The Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), also known as Rojava, was a de facto autonomous region in northeastern Syria from 2012 until its integration into the Syrian state in 2026. At various points during its existence, it consisted of the self-governing sub-regions of Afrin, Jazira, Euphrates, Raqqa, Tabqa, Manbij, and Deir ez-Zor. The region conducted some foreign relations, but was not officially recognized as autonomous by the Syrian government or any other state, although the Parliament of Catalonia recognized it.
The region gained its de facto autonomy in 2012 amid the Rojava conflict and the wider Syrian civil war, with its official military force, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), participating in the conflict. Northeastern Syria was polyethnic and was home to sizeable ethnic Arab, Kurdish, and Assyrian populations, with smaller communities of ethnic Turkmen, Armenians, Circassians, and Yazidis. Independent organizations that provided healthcare in the region included the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Syrian American Medical Society, the Free Burma Rangers, and Doctors Without Borders.
From 2016 until 2026, Turkish and Turkish-backed Syrian rebel forces occupied parts of northern Syria through a series of military operations against the SDF. In January 2026, the Syrian transitional government took full control of the territory previously controlled by Turkish and Turkish-backed Syrian rebel forces.
Following the January 2026 northeastern Syria offensive by government forces, up to 80% of the DAANES's territory was captured and subsequently ceded to the Syrian government as part of an integration agreement, culminating in the DAANES's full integration into the Syrian state on 20 August 2026.
Names Parts of northern Syria are known as Western Kurdistan, or simply Rojava among Kurds,: "On 19 July the PYD formally announced that it had written a constitution for an autonomous Syrian Kurdish region to be known as West Kurdistan." one of the four parts of Greater Kurdistan.Kurdish Awakening: Nation Building in a Fragmented Homeland, (2014), by Ofra Bengio, University of Texas Press, p. 2 The name "Rojava" was thus associated with a Kurdish identity of the administration. As the region expanded and increasingly included areas dominated by non-Kurdish groups, mostly Arabs, "Rojava" was used less and less by the administration in hopes of deethnicising its appearance and making it more acceptable to other ethnicities. Regardless, the polity continued to be called "Rojava" by locals and international observers, with journalist Metin Gurcan noting that "the concept of Rojava [had become] a brand gaining global recognition" by 2019.
The territory around Jazira province of northeastern Syria is called Gozarto, part of the historical Assyrian homeland, by Syriac-Assyrians. The first name of the local government for the Kurdish-dominated areas in Afrin District, Ayn al-Arab District (Kobanî), and northern al-Hasakah Governorate was "Interim Transitional Administration", adopted in 2013. After the three autonomous cantons were proclaimed in 2014 together with a written Social Contract, territories governed by the Democratic Union Party (PYD) were also nicknamed "the Autonomous Regions" or "Democratic Autonomous Administration". On 17 March 2016, the establishment of a federal system of government known as the Democratic Federation of Rojava – Northern Syria; sometimes abbreviated as NSR, was declared.
The updated December 2016 constitution of the polity used the name Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (DFNS). On 6 September 2018, the Syrian Democratic Council adopted a new name for the region, naming it the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES or AANES) also sometimes translated into English as the Self-Administration of North and East Syria (SANES), encompassing the Euphrates and Jazira regions as well as the local civil councils in the regions of Raqqa, Tabqa, and Deir ez-Zor. In December 2023, the region adopted a new constitution, with a new name for the region, the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES). The YPG/PYD at times used the names Federal Northern Syria and the Democratic Confederalist Autonomous Areas of Northern Syria.
History
Background
Northern Syria is part of the Fertile Crescent, and includes archaeological sites dating to the Neolithic, such as Tell Halaf. In antiquity, the area was part of the Mitanni kingdom, its centre being the Khabur river valley in modern-day Jazira Region. It was then part of Assyria, with the last surviving Assyrian imperial records, from between 604 BC and 599 BC, being found in and around the Assyrian city of Dūr-Katlimmu.Assyria 1995: Proceedings of the 10th Anniversary Symposium of the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project / Helsinki, 7–11 September 1995. Later, it was ruled by different dynasties and empires – the Achaemenids of Iran, the Hellenistic empires that succeeded Alexander the Great, the Artaxiads of Armenia, Rome, the Iranian Parthians and Sasanians, then by the Byzantines and successive Arab Islamic caliphates. In the course of these regimes, different groups settled in northern Syria, often contributing to population shifts. Arab tribes have been present in the area for millennia. Under the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire (312–63 BC), different tribal groups and mercenaries were settled in northern Syria as military colonists; these included Arabs and possibly Kurds. Jan Retso argued that Abai, an Arab settlement where the Seleucid king Antiochus VI Dionysus was raised, was located in northern Syria. By the 3rd century, the Arab tribe of the Fahmids lived in northern Syria.
