In April 2017, while Raqqa was still under the control of the Islamic State (IS) group, Jalaa Hamzawi met Leila Mustafa.
They met in Ain Issa, some 50 kilometres from Raqqa, while a council to govern Raqqa once it was freed from IS rule was being established. Jalaa, a Raqqa native, an economics graduate, an Arab woman then in her mid-forties, and Leila, a 29-year-old Kurdish woman and civil engineering graduate, instantly connected, bound by shared experience of the horrors that had befallen Raqqa in recent years.
“I introduced myself to her as a poet and artist, and she greeted me with tears,” Hamzawi told SyriaUntold about their first encounter.
“I recited a poem in her ear about how I suffered under Daesh (IS),” she said. “We became friends, even though I was 15 years older than her.”
In the same town where they first met, more than 100 delegates from Raqqa’s different ethnic communities would select Leila as co-chair of the Raqqa Civil Council (RCC), a body tasked with governing the city once it was pulled out from the grasp of IS. The council’s makeup reflected the city’s ethnic and religious diversity (it is multi-ethnic, but with an Arab majority), and came close to gender parity.
Raqqa would be freed in October 2017. The destruction wrought by IS and its war with the US-led coalition almost without precedent, and the reconstruction challenge at hand was monumental. In its bid to recapture Raqqa, the US-led coalition obliterated the city with its airstrikes. Just 20% of buildings were left standing, and the city was left almost entirely without water and electricity. IS had laced the city with thousands of landmines, making any effort to clear rubble a lethal one. Who better than a local civil engineer to oversee the city’s recovery?
Leila at least had a few years of local political experience under her belt, becoming co-chair of the Autonomous Administration in Tel Abyad (Gire Spi) in 2015 and representing the district at a conference in Al-Malikiyah (Derik) for the establishment of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), a political assembly representing political parties and organisations in the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North East Syria (DAANES), in 2016.
Leila spoke fondly of growing up in a diverse Raqqa, and said that its coexistence drove her politics. “Syrian society was harmonious between different groups, and our relationship with our Arab neighbours was really good,” she told a documentary crew when recounting life before IS.
In the early days of the council, Leila said via her memoir written by French journalist Marine de Tilly and published in 2020 that she encountered deep scepticism from some leaders of local Arab tribes around the RCC, including around women’s rights and the new Kurdish-founded governance — but that she and her peers were able to win some of them around with her sincerity.
Leila said she hadn’t wanted to become a political figure, but she had been encouraged by existing Kurdish leaders, who installed a lot of self-belief in her - among them Omar Alloush, her political mentor who was killed in a suspected Turkish attack in 2018.
Reconstruction efforts
Despite Leila’s own apprehension about a role in politics, Hamzawi, who would go on to share close professional ties with Leila when they worked together on the council, and other women who worked with her said she was a natural leader.
“She led with humility, a smile, guidance, and flexibility. She dealt with everyone as though they were family,” Hamzawi said of Leila.
“People in Raqqa consider her administration as a golden age, because it allowed the people of Raqqa to rebuild their homes, markets, and commercial and industrial facilities,” Hamzawi said.
Leila spoke fondly of growing up in a diverse Raqqa, and said that its coexistence drove her politics.
During her time as co-mayor, schools, healthcare facilities and bridges were rebuilt. While some marvelled at the extent to which the city seemed to be coming back to life, many, including Leila herself, said reconstruction was not taking place as quickly as it could have been.
“We received minimal support from the international coalition to make the city habitable again – almost insignificant compared to the level of destruction,” she told French newspaper Le Monde in 2021.
Even today, an estimated 50 percent of the city remains in ruins, reconstruction slowed by devaluation of the Syrian pound, the cost of building materials, and, by the administration’s own admission, embezzlement of funds by civil servants in key sectors like electricity. Dozens of schools in Raqqa that were destroyed during the war with ISIS were slowly being rebuilt, but many are running while still bearing the damage from the war, Zulekha Abdi, a senior local education official told SyriaUntold. Hospitals and other healthcare facilities are in particular need of investment and reconstruction, both Ismail and Abdi said. According to Ismail, the “lack of international support” for Raqqa’s authorities after Islamic State rule is one of the biggest challenges currently facing the city.
