There is something bitterly familiar about armed women being celebrated as symbols of resistance one decade and quietly written out of the state the next. That is precisely the fate closing in on Syria’s YPJ fighters, the all-female Kurdish units that spent years on the front line against ISIS, only to now find themselves shut out of the very national army their sacrifices helped make possible.
According to reporting on the ground in northeast Syria, the YPJ has been pushing for integration into the country’s reconstituted armed forces under the post-Assad transitional arrangement, but the terms being discussed in Damascus offer little room for them as an organised, autonomous fighting force, let alone one built specifically around women. The broader Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have been in fraught negotiations with the new authorities over how, or whether, their fighters get folded into a unified national military. Women’s units appear to be the first casualty of that bargaining, treated as a political inconvenience rather than a military asset.
This matters well beyond Syria’s borders. How the new Damascus government treats the Kurds, and particularly the women who fought and died against ISIS when much of the world watched from a distance, is a test of what kind of state is actually being built there. Western capitals spent years lionising the YPJ in documentaries and diplomatic photo-ops as the face of a more progressive resistance to jihadism. Quietly sidelining them now, to placate Turkey or satisfy conservative currents within the new order, would confirm what many already suspect: that Syria’s transition is being negotiated over the heads of the people who actually did the fighting, with outcomes shaped more by regional power plays involving Ankara, Washington and the Gulf than by any genuine reckoning with merit or sacrifice.
For India, this is not a peripheral story. New Delhi has long argued, in forums from the UN to the G20, that stability in West Asia depends on inclusive governance rather than victors’ justice, a position rooted in India’s own experience of holding together a diverse and fractious polity. India also has energy and connectivity interests across the wider region that hinge on Syria not sliding back into fragmentation or becoming a new theatre for Turkish-Kurdish confrontation. A Syria that alienates the Kurds risks reigniting exactly the kind of instability that drags in outside powers and disrupts trade corridors India is banking on, including ambitions tied to the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor. Delhi has no formal stake in this negotiation, but it watches closely, because every fractured transition in this region eventually exports its instability outward.
My take: governments that inherit power after long wars often discover convenient amnesia about who actually won them. The YPJ’s fighters did not ask for gratitude, only a seat at the table they helped build. Denying them that is not just a domestic Syrian dispute, it is an early signal of whether the new Syria will be a state for all its people or simply a rebranded version of the old exclusions with different men in charge.
RP analysis · Based on reporting: Kurdish YPJ women fighters face exclusion from Syria’s new army
