Developments in Syria have been overshadowed by news from Iran but they are not good. A few days ago a coordinated and planned attack was mounted by government forces (ie the Al-Sharaa government) against Kurdish neighbourhoods in Aleppo. The government sent scores of armoured vehicles. Turkish drones were observed both monitoring the attack and themselves launching aerial strikes. The Kurdish neighbourhoods were defended by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the male and female militia of North East Syria, which is a mixed ethnicity force - i.e. both Kurdish and Arab. Over a hundred thousand civilians were driven out by the fighting; many will never return.

There is now a ceasefire, arbitrated by the US, but it is being violated by government forces. As I write, there is fighting to the east of Aleppo, to the north at the Tishreen Dam and now in Deir-ez-Zour in the south. In other words, the fighting is spreading. This could be the start of a major military confrontation between the government and SDF - in other words, a civil war.

There is little question that the Aleppo attacks were conducted at Turkish behest. Damascus would only launch such attacks with a green light from Ankara. There was no cause for the attacks, and no provocation by the SDF. The SDF and North East Syria do not want to fight the government, and have no reason to do so. They want a peaceful, unified Syria.

As usual, the Western press either failed to report it or did so in typically essentialised and inaccurate terms, depicting it as a fight between the government and ‘the Kurds’ - which is in fact the multi-ethnic and women-led dispensation of the North East, again reduced to simplistic and inaccurate ethnic labels. Yet another example of the lazy if not racist depictions of the Middle East as a witches’ brew of insoluble ‘ethnic’ and religious tensions. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera, which has been the only major news outlet to give the fighting significant coverage, offers outrageously biased pro-government narratives, reflecting the policy of AJ’s Qatari owners.

Media reports also alleged that the fighting came about because of delays in integrating the SDF into the Syrian national army with ‘each side blaming the other’. This is not the case. In March last year, the commander of the SDF agreed with the transitional president, Al-Sharaa, that the SDF would join the army. Later, in another meeting with the SDF commander, Al-Sharaa agreed that the SDF would join the army as three distinct divisions. A process was set up to implement these commitments. The SDF offered multiple documents and proposals to move things forward, including the names of officers it proposed for joint command. There was no response from the government for many months. Unchallenged, government ministers have blamed ‘the Kurds’ for holding up the process. Most recently, at a meeting in Damascus on 4 January, the government delegation abruptly ended the meeting without explanation.

When officials of the North East met Al-Sharaa, they found him, as many have, reasonable and accommodating. The suspicion is that a) he doesn’t have his own forces fully under control and b) the government is being told what to do by Turkey, which of course is deeply hostile to the SDF, regarding it as the same as the PKK, the Kurdish liberation movement, whom Turkey regards as terrorists and has fought for decades with great loss of life. My hopes are evaporating that Turkey’s antipathy to the PKK (and thus to the SDF) might be waning, as a result of secret and ongoing talks between Ankara and the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, about which we know more or less nothing, and which, dangerously (as it now appears), very much depend on the whim of Turkey’s autocratic leader, Erdogan.

Extremists, including Al-Qaeda fighters, were observed among government forces in Aleppo. One Egyptian extremist was reportedly responsible for throwing a female SDF fighter off a building to her death (there are, inevitably, videos). The fear is that the government is revealing its true colours: that it seeks only a highly-centralised, Islamist state, under the tight if not authoritarian control of Damascus and the President. Contrary to the lovey-dovey interviews that al-Sharaa has given to gullible western media, the constitution that his government has imposed on Syria states that the only source of law should be Islam and that the president has powers to suspend parliament - and thus democracy - should he choose, unconstrained by democratic niceties like courts or legislatures. Again, western media reported on recent ‘elections’ as a sign of democratic progress, but al-Sharaa appointed a third of the parliament’s new members, and the rest were chosen by two committees appointed by him. Crucially, the North East and coastal areas, where Alawites have been under continuing attack, were excluded from the elections entirely. There has in any case subsequently been no evidence of an substantive democratic role for the parliament. Instead, it is government by decree and decision from the presidential palace. There are good people in the government (one of them, whom Independent Diplomat worked with for many years, hugged me in Doha when Assad fell), but it’s open to question whether their influence will prevail.

