Stability has a language: How the West Learned to speak Arab nationalism

by Dastan Jasim

Dastan Jasim argues that anti-Kurdish violence by regimes, ideologies, and political movements in Arab countries reflects a shared, racialised understanding of the Kurdish presence as incompatible with political order. According to Jasim, it is a pseudo-anti-imperialist reading of Middle Eastern history in which Arabs are cast as the sole indigenous political subject, a version of events that Western countries have adopted.

‘There is no Syria,’ Nesrîn Abdullah, a senior commander and spokesperson for the Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (Women’s Protection Units, YPJ), stated during a recent press conference. With this statement, she grasped, in Arendtian terms, the banality of repeated ethnically- and religiously-motivated killings that have occurred since the takeover of Syria by former al-Qaeda terrorist Ahmed al-Sharaa in December 2024. For Abdullah, who served in the YPJ and defeated the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Syria is less a state than the product of accumulated massacres. Abdullah’s words were a realisation that things have never been any different in Syria, especially for Kurds.

The question when violence is so repeated, so easy, is how is it promoted and justified? Under the banners of Syria and Middle East fatigue, some Western political and analytical discourse presents disengagement as ethical restraint and non-intervention as prudence, hence the lack of action during the recent conflict. A brief recap of what happened in January 2026 provides evidence of the depth of the problem. More than 150,000 Kurdish civilians fled largely Kurdish quarters of Aleppo after days of ruthless urban attacks by the forces of the Syrian transitional government. Syrian forces killed dozens. Reports documented Syrian fighters kidnapping civilians, surrounding refugees, forcing them to sit on the ground, and barraging them with insults that they are swine and infidels. One Syrian transitional government fighter threw the body of Kurdish woman fighter off a building. Another proudly displayed a braid cut from the head of a Kurdish fighter.

This campaign of openly anti-Kurdish violence was followed by Syrian transitional government forces rapidly seizing Arab-majority territories east of the Euphrates, which had been under the control of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). There were scenes of cheering crowds celebrating what was framed as liberation from ‘Kurdish occupation,’ although it was Kurdish-led forces which had ousted ISIS from these areas only years earlier. Syrian transitional government forces, filled with the very gunmen that had previously sheltered ISIS lead Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi after his defeat, took over prisons which held ISIS inmates. Preceding these attacks on the Kurds were the killings of Alawites in Latakia, Christians in Damascus, and Druze in Suwayda. Despite this record of murder, al-Sharaa seamlessly moved from Washington to Paris, from New York to Moscow, seemingly bridging all geopolitical divides, creating facts, and knowing that the world is very much on board with his policy of creating a ‘unified Syria’. In some Western countries, the prospect of a Syrian leader who can be dealt with at low cost is welcome.

What has changed in Syria is not the logic of exclusion, but the willingness of international observers and policymakers to use, reproduce, and justify it. They deploy global technocratic language that merges with fully anti-modern notions of nation and ethnicity. They utilise Arab nationalist framings of Kurds as foreign actors, non-indigenous entities, whose existence is provocative. These commentators turn Arab supremacy into ‘stability’, while framing challenges to it as unnecessary disruptions of an already fragile equilibrium. In this portrayal, the Kurdish political presence is not read as an indigenous continuity or a defensive response to existential threat, but as an interruption that generates instability through its mere articulation or simple existence. The effect of such analysis and commentary is to portray violence against Kurds an unfortunate consequence of complexity, exhaustion, and competing claims, and not as the murderous racism or political exclusion that Kurds pay for with their lives.

