On 21 March, Kurds around the world celebrated Newroz, the spring festival regarded as the New Year by many peoples of the Middle East and Central Asia. For the Kurds, this festival is also a symbol of resistance against the colonial order, which banned it in Turkey, Syria and Iraq for many years.
In Rojava, Newroz has been celebrated officially and publicly for 13 years now, following the revolution. However, this year in Syria, despite promises by the new rulers to respect minority cultures, Newroz celebrations in Afrin and Aleppo were marked by racist and nationalist violence.
In early March, the return of 400 Kurdish families who had fled the Turkish offensive and occupation of 2018 was organised to Afrin. This convoy, coordinated between the Asayish and the Kurdish administration on one side and the Syrian Transitional Government (STG) on the other, was intended to mark the first stage of a dignified and secure return of all IDPs to their lands. However, unlike other regions, Afrin is not included in the agreements allowing for the establishment of Syrian Democratic Forces battalions or the deployment of the Asayish (local police forces), leaving the Kurds without their own means of self-defence. Instead, young Kurds have been encouraged to join the STG’s General Security forces, where they will find themselves alongside some of the very people who occupied their lands.
From Friday 20 March, the Kurds in Afrin gathered in small groups to celebrate Newroz. Initial accounts of attacks were shared, including that of an elderly man beaten by individuals apparently affiliated with Turkey’s former proxy militias. This prompted a solo protest by a young Kurdish man in Kobanê, who, during the public celebration on Friday, climbed a flagpole to remove the Syrian flag. In response, demonstrations, mainly involving young people from Afrin, took place in Qamishlo, Derik and Hasakah to denounce these violent and racist attacks. The crowd stormed the buildings of the STG armed forces, destroyed their vehicles and removed the Syrian flag from Qamishlo airport.
The former YPG commander and now Deputy Minister of Defence for Eastern Syria, Sipan Hemo, took to the streets in Qamishlo with the aim of ‘restoring calm’ and preventing any form of ‘chaos’. The Syrian Democratic Council condemned the violence as well as the ‘insult to the Syrian national flag’, whilst the Asayish arrested on Sunday the young man responsible for removing the Syrian flag in Kobanê. He was forced to record a humiliating video in which he claims to regret his actions and to have acted on his own initiative.
On Monday, we learnt of the death of a Kurdish man, Loqman Kamal Kosa, following two attacks he suffered on Sunday whilst attempting to travel to the Newroz celebrations in Afrin. We join the many voices within the Kurdish civil society who are speaking out to condemn racist assaults and attacks, but also to criticise the handling of the matter.
We cannot analyse these events by equating racist assaults and murder – motivated by a colonial and nationalist past, reinforced by years of occupation of Syrian Kurdish territory by the fascist Turkish state – with acts of anti-colonial revolt and self-defence led by Kurdish youth. The integration of Kurdish areas into the Syrian state, as well as coexistence between peoples, must be achieved through processes of justice that acknowledge the colonial history and the violence suffered by the Kurdish people in Syria and throughout the Middle East.
The nationalist and hateful policies practised by the STG and its armed forces must be denounced as such, and only this will enable us to combat nationalist and anti-Arab rhetoric within the Kurdish community in Syria.
The unity of the peoples of Syria can only be forged through a common struggle:
against the oppression of an anti-democratic state; against the imperialists who seek to exploit the country; and against patriarchal policies and social structures that seek to prevent the liberation of women at the heart of its revolution.
People´s Bridge, March 27 2026