There is considerable anger in the North East at the west’s credulous embrace of al-Sharaa which perhaps reflects the west’s self-serving view of itself as the saviours of benighted and primitive Arabs (it is notable that the countries that insert themselves in the diplomacy about Syria are former imperialists (France, UK) or current ones (the US, Russia)). Gulf countries are also asserting themselves through money and diplomatic muscle, though not - yet - military involvement. That may come, as it has in Sudan and Yemen, much to the detriment of both places. One of these countries sent the North East a pompously-written paper of constitutional advice that could have been cut and pasted from Wikipedia or generated by Chat GPT when in fact the North East already has a constitution that, in my view, is rather better than the ones our so-called ‘democracies’ enjoy: women-led, bottom-up, ‘communalist’ democracy. I guess officials and diplomats are just too busy to read the copious literature about this remarkable place or too ready to believe the ‘fault on all sides’ narratives of outside commentators.

The authorities in the North East, represented by its female quasi ‘foreign minister’ Elham Ahmed, whom I have known for many years, have repeatedly made clear that they believe only a federal, decentralised government structure will provide for stability and security in Syria, where the regions (or governorates) would enjoy significant autonomy to run their affairs but, crucially, within a single, unified Syria with a single body of national law. They have proposed specific models to this end - again with zero response from Damascus or the ‘international community’.

As is often the case, in the absence of coherent or effective diplomacy from others, it has been left to the US to hold the ring, and to their credit they have been busy negotiating the ceasefire in Aleppo and trying to advance the ‘integration’ process between the North East and Damascus, primarily the integration of the SDF. But the US is not disinterested: it has also put enormous pressure on al-Sharaa to accept Israel’s occupation of Syrian territory in the south, established without apology by Israel as necessary for its own security (an illegality as usual ignored in western parliaments and governments). The US is also asserting a wider military role in Syria, including by establishing new bases in western and central Syria (which Turkey is also doing). The US recently conducted large waves of airstrikes against ISIS targets across Syria. Israel has mounted hundreds of airstrikes aimed at destroying Syria’s residual military capabilities and, now, at new Turkish military installations.

This convoluted and volatile situation is crying out for greater international scrutiny and attention. So far, the diplomats generally rely upon telephone calls or brief meetings with al-Sharaa and his lieutenants to pass their messages and to hear government bromides. Neither the US nor UK have yet opened embassies in Damascus (for security reasons) which doesn’t help. The public narrative is shaped by either inherently biased outlets like AJE or the very occasional and brief visits by western journalists who never visit the North East or, if they do, concern themselves only with the resurgence of ISIS (indeed a dangerous new development very much worrying the SDF) and the prison camps of ISIS fighters and their families which are, again, ignored by the ‘international community’, a ticking time bomb that everyone pretends isn’t their concern even if a large proportion of the detainees are in fact foreign fighters, including British.

The UN has been invisible. A replacement for the previous Special Envoy (who stepped down some months ago) has yet to be appointed though an experienced UN official has just begun work as the acting envoy. Rather than relying on ad-hoc and sporadic diplomatic intervention by individual states, the UN Security Council needs to get involved - there needs to be sustained scrutiny of what al-Sharaa’s government is up to, most recently in Aleppo: what are the facts, who started the fighting, what about the many thousands of now-displaced people? There also needs to be scrutiny of what is happening in the largely-Druze south, where government forces were involved in massacres of civilians, and Latakia, where attacks on Alawites continue, unreported. On the humanitarian front, the UN needs to be busy, for instance to protect civilians in Aleppo, or attend to the now large numbers of displaced.

Above all, there needs to be a systematic and organised negotiation process to agree military and political integration, rather than the sporadic and partial meetings convened by the US which is itself, how can we put it, currently a little distracted. The goal should be a comprehensive and consensual constitutional settlement, agreed by negotiation between the current government and Syria’s regions rather than imposed by presidential decree. Countries with an interest - the US, Turkey, KSA, Qatar etc - need to be brought around a neutral table to monitor this process and ensure the government - but also others, including the North East - keep to their commitments.

Countries that claim to vaunt the ‘rules-based order’ also need to start talking both about Israel’s occupation in the South but also Turkey’s equally illegal occupations in northern Syria, both east and west. There is a contest of influence and strategic domination going on in Syria, between the US, Israel, Turkey, the Gulf, and even Russia (which is asserting itself again), of which Syria and its long-suffering people risk becoming victim, indeed they already are. Unfortunately, countries like the UK are themselves not exactly disinterested: the UK sells fighter planes to Turkey and needs Turkey’s help in the bloody mess that is Ukraine diplomacy. France is similarly embroiled though it has at least been energetic in trying to advance matters.

I am very worried that without a reinvigorated international approach, and a robust framework for the integration of Syria’s disparate parts, civil war is a distinct possibility: it could even be starting. And we can expect that, if this happens, it will be blamed on ‘Arabs’ and ‘Kurds’, crude and essentialist labels affixed to a more complex reality.

I encourage those with access to raise this with government ministers, MPs and journalists.