I hear this all the time "AANES attempted to run multiparty elections but Turkey threatened to invade & US to withdraw" but I don't think it reflects reality. I think it was a convenient excuse to not have any multi-party elections. The authorities in AANES were busy arresting and harassing members of the KNC and ENKS. We all know this. It was accepted due to expediency...as in "well SDF is the best option now"...but the fact is there was ample time to have local elections. I don't buy for one second that the same US officials who said "this is a temporary, transactional, tactical" partnership, that is primarily only military, opposed local elections. I also DO NOT buy the theory that "we have to not have elections because Ankara might be made"....Ankara already had invaded Afrin...it was bombing the SDF often... It's clear that PYD was always going to be a one party state. This was accepted when Assad was in power because the alternative was bad. But the fact is that democracy is better. DAANES literally had "democratic" in its name. But there was no democracy. I supported the SDF because I think as a military organization it was good. The political side of it was always problematic. Not matter how may councils are "half women"...having democracy is about doing more than just appointing a bunch of people who all are from the same political party. And it's not like any of the other polities were democracies either, not HTS, or Faylaq Sham, or the rulers of Suwayda today. But let's be honest about that... I haven't changed my view, I was never ideologically inclined to the political side of SDF...I thought the military side was fine.

#Syria: a road collapsed today in the city of #Raqqa, due to the presence of a #SDF tunnel underneath.

Remember: The Syrian Arab Republic believes that gangsters who are sanctioned for sexual violence against ethnic minority women ought to be rewarded with top military posts, but ethnic minority women taking up arms to resist those gangsters are “objectifying the female body.”