ABSTRACT
Turkey had watched the second de facto Kurdish autonomy emerge after Iraq with suspicious eyes. Indeed, Ankara viewed the autonomous administration built up after 2011 in northern Syria as beholden to the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, which from Turkey's perspective is nothing more than a terrorist organization. The attack on the remaining part of the autonomous administration in northeast Syria in October 2019 was finally made possible by the retreat from Syria announced on Twitter by US President Donald Trump. Even though the mercurial US president had changed his mind in the end and American soldiers are still stationed in northeastern Syria to this day, the withdrawal of the US army from the regions west of Qamishli meant the green light for the attacks by Turkey. In the Turkish-occupied regions of northern Syria, Turkish is now used alongside Arabic as the official language of governance and education, while Kurdish is being suppres.