For Syrian journalist Hussam Hammoud, who was a USAID programme coordinator in the period after IS rule and met Leila on several occasions, some of the issues with reconstruction in the city were in part due to poor coordination between the council and aid agencies. The brunt of projects like the reconstruction of the Naeem roundabout, which became a frequent sight in international news reports on reconstruction in Raqqa, were done with little contribution from the council, he told SyriaUntold.
A Kurdish woman in foreign media
Leila was by no means the first woman to hold important office in northern Syria since Bashar al-Assad’s forces withdrew from northeastern parts of the country in 2012, and international media and officials had already been drawn to images and stories of Kurdish women and women of other ethnicities taking up arms or becoming civil and political leaders in northern Syria. When the war with the Islamic State began, foreign media gushed at “badass” Kurdish women and girls who had taken up arms against the Islamic State, women and girls who were unlocking their innately feminist, heroic, and not-too-Muslim nature to fight for good. These women and girls were cast in opposition not just to the bloodthirsty and barbaric Islamic State fighters they were fighting, but to an Orientalist and Islamophobic caricature of Syrian Arab women as submissive, veiled, and protectors of cultural backwardness.
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Once IS was territorially defeated in Raqqa, some of the media attention turned from the military to the civil, and Leila, a young, educated, Kurdish woman politician, was a natural new focal point. Mustafa Kemal Topal, Assistant Professor at the Roskilde University currently researching women in governance in northern Syria, told SyriaUntold that the high visibility of Kurdish and non-Kurdish women in the NES “has made the movement appear particularly progressive and radical, especially in a region traditionally known for its patriarchal and conservative norms.”
Leila’s story was especially potent – that she was someone with an engineering background overseeing reconstruction; that she was a Kurdish figure of leadership in a city from which IS had decreed Kurds must be expelled; that she was a woman leader where a caliphate that made women as invisible as possible once stood. Her individual tastes, like her casual and personalised dress sense, were a source of interest too. In news article photos, TV news reports, and documentaries, she could be seen in a leather jacket and skinny jeans, dainty gold earrings and patterned scarves around her neck. Leila was an unmissable port of call for journalists and foreign officials visiting northeast Syria, and, for the local authorities and its US-led coalition backers, the perfect figurehead for the city’s reconstruction, according to Hammoud.
“She was an engineer – or at least an engineering graduate – she was quite young, and she was a woman,” he said.
“This was so important for them, because if you read the narrative that came afterwards, you see that in every headline that mentioned Leila Mustafa, that it was mentioned that she was a woman – ‘The Woman Rebuilding Raqqa’.”
Leila’s story was especially potent – that she was someone with an engineering background overseeing reconstruction; that she was a Kurdish figure of leadership in a city from which IS had decreed Kurds must be expelled; that she was a woman leader where a caliphate that made women as invisible as possible once stood.
Meanwhile, Raqqa’s Arab majority were overlooked by journalists visiting Raqqa in the wake of the IS defeat, and their hopes and concerns were ignored, Hammoud said.
“When foreign journalists were coming to visit – it was very much about being somewhere where IS had just been. They wanted the good guy-bad guy perspective, the fight between IS and the SDF,” Hammoud told SyriaUntold.
“It was way easier than speaking to [Arab] locals, who were made out to be freakish and terrifying, like they were the host community for IS and nothing else. The rest of their history vanished.”
Syrians of all kinds have long called out — and continue to call out — Western media and academia for invisibilising or vilifying Syrians belonging to the ethnic or religious majorities.
Writer and political dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh, himself from Raqqa, said in an interview back in 2018: “The dominant discourses that share the act of producing knowledge about Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and the Middle East… are both depopulated, reductionist discourses that helped greatly in making local populations invisible, indeed nonexistent.”
