practical and military alliance put in place by the (Kurdish) PYD and the two other principal groups in Rojava’s population, the Arabs and the Syrian Christians. This alliance the Syrian Democratic Forces (whose political branch is the Syrian Democratic Council) must also reckon with Bashar al-Assad’s troops, who haven’t given up on regaining control of the whole region,