By the 9th century, northern Syria was inhabited by a mixed population of Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds, Turkic groups, and others. Kurdish tribes in the area often operated as soldiers for hire, and were still placed in specific military settlements in the northern Syrian mountains. There existed a Kurdish elite of which Saladin, the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty and the Emir of Masyaf in the 12th century were part of. Under Saladin's rule, northern Syria experienced a mass immigration of Turkic groups who came into conflict with Kurdish tribes, resulting in clashes that wiped out several Kurdish communities.
During the Ottoman Empire (1516–1922), large Kurdish-speaking tribal groups both settled in and were deported to areas of northern Syria from Anatolia. By the 18th century, five Kurdish tribes existed in northeastern Syria. The demographics of this area underwent a huge shift in the early part of the 20th century. Some Circassian, Kurdish and Chechen tribes cooperated with the Ottoman (Turkish) authorities in the massacres of Armenian and Assyrian Christians in Upper Mesopotamia, between 1914 and 1920, with further attacks on unarmed fleeing civilians conducted by local Arab militias.Travis, Hannibal. Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq, and Sudan. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2010, 2007, pp. 237–77, 293–294.Hovannisian, Richard G., 2007. The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies . Accessed on 11 November 2014. Many Assyrians fled to Syria during the genocide and settled mainly in the Jazira area. Starting in 1926, the region saw another immigration of Kurds following the failure of the Sheikh Said rebellion against the Turkish authorities.Abu Fakhr, Saqr, 2013. As-Safir daily Newspaper, Beirut. in Arabic Christian Decline in the Middle East: A Historical View While many of the Kurds in Syria have been there for centuries,Ross Burns (2013), p.138 waves of Kurds fled their homes in Turkey and settled in Syrian Al-Jazira Province, where they were granted citizenship by the French Mandate authorities. The number of Turkish Kurds settled in al-Jazira province during the 1920s was estimated at 20,000 people, out of 100,000 inhabitants, with the remainder of the population being Christians (Syriac, Armenian, Assyrian) and Arabs.
Syria's independence and rule of the Ba'ath Party
Following Syria's independence, policies of Arab nationalism and attempts at forced Arabization became widespread in the country's north, to a large part directed against the Kurdish population. The region received little investment or development from the central government, and laws discriminated against Kurds owning property, driving cars, working in certain professions, and forming political parties. Property was routinely confiscated by government loansharks. After the Ba'ath Party seized power in the 1963 Syrian coup d'état, non-Arab languages were forbidden in Syrian public schools. This compromised the education of students belonging to minorities such as Kurds, Turkmen, and Assyrians. Some groups such as Armenians, Circassians, and Assyrians were able to compensate by establishing private schools, but Kurdish private schools were also banned. Northern Syrian hospitals lacked equipment for advanced treatment, and patients instead had to be transferred outside the region. Numerous place names were Arabized in the 1960s and 1970s. In his report for the 12th session of the UN Human Rights Council titled Persecution and Discrimination against Kurdish Citizens in Syria, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights held that "Successive Syrian governments continued to adopt a policy of ethnic discrimination and national persecution against Kurds, completely depriving them of their national, democratic and human rights an integral part of human existence. The government imposed ethnically-based programs, regulations and exclusionary measures on various aspects of Kurds' lives political, economic, social and cultural." Kurdish cultural festivals such as Newroz were effectively banned.
In many instances, the Syrian government arbitrarily deprived ethnic Kurdish citizens of their citizenship. The largest such instance was a consequence of a census in 1962, which was conducted for exactly this purpose. 120,000 ethnic Kurdish citizens saw their citizenship arbitrarily taken away and became stateless. This status was passed to the children of a "stateless" Kurdish father. In 2010, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimated the number of such "stateless" Kurdish people in Syria at 300,000. In 1973, the Syrian authorities confiscated of fertile agricultural land in Al-Hasakah Governorate, which was owned and cultivated by tens of thousands of Kurdish citizens, and gave it to Arab families brought in from other provinces. In 2007, in the Al-Hasakah Governorate, around Al-Malikiyah were granted to Arab families, while tens of thousands of Kurdish inhabitants of the villages concerned were evicted. These and other expropriations were part of the so-called "Arab Belt initiative", which aimed to change the demographic fabric of the resource-rich region. Accordingly, relations between the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurdish population were tense.