“Every mediocre Middle Eastern ‘expert’ knows that so-and-so is an Alawi, so-and-so is a Christian, or a Kurd. The ‘rest’ are the ‘majority’ Arabs and Muslims that the West should take great care to protect the minorities from its primordial threat.”
Critics of the authorities in Raqqa say they are often repressive, pointing to the detention of journalists and media workers, and shutdowns of protests over planned policies with excessive force as examples. Now, while the SDF fights Turkish-backed militias at the Tishreen Dam on the Euphates and IS militants keen to capitalise on national political uncertainty, Raqqa and other areas under DAANES control have been under a partial nighttime curfew for more than a month and raids to arrest suspected members of IS are frequent. The internal security forces (Asayish) have said its measures are to help maintain security and stability in the city, but the move is hampering local business and making the city’s inhabitants tense.
Though Leila was the face of Raqqa’s transformation, the power to make the decisions necessary to reconstruct Raqqa lay far beyond Leila and the council, according to Hammoud.
“Civilian arms couldn’t make direct decisions – there was always someone in the background that had to make that decision for them… Every decision, every policy was made by the military cadres,” he said.
For Topal, that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) military is involved in some decision-making makes sense considering the threats from all sides that the Kurdish-led authorities face.
“I would say, yes, the SDF has an influence on decision-making processes but they do not decide everything and there are also strong political forces in the SDC,” he said.
Hammoud said he believed that the limits to the agency that Leila had were likely a source of frustration to her.
“In my personal opinion, Leila was dreaming of becoming something more. She didn’t want just the role that was given to her,” he said. “She wanted to be in the place of Ilham Ahmed – she was fighting for that kind of role.”
No reaction
Whatever Leila’s political ambitions were, her political career would be drastically cut short. She died in November 2023 at the age of 35, after surgery to remove cysts on her liver at a hospital in Damascus where she had been receiving treatment for three months.
It seemed she had been unwell for far longer than made publicly known. There is no real record of her from April 2022, when she was replaced as co-chair of the civil council by Hevin Ismail; no official reason was given for the replacement. Upon announcement of Leila’s death, Ismail said that Leila had begun to have health issues in 2021. Hamzawi said she fell out of contact with Leila once she stopped coming to work, and only knew how ill she had gotten a month before her death. Hammoud said he had been shocked by the news of her passing. Some reports on her death, including one by de Tilly, said had been suffering from cancer.
When asked to confirm if Leila had been unwell for the few years before her death, and whether she had cancer, Ismail said: “It is true that she had been sick, but no one knew that she had cancer.”
Ismail said Leila had been replaced in 2022 not because of her illness, but because “all administrative and leadership figures are changed periodically and replaced with others who have the necessary skills and experience”.
More local news outlets did report on her death, her role in the partial rehabilitation of the city, and the international recognition she gained as a young, Kurdish, woman mayor — though they had been quiet about the reasons behind her replacement as co-mayor in 2022, and the prolonged period of illness that led up to her death. Some of these outlets noted that she had received medical care in Damascus for the last few months of her life, and that she was not the first DAANES or SDF representative to receive medical treatment in the regime-held Syrian capital. The Istanbul-based Syria TV cited an unnamed source as saying that the transportation of these officials to Damascus for treatment happened thanks to SDF coordination with the Assad regime military.
Despite the fanfare around the role that she and other Kurdish women played in liberating north and east Syria from IS, Leila’s death only a few years later was met with almost no international reaction, a reflection of the transient international interest in the fate of Kurdish and other Syrian women, and of cities like Raqqa.
“When our sons and daughters were fighting to retake Raqqa from IS, we were the centre of international attention,” Mustafa told Le Monde in 2021. “But since we together drove out this common enemy, we find ourselves practically alone.”
The politicians and administrators SyriaUntold spoke to said the latest Turkish and Turkish-backed aggression was one of the biggest threats to their governance in northeast Syria. Since December, in the days following the Military Operations that led to the fall of the Assad regime, the SDF has been fighting the Turkish-backed SNA at the Tishreen Dam, the SNA looking to capture the dam from SDF control. The dam is a major source of water and hydropower for those living in northern Syria, and local officials say it could collapse if the fighting continues.