NOT ANCIENT HATREDS, BUT A PRODUCED SYSTEM OF DENIAL

Unsurprisingly, given this framing of events, some reporting and analyses diverged more sharply from reality. Some journalists uncritically cited ‘the inhabitants of Raqqa’ as an authentic expression of popular will, presenting Arab-majority reactions as a neutral barometer of legitimacy – somehow ignoring the numerous Kurdish residents of the city. These reports implicitly positioned Kurds as the source of resentment directed at them, casting them as alien rulers whose removal restored social order. Reporters such as the German-Iranian ZDF journalist Golineh Atai stood in front of al-Hol camp, where hundreds of ISIS family members had just been released, claiming that they escaped under Kurdish watch, talking about how she was concerned that Mazloum Abdi did not have his forces under control, about Arabs ‘shivering in fear’ as there were bad blood between them and Kurds for the last 10 years – hence shifting all responsibility on Kurds but portraying Arabs as victims without agency. She further claimed that ‘a war was avoided’, acting as if the dozens of killed Kurds, the humanitarian siege of Kurdish areas, and the video-taped racial violence had not happened. This performance of representing only Arab narratives, framed as ‘authenticity,’ marginalises and eliminates Kurdish loss, displacement, and death.

Similarly, a recent article in Der Spiegel asking ‘what game the most powerful Kurdish militia in Syria is playing’ exemplifies how suspicion is projected onto Kurdish actors even in ostensibly critical reporting. The framing presupposes duplicity and hidden agendas on the Kurdish side, while the actions of surrounding Arab and Turkish actors are treated as background conditions rather than subjects of equivalent inquiry. Kurdish governance is approached as a puzzle or threat, not as a political project with historical roots, social legitimacy, and clearly articulated aims. The question is not what Kurds are defending themselves against, but what they are scheming to achieve. This inversion mirrors the same racialised imagination, that Kurds possess certain inherent characteristics, that has long governed regional discourse, now translated into the idiom of investigative journalism.

This charade of allegedly ground-level reporting stripped the violence unfolding against Kurds of its political meaning. At best, such analyses presented the Arab–Kurdish conflict as the outcome of ancient hatreds or reciprocal prejudice, as though violence had emerged organically from unresolved communal tensions. Often, it only shows the violence as one perpetrated by Kurds in their last 10 years of control over former ISIS territories. This explanation empties the conflict of its political content and functions as a form of denial. What is at stake is not the persistence of pre-modern animosity, but the success of a modern political project that framed Kurdish existence as incompatible with national order, progress, and sovereignty. Kurdish exclusion was not the residue of backwardness; it was one of the instruments that articulated Syria’s modern statehood.

THE HISTORY OF ANTI-KURDISH IDEOLOGY

The Syrian case illustrates the logic of anti-Kurdishness with particular clarity. Arabisation policies of the mid-twentieth century were not marginal excesses or policy errors, but constitutive practices through which the state defined who belonged and who did not. The 1963 so-called study of the Kurdish region of Syria (Dirasat ʿan Muhafazati al-Jazirati min al-Nawahi al-Qawmiat al-Siyasiat al-Aijtimʿaeia, ‘A study of Al-Jazirah Governorate from national, political, and social perspectives’) by Mohammed Talib Hilal, a Syrian-Ba’athist military and police officer, articulated a worldview in which Kurdish presence was cast as an existential threat comparable to Israel itself, which Hilal disparagingly referred to as ‘Yahudistan’ (‘Jew country’). Hilal collapsed Kurdish existence into the same category of permanent enemy as Israelis. He argued that Arabs had to confront Kurdistan and Israel alike through a comprehensive plan, rather than addressed in partial or ad hoc ways, because he saw both as vehicles of imperial intervention against Arab nationalism. Within this framework, Kurdish political claims did not require engagement or negotiation, because Kurdish existence was outside the realm of legitimate politics. Hilal’s study justified the Syrian government’s creation of an ‘Arab belt’ (al-Hizām al-ʿArabī) of Arab populations brought in to make the north east of Syria less Kurdish.

Crucially, this anti-Kurdish logic neither stood in opposition to religious fundamentalism. nor was it neutralised by secular modernism. Arab nationalism and political Islam repeatedly cohered around the same racialised understanding of Kurdish presence, showing Kurds as an unchangeable, alien and inherently inferior group. Saddam Hussein’s political trajectory demonstrates this convergence with brutal clarity, combining Ba’athist modernisation rhetoric with Islamic symbolism, while inflicting genocidal violence against Kurds during the Anfal campaign (1988) as a rational act of state preservation. In Syria, Ba’athist figures such as Salah Jadid, often referred to as neo-Marxist when his political debut was nowhere less than in the Nazi sister-party the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), treated both Islam and Kurdish society as backward forces to be suppressed in the name of development. For Syria’s Alawite elites, extreme Arab nationalism functioned as a mode of integration into a Sunni Arab political landscape, just as Palestinian nationalism historically served as a vehicle of belonging for Palestinian Christians. Modernisation racism did not contradict religious or nationalist ideology. It worked through both, producing a durable grammar in which killing Kurds or destroying their culture, making them disposable, could be repeatedly justified as progress.

