The Syrian civil war has evolved into a proxy war involving an array of both regional and global powers. On one side, Iran, Russia, and now China have acted to stabilize the government of Bashar al-Assad, while on the other, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Turkey, and the United States are backing anti-Assad rebels, in an effort to affect regime change in Damascus.

Yet the Syrian tragedy — which in five years of fighting has cost nearly half a million lives and provoked the largest refugee crisis since World War II — has brought to the fore forces that have muddied the waters for those powers seeking to oust the Assad government. While the West and its regional allies have sought to back what they describe as “moderate” rebels, the most effective military resistance to the Assad regime has come from a collection of radical Islamist groups. These have included Al-Qaeda’s local franchise, al-Jabhat al-Nusra, which recently rebranded itself as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an organization which seeks to impose a radical version of Islam on not only Syria but the entire Muslim world.

However, Islamic-orientated “black reaction” is not the only political force unleashed by Syria’s chaos. The conflict has also seen Syria’s long-marginalized Kurdish community — which numbers between 1.5 and 2.5 million — rise to prominence in the country’s predominantly Kurdish north, a region known to Kurds as Rojava. The Kurdish experiment in self-government, led by the Democratic Union Party (PYD), has differed greatly from the Islamic State’s efforts to construct a global caliphate.