Who Won in Syria?

I am traveling through the cities in Syria that have been devastated by years of dictatorship and civil war. When I saw the Turkmen in Al-Rai, the Kurds in Sheikh Maqsoud, and the Arabs in Raqqa, I said to myself: There is no nation in Syria that has not had its share of suffering.

Poverty, deprivation, destruction, misery… this was the first thing I saw in every city. The Turkmen, Kurds, and Arabs I spoke with all told me about the pain they had endured, the loved ones they had lost, the traumas they had lived through. I could not decide whose pain was deeper, whose burden was heavier, whose story was more sorrowful…

Syria is full of people carrying painful stories on their backs…

I passed through places where poisonous waters flowed, turning nations, beliefs, religions, and identities against each other. The Euphrates, instead of nourishing the black soil, has become a line of separation. Bridges that once connected cities, roads, and people were blown up.

Fragmented lands, divided geographies, relatives turned against one another, estranged siblings, and red soil watered with blood…

This entire painful picture is the product of minority dictatorship, blind ideologies, imperialist greed, ignorance, and poverty. Together, they drew this picture in blood.

I keep seeing children walking in freezing rain wearing slippers… The children wandering through the muddy backstreets of Sheikh Maqsoud, beside the destroyed bridge in Raqqa, along the potholed dirt roads of Manbij — they were all the same. Their feet were bare; they wore slippers.

I understood that Syria is full of children raised by suffering…

Now try explaining the ideology of a “socialist democratic society” to this Kurdish child; the caliphate theory of ISIS (Daesh) to the Arab child; the Baath ideology; the theory of the Shia Crescent to the Alawite child — what answer would they give you? You can try explaining it to their father as well, inside clothes worn thin by poverty… It does not work, does it? What a barefoot child needs is not ideological propaganda, but a pair of shoes, a coat, a bowl of hot soup.

Yet they always imposed on them ideologies they did not understand. Those children fell into the traps of those organizations because they were hungry, not because they believed in the ideology.

Syria is a bottomless pit of blind ideologies… Many young Sunnis, Alawites, Kurds, Arabs, and Druze disappeared into that bottomless pit… Each life left behind a mother’s heart turned to ashes, a father’s liver scorched with grief — yet no one will ever know their story. In that bottomless pit, all the wars, all the quarrels, and all the pain will quietly fade into the darkness of memory and be forgotten.

In the end, I asked the question that would rub salt into all wounds, standing at the foot of a building in Raqqa that had been struck by U.S. warplanes:

“So who won in the end?”

I suppose I am wandering through lands where the loser keeps changing, but there is no winner. In 2014, ISIS (Daesh) declared victory in Raqqa, shouting slogans of triumph. When bombs dropped from coalition aircraft onto their heads, they realized they were the ones who had lost. Then Arab tribes took control of the city… Afterward, the Americans came, took the city from them, and handed it over to the YPG/SDF, and another fight broke out. The SDF/YPG, which erected statues and sold tunnels in a city dominated by Bedouin tribes, this time packed up and set out for Hasakah when the Syrian army entered the city… In other words, I passed through smoking cities in Syria where wars and clashes had raged — where the loser was clear, but there was no winner.

Every ethnic identity in Syria has a diaspora, and I think they have never seen the misery and deprivation I saw in the streets. That is why they sit in their comfortable, warm rooms and keep lecturing the child in slippers in Sheikh Maqsoud, saying, “We must resist for Rojava.” Those who sit in Türkiye, Europe, or the Gulf and fuel the internal conflict in Syria should be brought here for one day. If they were made to walk through the backstreets of these cities in the cold for just one hour, I am sure they would all say: Enough — stop fighting, reconcile… At least those conscientious people who have not surrendered to blind ideologies and ignorance would say so.

Whoever tells these people — who have been killing one another for 14 years — “resistance, war, fighting, division, autonomy, independence” should know that he is not their friend but their enemy. And those who say such things will, as in Raqqa, cut off their support when the circumstances change and leave them alone in the cold of winter.

When I entered the Tishrin Dam after the clashes, I saw many slogans written in Kurdish on its walls. One of them read: “I would not trade a friend in a dark day for a hundred friends in good days.”

The Kurds complain about America, but in fact they should complain about themselves. For the Kurds’ friend is not the United States, just as Israel is not the Druze’s friend.

It was the same in history: the Russians, the British, and the French were never friends of the people living in this region. They had interests, but no shared story. They lived far away, and when they found themselves in trouble one day, they would board their planes and return to their safe homes — just as they did when they left Bagram airfield in Afghanistan.

As I passed through the Tishrin Dam, the Russians too were evacuating their last remaining military base in Qamishli, boarding Ilyushin military aircraft and leaving.

Now the Arabs, Turkmen, and Kurds were once again left alone in Hasakah.

Instead of writing that painful sentence on the dam wall, those in Syria should choose their friend in dark times carefully. The Kurds’ friend in dark times is the Turks; the Arabs’ friend in dark times is the Kurds and the Turkmen… In short, those living in Syria must be one another’s friend in dark times.

Let me repeat, at the end, the question I asked at the beginning of this article: Who won in Syria? You guessed the answer wrong. Everyone who negotiated, reconciled, reached agreement, and decided to be one another’s friend in dark times won in Syria.