The repetition of anti-Kurdish violence across regimes, ideologies, and political moments is genealogical, not accidental. It does not simply come from antipathies of Arabs that came up after the war against ISIS and the alleged occupation of Arab lands. It has deeper and, as the Ba’athist history of thought shows, well-developed and refined ideological embeddings of anti-Kurdish racism. It reflects a shared racialised understanding of the Kurdish presence as incompatible with political order, and a pseudo-anti-imperial reading of Middle Eastern history in which Arabs are cast as the sole indigenous political subject. Within this framework, Kurdish existence appears either as an imperial fabrication or as a demographic threat, but never as a legitimate historical continuity. This ideological cherry picking allowed Arab nationalism and later Islamist movements to evade reflection on their own forms of domination, while presenting Kurdish resistance as collaboration, deviation, or betrayal.

The weakening of the Assad regime after 2011, when the Syrian uprising and civil war began, did not dismantle this racial logic. It reappeared almost seamlessly in the discourse of the anti-Assad opposition, which framed Kurdish autonomy as fragmentation, conspiracy, or foreign manipulation rather than self-defence. These opposition groups consistently portrayed Kurdish political organisation as illegitimate – regardless of its practices, alliances, or ideological commitments. The racial imagination remained intact even as banners, slogans, and patrons changed. This continuity explains why it was so easy to justify alliances between Syrian Islamist militias and Turkey to attack the Kurdish-majority region of Afrin (in north west Syria), and Kurdish-majority towns such as Serêkaniyê (in north east Syria, known in Arabic as Ras al-Ayn), and Girê Spî (in northeast Syria, known in Arabic as Tal Abyad). The same racial conception of the Kurds was present when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan indirectly invoked the ‘Arab belt’ during his 2019 offensive against the Syrian Kurds. He stated that northeast Syria was ‘virtually desert’ and that the Arabs were the ‘real owners’ of the town of Manbij, while pointing to a map on which the majority Kurdish areas, which are divided from Kurdish areas in Turkey precisely through the arbitrary Syria-Turkish border, were marked as areas Turkey wanted to occupy as a ‘safe zone.’

REPRODUCING ANTI-KURDISHNESS AS EXPERTISE

The structural nature of anti-Kurdish racism becomes most visible not in abstract declarations, but in the concrete moments where Kurdish political agency is evaluated, interpreted, and disciplined. One such moment, now largely forgotten, is the exchange between Leyla Zana, a former Kurdish political prisoner of the Turkish state, and Leyla Khaled, a Palestinian airplane hijacker, at a women’s conference in 2013. Zana articulated a position grounded in coexistence, insisting that the Palestinian struggle for liberation did not require the erasure of another people, and that peace among peoples presupposed mutual recognition even under conditions of occupation. Khaled rejected this framework categorically, refusing any form of recognition that would allow Israel to remain and drawing a rigid boundary between national causes deemed legitimate and those considered irreconcilable.

At the time, many Kurds understood this as a disagreement specific to the Israeli-Palestinian context. In retrospect, the exchange exposed a deeper political grammar: Arab and Palestinian national causes are articulated as indigenous, absolute, and non-negotiable, while Kurdish (and Jewish-Israeli) existence is treated as conditional, secondary, and indefinitely deferrable. Kurdish participation in Arab political struggles thus functioned less as solidarity than as proof of an unequal relationship in which Kurdish commitment to the Arab cause was expected and mobilised, while Arab recognition of the Kurds’ struggle was never part of the political bargain.

