In northeastern Syria, artists fight to preserve a cultural renaissance

QAMISHLI — The dancers pound their feet to the heavy beat of drums. In unison, each raises a right arm into a fist and draws it back, poised to shoot an invisible bow. They release, and together spin toward the mud walls of Welat Art House—Hunergeha Welat in Kurdish.

Across the open-air courtyard at the art house in Syria’s northeastern Qamishli city, Yazan al-Taama, 24, strums an oud, the instrument’s melancholy hum reverberating in the small room. He plays one of his father’s favorite songs, from his hometown of Raqqa. “You have to stay connected to your heritage and bring it forward to make the world aware,” al-Taama says. 

Outside, a few artists mingle and talk while others prepare tea and lunch in the kitchen. They are among the 25 musicians, dancers and filmmakers who live and work at Welat Art House—part of a growing community of artists in Syrian Kurdistan, also known as Rojava, fighting to preserve the region’s diverse heritage.

“This land is a place of mixed ethnicities, the region is diverse,” one of Welat Art House’s founders, Shêro Hindê, 45, tells Syria Direct. “We hope to see its Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian and Armenian arts all working together.” 

Artists share lunch at Welat Art House in Qamishli, 23/5/2025 (Sandro Basili/Syria Direct)

‘Kurdish culture was unknown to Syrians’

The idea for the art house—a place for artists to live and work together—began nearly 11 years ago. The local space for Kurdish art began to open after 2013, when the region gained de facto autonomy during the war in Syria. 

For decades, the Assad regime had suppressed Kurdish culture, banning the Kurdish language in schools, heavily restricting Kurdish holidays and celebrations, and even rejecting Kurdish names. 

“Kurdish culture was unknown to Syrians, until recently,” Hindê says. “So, in everything we do, we are keen to embed details of culture and meaning related to Kurdish ethnicity and language.” 

Hindê is also a filmmaker, director and theater actor, but before 2011 he mostly worked in Damascus, since there was no active film scene in northeastern Syria at the time. 

In 2014, Hindê and a group of friends decided to open a collective space for artists in Rojava. They named it after their friend Welat, a musician who was killed by an Islamic State (IS) suicide bombing earlier the same year. 

That year, IS was sweeping through Iraq and Syria, taking over large swathes of both countries. Over the years to come, as northeastern Syria became a battleground between the extremist group and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Qamishli was also thrust into the conflict, suffering multiple attacks.

At first, finding a permanent space for the artists to gather was difficult, Hindê remembers. In 2016, an explosion in Qamishli’s city center sent their first studio up in flames. Over the years that followed, they rented various apartments before finding a quiet piece of land on the outskirts of the Hasakah province city. 

The artists involved at the time, less than a dozen, built a one-level mudbrick home with a large courtyard—inspired by the traditional, thousand-year-old architectural styles of the region. “The style of the building we created aligns with our work, linked to the region’s heritage, folklore and history,” Hindê adds. 

A sound technician works in one of Welat Art House’s recording studios, 23/5/2025 (Sandro Basili/Syria Direct)

Taking culture online

Inside a production room at the Welat House, Hindê plays several music videos on a flatscreen computer. He scrolls through dozens of videos produced by the artist collective and released on their YouTube channel, which now has more than 200,000 subscribers. 

One video, “Li Qamişlo Li Ber Derî,” was filmed in Qamishli’s historically Jewish market, Souq Ezra, which was once a major center for Syrian Jews alongside Damascus and Aleppo. The dancers are Kurdish and Arab, Hindê—who wrote the lyrics and directed the video—says, as he watches them line up to dance dabke on the screen. 

Another video features Gewrgîs, the last Assyrian singer able to sing a unique genre of ancient Assyrian songs, Hindê says. When IS swept through the region, it invaded Assyrian villages in northeastern Syria, kidnapped hundreds and displaced most of the predominantly Christian minority. While Gewrgîs has passed away since filming, his mesmerizing voice is still alive on screen. 