The fall of Assad has brought a mix of joy and apprehension to Raqqa. On 12 December, a few days after Assad’s ousting, inhabitants of Raqqa took to the streets to celebrate, like Syrians across the country; some waved the flag of the Syrian Revolution.
Civilians from Kurdish-controlled areas have demonstrated and conducted sit-ins at the dam, and several of them have been killed in Turkish drone strikes on the area. More than 20 civilians have been killed and another 120 injured since the offensive began, the SDF said last week.
Since Assad’s fall, a stream of foreign officials have visited Damascus to meet with Ahmed al-Sharaa and Syria’s new administration, and though a few European officials and US senators have warned Turkey against attacking Kurdish forces in Syria (again, as protectors against IS), there has been little to no explicit condemnation from Western officials of Ankara for Turkish and Turkish-backed attacks on the Tishreen dam. Officials in Ankara have warned that they could approve the launch of another Turkish military operation if their demands, including the disbanding of the YPG, a force that makes up a significant proportion of the SDF, are not met.
Support from the Kurdish-led forces’ main material backer, the US, is tenuous. The US has failed to show any profound support to civilian rule in northeast Syria, Topal said, with Washington communicating meaningfully only with the SDF, its local military partner in the fight against IS.
“They [the US] only want to maintain a strategic cooperation with Kurds, therefore they always keep in touch directly with the SDF rather than the SDC,” he said.
New president Donald Trump said US forces “should not get involved in Syria”, and allowed Turkey to launch Operation Peace Spring invasion by withdrawing troops from areas it controlled with the SDF in October 2019. What US backing for the DAANES and SDF might look like in the future is still uncertain, and Washington has offered little reassurances. Since winning the election, US President Trump has had lots of praise for Turkish President Erdogan, and has skirted around questions on whether US troops would be withdrawn from Syria — despite pleas from Abdi and other military leaders that these soldiers remain, to prevent a resurgence of IS while the SDF fights the SNA.
The fall of Assad has brought a mix of joy and apprehension to Raqqa. On 12 December, a few days after Assad’s ousting, inhabitants of Raqqa took to the streets to celebrate, like Syrians across the country; some waved the flag of the Syrian Revolution. But at least one person was killed and several were injured when what appeared to be an armed demonstrator fired a gun, and several demonstrators were arrested, some of whom have since been released.
Mazloum Abdi, the commander-in-chief of the SDF expressed sadness over the events, and promised comprehensive dialogue with Syria’s new leaders. “The common enemy of the Syrians has fallen… the way is now paved for us to solve all of our problems at the negotiating table,” he said in an X post addressing the people of Raqqa.
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Since then, talks between the authorities in north and east Syria and the new leadership in Damascus are underway, and the flag of the Syrian revolution has since been raised in Raqqa’s city centre.
Amid the uncertainty about what the relationship between the DAANES and Damascus might look like in the longer term, women politicians in Raqqa seem cautiously optimistic.
“We look forward to an agreement that enhances understanding and peace, focuses on achieving the general interest of all Syrians,” Hevin Ismail, the current co-chair of the Raqqa Civil Council told SyriaUntold.
“The priority is to avoid any conflict and work to stabilise the region through constructive dialogue and mutual understanding,” she said.
“We seek an agreement that constitutionally guarantees the rights of everyone in the region, and includes the recognition of the diversity of society and respect for its individualities.”
Eight years since the establishment of the RCC and the DAANES, threats to Kurdish-led rule and the women who are part of it have been near constant. Despite them, women like Leila Mustafa and Jalaa Hamzawi feel, or felt, compelled to persist.
“We did not tire at all, despite our exposure. There are IS cells and the dangers of mines, but the motivation of the nation and our belief in the project of democratic self-administration was our primary goal,” Hamzawi said.
“We drew strength from the severity of the shock, from our intense feelings,” Leila said about the early days of her tenure as co-chair.
“We felt both despair and a driving force that told us: go, go, go.”