This asymmetry is not confined to regional political movements. It migrates seamlessly into Western academic and policy discourse, where it is reframed through the language of pragmatism, stability, and risk management. A telling example is the analysis offered by Charles Lister, Resident Fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. Lister wrote that ‘for years, the SDF had proven a loyal and dependable local partner, but at the end of the day, it was a non-state actor, whose Kurdish base had long been a trigger for wider instability, both inside Syria and, to an extent, beyond it.’ The formulation is revealing not because it denies Kurdish contributions, which it briefly acknowledges. Rather, what is telling with this analysis is that it locates instability in Kurdish existence itself. Loyalty, effectiveness, and sacrifice are rendered secondary to an ethnic diagnosis that frames Kurdish presence as inherently destabilising, intrinsically a threat. Turkish military aggression, jihadist violence, and decades of Arab nationalist repression disappear analytically, replaced by the assumption that simple Kurdish existence is the underlying problem to be managed.

A similar logic operates in Princeton academic Faris Zwirahn’s analysis of eastern Syria, in which Kurdish governance is delegitimised through the claim that ‘These cadres are often foreign nationals (mainly from Turkey and Iraq) rather than Syrians.’ The observation is presented as evidence of Kurdish foreigness, despite the fact that the Syrian state has integrated thousands of foreign fighters, including Uyghur jihadists, into its forces without attracting comparable scrutiny. The issue here is not factual accuracy, but differential interpretation. Such analyses frame Kurdish trans-border ties as infiltration and demographic manipulation, while either ignoring Arab state militarisation of foreign, non-Arab, combatants or normalising it as a wartime necessity. What emerges is a hierarchy of legitimacy in which Kurdish mobility, by definition, is suspect, while Arab state practices are insulated from equivalent critique.

This pattern is even more pronounced in the work of analysts such as Hassan I. Hassan, the Founder and Editor in Chief of New Lines Magazine, and Rasha al-Aqeedi, a New Lines writer, whose commentary frames Kurdish autonomy as an externally driven disruption rather than as an indigenous political response to existential threat. Hassan I. Hassan, for example, claims that the SDF ‘never won a battle without close U.S. air support’, unlike Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the jihadi group that brought al-Sharaa to power. The reality is that HTS succeeded thanks to years of Turkish funding, an effort which itself had U.S. diplomatic, financial, and military backing.

Kurdish institutions appear in these analyses as proxies, instruments, or unintended consequences of Western intervention, sentiments that recall Mohammed Talib Hilal. Such writing treats Arab nationalist and Islamist actors as reactive forces shaped by circumstance, rather than as agents of domination. The Kurds, on this reading, are destabilising outsiders, while Arab violence against the Kurds is regrettable, but also understandable as a form of anti-imperialism. Kurdish self-defence becomes a problem to be explained away, not a claim to be taken seriously.

THE COSTS OF GEOPOLITICAL FATALISM

What links these cases is not individual bias or analytical failure, but a shared epistemic structure in which Arab political dominance is assumed as the default order. Through this language of realism, non-intervention, and fatigue, violence against Kurds can proceed without triggering moral or analytical rupture, while Kurdish resistance is met with heightened suspicion.

At this point, geopolitical fatalism performs its central function. By presenting Arab nationalist control as the least disruptive (and most ‘natural’) option, policy discourse reframes Western military withdrawal from Syria as restraint, and acquiescence as ethical maturity. Kurdish lives become negotiable not because circumstances are chaotic, but because the framework used to imagine order has already determined whose claims count as legitimate. Kurdish governance is an illegitimate, disruptive innovation. Arab governance is the natural order. Seeking to change that dispensation is a fool’s errand, so the only viable policy is to accept the Arab-dominated Middle East as is. Anti-imperialism, stripped of a reading in which all empires are under scrutiny, becomes a vocabulary that absorbs domination rather than confronts it.

This arrangement persists in regional and Western discourse because it rests on a racialised conception of indigeneity that treats Arabs as the sole authentic political subject of the region. Kurds, Jewish-Israelis, Christians, Alawites, Druze, Yazidis and others, become troublesome presences, peoples who mere existence is destabilising. The consequences of such thinking are written in the blood of innocents.