"Regarding Rojava – in the event of government forces seeking to enter our regions – the region will enter a total resistance situation. The people, for now, are mobilized,” Îlham Ehmed, a top official of the Kurdish-led Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday. Ehmed, who is co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), is one of the two most senior officials of the Syrian Kurdish de facto autonomous zone (the other is Gen. Mazloum Abdi) and the de facto foreign minister of the area.
“We need international support in this matter. For the right of the Kurdish region not to be attacked,” she continued. “There are certain figures in Israel engaged in communication with our side,” Ehmed said later in the same briefing. “We expect their support. If these conversations lead to support, we will be happy to accept it from wherever it comes.” It has been a dramatic week for the Syrian Kurds, in which they have found themselves abruptly plunged into a war for survival. Still, the broader trend lines had for a while become increasingly visible. They pointed toward the imposition by the Islamist authorities in Damascus of power east of the Euphrates.
...The sudden thrust of Damascus’s forces across the Euphrates River last week was in many ways tactically surprising but strategically inevitable. Since the Sunni jihadist Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) organization seized power in Syria on December 8, 2024, two incompatible governing entities in Syria have uneasily co-existed. The first is the Syrian government of President Ahmed Sharaa, which rules Damascus and now the rest of Syria west of the Euphrates River, aside from areas in the southwest held by Israel, and a small de facto Druze autonomy in Sweida. (Read More)
