ANKARA - Academician Peter McLaren, assessing Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham's (HTS) attacks on Kurds in Aleppo, stated that the attacks targeted not only neighborhoods but also a deep-rooted system of thought. 

 

As HTS and Turkey-backed groups' genocidal attacks against Kurds in Syria spread across North and East Syria, reactions to this situation are also increasing. Assessing this process, described as a “comprehensive conspiracy” against the Kurds' national gains and values, academician Peter McLaren emphasized that the attacks transcend a single city and are fundamentally targeting the ideas of Kurdish People’s Leader Abdullah Öcalan. McLaren stated, “Rojava and the SDG represent an alternative modernity in a geography that has long been ruled by tyrants; this is the real reason they are being targeted.”

 

McLaren said that the events in Aleppo are not isolated tremors but aftershocks of a deeper tectonic struggle over the soul of the Middle East. McLaren responded to these attacks, which have escalated despite the Peace and Democratic Society Process in Turkey, saying: “What is named as a ‘peace process’ in Turkey, while Kurdish self-rule is assaulted by proxy in Syria, is not peace but a displacement of war across borders, a choreography in which violence changes its uniform but not its intention. Silence on one front, bombardment on another. This is not reconciliation, but a strategic breathing space for domination. It is the old art of empire, speaking softly in one room while tightening the fist in the next.”

 

‘IT IS QUIET REVOLUTION AGAINST FIVE THOUSANDS YEARS’

 

McLaren reminded that from Kurdish People’s Leader Abdullah Ocalan’s horizon, the Kurdish question has never been merely a problem of weapons or territory, it is a question of civilization itself and said: “ It asks whether the region will remain imprisoned within the iron architecture of the nation-statecentralized, patriarchal, militarized, obsessed with uniformity or whether it can be reimagined through democratic confederalism: a political form grounded in communes and councils, in women’s liberation, ecological responsibility, and the coexistence of peoples without forced assimilation. This is not a reform of the old order but a quiet revolution against five thousand years of hierarchy.”

 

‘THE STATE FEARS A LIVING ALTERNATIVE TO ITS OWN FORM OF ORDER’

 

McLaren added: “Rojava, and the structures defended by the SDF embody this possibility. They represent an alternative modernity in a landscape long ruled by tyrants, generals, and caliphs. They show that sovereignty can be plural, that power can rise from below, that women can stand at the center of political life rather than its margins. This is why they are not merely opposed but hunted. States can tolerate rebellions; they cannot easily tolerate examples. In this light, the HTS and the armed formations aligned with Turkey appear not as autonomous forces, but as instruments in a broader strategy of containment. Their assaults in Aleppo are not random eruptions of jihadist fury; they are part of a geopolitical design to fracture Kurdish political gains, to prevent the consolidation of a democratic model that might radiate across borders and awaken the oppressed within Turkey itself. The state speaks of security, but what it fears is not disorder, it fears a living alternative to its own form of order.”

 

‘YOU CANNOT BOMB A SOCIAL PARADIGM’

 

McLaren stated that the continuation of attacks in Aleppo, while a process is rhetorically upheld, it reveals a dual policy which is reconciliation in discourse, annihilation in reality. He said: “You cannot bomb a social paradigm out of existence. You cannot drone a people back into pre-political silence. The Kurdish movement has already crossed the threshold from a national liberation struggle into a civilizational proposal. Its core is no longer the seizure of the state, but the transcendence of the state as the sole horizon of political life. What is under assault in Rojava is therefore not merely a territory, but the possibility of a post-authoritarian Middle East.”

 

‘THE KURDISH PRESENCE IS THE LIVING EMBER OF THIS WORLD’

 

McLaren noted that Aleppo is not only a city, but it is a tectonic rift in history and added: “On one side stand the iron architectures of sovereignty—capitals, armies, empires—proclaiming that order descends from command and is enforced by the gun. On the other side flickers a fragile constellation: councils instead of thrones, women’s assemblies instead of patriarchal edicts, coexistence instead of coerced sameness. The Kurdish presence in Aleppo is the living ember of this world, and embers are always what empires try to stamp out.”

 

‘THE WAR IS NOT OVER STREETS BUT OVER MEANING’

 

“The war, in this reading, is not over streets but over meaning” said McLaren and added: “The bombardment of Aleppo in early January is not merely the rearranging of lines on a general’s map; it is the fever of a civilization afraid of its own future. It is not territory that is intolerable, but the example. Rojava and the Kurdish neighborhoods show that Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Turkmen can share power; that faith need not be a weapon; that economy can be communal rather than extractive. Such a vision is poison to systems that survive by monopolizing authority, by teaching society to kneel before the state as before a god.”

 

‘NATION STATE AGAINST SOCIETY’

 

McLaren also assessed that the tragedy of Aleppo confirms that the central conflict of our age is the war of the nation-state against society:  “The Kurdish movement, far from a local rebellion, poses a question to the whole world, written in the dust and blood of an ancient city: can we build a future where difference is not crushed into silence, but braided into a living, breathing freedom?”

 

MA / Deniz Karabudak