SDF's media grip in northern Syria echoes Assad's propaganda playbook

As journalists from northeastern Syria flock to Damascus and other areas under the transitional government’s control to report relatively freely, their own region remains under a regime that views journalism as a tool for consolidating power instead of one speaking truth to it.

Posts on social media platforms in Arabic are, at times, the sole source of reports of arrests and abductions in parts of Syria controlled by a US ally, the entity known as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), and its armed wing the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

For non-local journalists and media outlets, the news cycle is simply too overwhelming, possibly, while the shuttering of foreign bureaus over the past two decades and the near impossibility for freelancers to survive on what they earn for written stories means few of us can afford to research and document facts on the ground properly.

However, the fact remains that access to the SDF-controlled northeastern part of the country is, for the most part, restricted to journalists the local authorities deem useful; this clearly, continues to negatively affect what the public and decision-makers know and what they think they do, akin to the situation seen in areas held by the Bashar al-Assad regime prior to its ouster on December 8, 2024.

I recently reported from the liberated areas of Deir al-Zor on violations and thefts by the Kurdish-led and US-backed SDF. The militia forces had occupied the two major cities in the region for some days after the Assad regime and allied forces, including Iran-backed militias, handed over control as opposition-backed forces were advancing on Damascus. I have not seen any other reporting from this region by international media since the fall of the Assad regime.

Human rights violations and media silence

On February 6, the Syrian Network for Human Rights issued a statement documenting the “killing of 65 civilians, including one child and two women, by SDF snipers in the two months since November 29 2024, in Aleppo city, after the Military Operations Command groups managed to take control of most of Aleppo city”.

The US and others have for many years promoted the idea of the AANES as a bulwark of freedom and democratic ideals. The inaccurate and often intentionally misleading use of “the Kurds” as a stand-in for the SDF and for the PKK terrorist group – closely linked to the SDF and considered by many an integral part of it – has led even Western diplomats to overlook the fact that many “Kurds” do not feel represented by what many of them consider a deadly mafia.

The PKK is officially designated as a terrorist organisation by the US, EU, and Türkiye. Its frequent use of car bombs that kill civilians remains underreported in Western media, as does its history of drug trafficking and links to the Assad regime and Iran.

“Duran Kalkan is a top leader of terrorist group PKK”, the US noted in 2021, offering a reward of up to three million dollars for “information that helps bring Kalkan to justice”. He was named a “Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker (SDNK)” under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act) on April 20, 2011.

Suppressing dissent and manipulating narratives

Kurdistan 24 and Rudaw, the top Iraqi Kurdish media outlets, remain banned in SDF-held areas but are by no means the only ones to be prevented from reporting from the region. In both 2019 and 2020, I reported multiple times from Arab-majority SDF-held areas despite threats.

For example, in December 2020, I was in Deir al-Zor during a local protest against the SDF, after which several local men were arrested. They were released some days later when tribal notables and others intervened.

While I could not find reporting on the arrests anywhere other than my own article, the protests themselves were “covered” by the SDF-linked North Press Agency (NPA), which claimed those protesting were urging the AANES to “ignore tribal notables” since they “did not speak a word of truth”, and that “cells affiliated with the Syrian government are trying to destabilise security in the region”.

This narrative contradicted what I observed on the ground.

Since then, I have been unable to return to that area and know of no other independent journalists who have reported from oil-rich, Arab-majority tribal areas of Deir al-Zor without being accompanied by members of the SDF. I had previously been threatened for travelling there without being accompanied by SDF forces.

One Iraqi Kurdish member of parliament I interviewed in 2022 compared the AANES to North Korea in terms of its restrictions on the entire population, calling it a “dictatorship”. He has since said he can no longer speak publicly on this matter due to threats from the PKK.

The perception of SDF-held areas being dictatorial and similar to the Assad regime has been echoed by many Syrians I have recently interviewed on the ground, including Arabs, Druze, and Kurds.

Echoes of authoritarianism

"All regimes are the same," a Druze humanitarian worker commented to me in Damascus recently, stressing that the AANES-SDF is "no exception."

Bente Scheller, head of the Middle East and North Africa division at the Heinrich Boll Foundation in Berlin, noted to me in an exchange over encrypted messaging on February 9 that is important in the current period to seek accountability for crimes and opening “prisons and files” in Syria, including in SDF-held areas.

“Our partner Meshal Temmo for example, a true Kurdish democrat murdered on October 7, 2011,” she said, is a case she personally feels strongly about: “allegedly Bashar [al-Assad] ordered it, but PYD's role remains shady.”

When the opposition against the Assad regime started, she noted, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) – linked to the PKK – “had the upper hand” and “It is obvious that they had an arrangement with the regime.”

Scheller, who authored a book on Assad-era foreign policy and served at the German embassy in Damascus from 2002 to 2004, explained that the regime pulled its troops from the northeast to “in exchange” for the PYD not rising up against it. This withdrawal, she said, allowed the PYD to form a de facto “shadow” government and advance its political agenda.

“For the regime, the benefits were that it could be sure about that part of Syria. That they would not need to use the military there and they were in dire need of troops in other areas to crush the revolution. So, this agreement was beneficial,” she noted, “for the regime and it was unfortunately not beneficial for the Syrian rebels because this enabled the regime to concentrate its full power, of course, on the rebels.”

Hafez al-Assad, like any dictator, feared uncontrollable domestic dynamics. Scheller noted that, while he opposed armed groups operating against the regime within Syria, the elder Assad supported groups that weakened neighbouring states, including the PKK, to pressure Türkiye.

“For Türkiye, his vehicle of pressuring them was having relations with the PKK,” she said.

The PKK and its affiliates have admitted to providing false information to the public for “security reasons” and delayed reporting the deaths of their members by several years at times, as well as providing rather unlikely death tolls for “the enemy”. In 2022, for example, The New Arab quoted a PKK-affiliated spokesman as claiming that they had “killed 450 Turkish soldiers” in a single month.

After an April 2023 drone attack near the Sulaymaniyah airport in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, the SDF initially denied their commander Mazloum Abdi was in the country or anywhere near the site of the attack; journalists linked to the SDF parroted the news unquestioningly while SDF-PKK trolls on social media – many on different continents – engaged in an onslaught of social media insults towards those who said otherwise, as has become normal in such situations.

Later, the SDF admitted he had been there and that – in fact - he had been most likely the target of the attack.

Truth is irrelevant to authoritarian regimes: only the impact of "news" on public perception matters.

The reporting emerging from previously regime-held areas of Syria finally open to journalists serves as a stark reminder of how important it is to distrust any government obstructing independent journalism, including the one in northeastern Syria.