I left Aleppo on the 6th of January 2026 to the sound of gunfire and shelling as I headed towards SDF controlled northeast Syria. A city fatigued from years of bloody conflict had been freed from the grip of the Assad regime a year earlier, but the division between the new Islamist government of Damascus and the Kurdish led Syrian Democratic Forces had hit boiling point that morning, which triggered the military and political offensive which ended the autonomy of Rojava.

 

Rojava, officially the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria was an autonomous, primarily Kurdish, region that was governed by the democratic socialist ideology of the imprisoned Kurdistan Worker’s Party leader Abdullah Öcalan. The autonomy of the region lasted from 2012 until the 29th January 2026, when facing defeat from an offensive from the new Islamist government, both the SDF and the authorities of Rojava agreed to dissolve and be incorporated into the new Syrian state.

 

During those weeks from of the beginning of the violence, throughout the offensive and until the ultimate dissolution of its fourteen-year autonomy, Rojava was rocked with protests from Kurds and minorities who remembered the brutal fight against ISIS and feared the forthcoming Islamist government. From Raqqa, the former capital of the Islamic State, where Arab Muslims see the new government as a hope for a united Syria, to Kobani where the scars of war still haunt the Kurds, and to the Turkish occupation zones which one must keep to the cover of dirt banks, the month of January was another violent chapter in the path to a new Syria. The photographs in this journal are from then journey from Aleppo to Qamishli, visiting the countryside, borderlands, Kobani, Raqqa and Al-Hasakah.