Clashes erupted between Islamist groups in the north of Syria on Jan. 3, leaving at least 700 dead. For more than a year, armed groups have imposed a blockade on the isolated Kurdish enclaves in Afrin and Ain al-Arab (Kobani) to pressure the Syrian Kurdish fighters to give up their territory. Syrian Kurds now hope the clashes between the Islamist groups will end the siege on their regions.

Last summer, clashes erupted between Kurdish forces, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) — which are close to the Democratic Union Party (PYD) — and al-Qaeda-affiliated battalions and other Islamist groups. This led to a siege on the isolated Kurdish regions of Afrin and Kobani by Islamist groups accusing the YPG of working with the Syrian regime. Moreover, several civilians were kidnapped and others executed on charges of working with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), to which the PYD is affiliated.

Despite a shared secular ideology of the YPG and the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the FSA joined forces with other Islamist rebel groups to attack the Syrian Kurdish groups. This led to the expulsion of the PYD-linked FSA, Jabhat al-Akrad (Kurdish front), from several mixed areas by the FSA and al-Qaeda groups last summer.

As a result, the Kurdish front largely stopped their joint operations with other armed groups against the Syrian government in the provinces of Raqqa and Aleppo, but now it cooperates again with the FSA against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), carrying out operations in Tel Ebyad, Jarabulus and Aleppo.