The heads of Welat Art House, Rozalen Ibrahem (left) and Shêro Hindê, listen to music produced by the artist collective, 23/5/2025 (Sandro Basili/Syria Direct)

Among Welat House’s most famous productions is “Jin Jiyan Azadî” (Women, Life, Freedom), which has over three million views on YouTube. In it, hundreds of women dressed in traditional Kurdish clothing clap their hands and beat their fists against their chests. The slogan “women, life, freedom” has become a rallying cry for women’s movements in Kurdistan, Iran and around the world. 

“If a woman is intellectually and physically liberated in the Middle East, society will never be corrupted,” one of Welat House’s directors, Rozalen Ibrahem, 27, says, quoting a well-known phrase by Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). 

Öcalan’s philosophy of democratic confederalism and writings on a form of feminism known as jineology underpin the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), which administers the area. 

‘A way for people to understand us’ 

“Our dances have meaning,” says Inana Kingo, 23, one of the dancers at the Welat Art House. “They are a way for people to understand us.” 

Kingo has been involved with the artist collective for around five years. Before that, she found it difficult to find dancing instructors in Rojava, so most of her early training came from YouTube. 

A dancer practices at Welat Art House in Qamishli, 23/5/2025 (Sandro Basili/Syria Direct)

Kingo pulls out her phone, opening a video, “Vejîn” (Revival) she helped produce. 

It begins somberly: a group of women dancers walk into a graveyard, wearing black niqabs, a conservative form of Islamic dress imposed by IS during its rule. The dancers bend over gravestones bearing names of women activists. As the drum beat picks up, they rip off their dark clothing to reveal colorfully embroidered suits underneath. The dancers bend down as if drawing water from a well, then move their arms in powerful defensive motions. 

Kingo explains that the scene is meant to evoke the strict dress code enforced by IS and the liberation of areas by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), as well as women’s role as caregivers and protectors of their communities.

Kingo remembers when IS occupied parts of the region, she says, turning to her friend al-Taama, the oud player. Al-Taama was living in Raqqa city when it became the capital of the group’s self-proclaimed “caliphate” in Syria and neighboring Iraq.

“Life was bound by chains,” al-Taama says. Still, it was when music was outlawed under IS that he began to learn the soft strokes of the oud. For an hour and a half each day, his father would shutter the windows of their home and begin to sing in a low voice, so no one outside could hear. 

In that dimly lit room, al-Taama and his siblings would gather around their father while he taught them the oud’s chords. “These are sweet memories,” he says. “Our love for singing and art began with our father and grew.”

Yazan al-Taama, 24, strums a song his father taught him on the oud, 23/5/2025 (Sandro Basili/Syria Direct)

‘To preserve diversity’

Kurdish artists Syria Direct spoke to say they worry that freedoms they gained over the last decade could be lost under the new authorities in Damascus. 

“We don’t want anyone to come tell us to wear the hijab, like the IS regime,” Kingo says. “We want everyone to wear [what they choose], study their language, and keep their existence—whether Alawite, Druze or Kurdish.” 

There has been no enforcement of any particular dress code by the new Syrian government, apart from a June mandate to wear full-body swimwear on all public beaches. Unofficial signs have popped up in some Syrian cities encouraging “modesty” and conservative dress.

In March, the Kurdish-led SDF inked a deal to integrate all civil and military institutions in northeastern Syria with the new state. While Damascus has pledged to guarantee the constitutional rights of Kurds and recognize their distinctiveness, tensions have emerged over the agreement’s implementation. With an end-of-year deadline to finalize the deal is swiftly approaching, progress has been halting. 

Education is one significant point of contention. Under the Assads, speaking Kurdish in school—much less teaching in it—was strictly prohibited. Changing that was an early priority of the AANES, which developed a curriculum of its own—in which Arab, Kurdish and Assyrian students are taught in their mother tongues—across its local public schools. 

But the AANES curriculum was never recognized by the Assad regime, and remains unrecognized by the new government in Damascus. As a result, many parents—even those who may have supported it otherwise—have spent years paying expensive school fees to send their children to private schools that teach the official curriculum. 

The start of the 2025-2026 school year highlighted the struggle over education. In AANES areas, local authorities shut down all private schools teaching the state curriculum for weeks, before allowing Christian private schools to reopen. In Afrin, a predominantly Kurdish region of Aleppo, Syrian government officials suspended Kurdish language classes for more than a month before reinstating them. 

Read more: After years of revival, what is the Kurdish language’s future in Syria? 

At first, after Assad fell last December, Hindê felt hopeful. But over the months that followed—with outbursts of violence and sectarian killings in Alawite-majority communities on the Syrian coast in March and in Druze-majority Suwayda province in July—it dried up.

As he sees it, “those who are with al-Jolani are trying to make Syria uniform—with one color, one people, one nation and one army,” Hindê says, referring to Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa by his nom du guerre. “Our goal is to preserve the diversity of colors, cultures, religions, ethnicities and sects across Syria.”

An emerging film industry 

In downtown Qamishli, not far from Welat Art House, a block is closed off for a film set. Fluorescent lights illuminate the film crew, who stand behind cameras, adjusting the lighting or sipping tea as they watch the scene play out. 

As cameras roll, an elderly actor climbs out of a black car and heads into a liquor shop. The film’s director, Nadia Derwish, 28, sits watching the scene on a small screen, periodically adding her suggestions. 

Nadia Derwish, 28, works at her film set in downtown Qamishli, northeastern Syria, 22/5/2025 (Sandro Basili/Syria Direct)

The film is about the “coexistence of minorities” during the post-2014 fight against IS, Derwish tells Syria Direct. In it, an Armenian liquor shop owner helps a recently displaced family, she explains, noting the main characters are Syriac, Armenian and Kurdish. 

Derwish was displaced herself during the war, fleeing her Hasakah province village of Serekaniye (also known as Ras al-Ain). She recounts the diverse ethnicities who were living in Serekaniye, among them Chechens, Arabs and Christians, from whom she drew inspiration for her film. 

Like other forms of art, cinema has also exploded in Rojava over the last decade. In 2015, the Rojava Film Commune (Komîna Fîlm a Rojava) was established to help support emerging filmmakers—Derwish among them. 

“It was a new experience for me. In the past, there was no cinema in the region,” Derwish says. “You had to go to the capital, Damascus, but even if you did it there, you couldn’t use your language, or identify with the Kurdish people.” 

“After the revolution, many youth and many people could achieve their ambitions to make films in their language and [shed light on] the suffering of our culture and identity,” she adds. 

A makeup artist and actor at a film set in downtown Qamishli, 22/5/2025 (Sandro Basili/Syria Direct)

‘We want women to participate’ 

Women are emerging as a key component of the film scene in northeastern Syria. Derwish says “women are on all sides” of her film production, working as screenwriters, actors and directors. 

The first women’s film festival was held in Qamishli this past May, featuring 37 films from Rojava and around the world. “We want women to participate in art, especially cinema,” Derwish says. 

Just a minute’s drive from the film set, a small group of young women filmmakers share dinner at the Rojava Women’s Film Commune (Sîne Jin Rojava). At the institute—founded roughly a year ago in 2024—the women receive training in filmmaking and cinema with the aim of going on to produce their own films, the institute’s director, Dîrok Artos, tells Syria Direct, adding that it is the first such commune in the region. 

“It’s very difficult to practice art, especially cinema, where we are due to the inadequacy and difficulty of conditions,” Artos says. “ However, with the developing Rojava revolution, the women resisting in these lands must tell their own stories.” 

Students at the Rojava Women’s Film Commune (Sîne Jin Rojava) share dinner in Qamishli, 24/5/2025 (Sandro Basili/Syria Direct)

One of the oldest of the institute’s near-25 aspiring filmmakers, Mufid Hamdi, 26, tells Syria Direct she and the others are working on a film retelling Kurdish folktales. 

As part of the process, the students are visiting rural villages where the ancient stories have been best preserved. “The folklore stories and songs come from the villages and [often] stay there. We are trying to get them,” Hamdi explains. 

Artos stressed the importance of cinema and art for young women and youth in the region. “Their stories, which have been taken from their hands and distorted, are being spoken again,” she says.