By India Ledeganck on 8 Sep 2025
In northeastern Syria, Turkish aerial attacks using armed drones entirely shape the daily lives of the region’s inhabitants. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2023, this article seeks to illuminate the articulation between the incitement to fear generated by Turkish armed drones and the everyday experiences of local populations. The analysis takes as its cornerstone the feeling of surveillance and the survival techniques implemented by inhabitants to create forms of security in the face of random strikes. The fieldwork led to collecting inhabitants’ experiences through life stories, ethnographic interviews, and local archives, as well as by sharing daily life with the author’s host families.
The designation “northeastern Syria” used in the field refers to the seven regions that have gained de facto autonomy from Bashar al-Assad’s regime. This autonomy began with the Rojava revolution in 2012, then expanded throughout the civil war and the fight against the Islamic State. The Syrian Democratic Forces, the armed forces controlling these territories, are considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, due to the political and ideological ties they maintain with the PKK. The populations of northeastern Syria thus suffer regular bombing by Turkey via armed drones.
Drone attacks have been a constant since 2019. They were recurrent during the ethnographic research (2019-2023), with 130 strikes recorded in 2022 (RIC, 2023), and after the author’s fieldwork period, with 221 strikes in 2024 (Synergy hevdeştî, 2025). The bombings target individuals from not only the military sector but also the civilian one. A compelling example of civilian casualties resulting from Turkish drone strikes lies in the bombing of an educational centre affiliated with the United Nations on August 18, 2022. The attack caused a shockwave throughout the population, as five young women aged between 19 and 23 were killed while eleven others were wounded. They were playing a volleyball game when the attack took place.
Moreover, targeted individuals are generally hit in places of social gathering or when they are in their cars, killing or injuring the driver and other passengers. The strikes are thus carried out in city centres, on busy roads, or at checkpoints where passage is frequent. The idea of potentially dying because a trip might be undertaken at the wrong moment or with someone who could potentially be targeted by Turkey is a possibility that is considered during travels. Beyond the sudden and surprising character of drone strikes, this “collateral damage” policy adds a completely random nature to them. For instance, the poet Ferhad Merdê, originally from Qamîşlo, was targeted by a drone attack on April 1, 2022. He survived with minor injuries, but the car driver was killed instantly. As for Yusef Gulo, 81 years old, he was assassinated along with two of his sons by a drone strike carried out on November 9, 2021 in the heart of Qamîşlo while they were in their car.
Yusef Gulo was known for his involvement in the Kurdish liberation movement as well as in the creation of the Democratic Union Party (PYD). During the years spent in the field, the author was moreover able to observe the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure. Aerial strikes are indeed conducted on grain silos, power plants, brick and ice factories, public bakeries as well as medical centers (notably those specific to COVID-19 vaccination) (Human Rights Watch, 2022). On October 4, 2023, Hakan Fidan, the Turkish Foreign Minister, declared that “all infrastructure, superstructure, and energy facilities of the PKK and YPG, especially in Iraq and Syria, are the legitimate targets of our security forces, armed forces, and intelligence units” (Aksan, 2023).
Local living conditions, already very precarious following a decade of war, are therefore made even more difficult. The distribution of the few daily hours of electricity is often interrupted by the destruction of local power plants (Human Rights Watch, Zayadin, 2024). The author was moreover able to conduct ethnographic interviews with inhabitants of the town of Zirgan, located near the front line in the Cezîre region. They highlighted the systematic targeting of public infrastructure: “the three local bakeries were also bombed. We had just restored them [from a previous bombing]” declares a resident.
The author also met with victims’ families as well as bombing survivors, including S., one of the few to make it out alive from the double-tap carried out by Turkey during the night of November 19-20 in the village of Taqil Baqil. A double-tap consists of conducting a second strike while civilians and medical personnel gather to assist survivors. Mother of five children and involved in her neighbourhood commune, S. had left with a group of friends to rescue victims and make media statements. They were hit by a second wave of strikes once they arrived at the scene. “The world turned to fire”, says S., “the drones were over our heads. […] All the people inside [the car] had been burned. The fire had taken them. I was horrified. My friend who had come with me was in that car.”
In her research on drone attacks in Palestine, Espinoza (2018) highlights the psychological terror generated by them. According to her, the double-tap tactic is specifically designed to be terrifying. “As soon as I close my eyes, a plane comes”, reveals S. “The plane still flies over my friends. It reaches a point where I can no longer sleep. As soon as I close my eyes, the plane comes.“
The UAV (“Unmanned Aerial Vehicle”) possesses the capacity to fly over an area for several hours – up to 27 hours for the Bayraktar TB2, a drone widely used by the Turkish state in northeastern Syria’s airspace. These long hours following a potential target offer the observer the possibility to analyse life patterns that would allow for detecting suspicious behavior from those being observed.
This grants the observer a voyeuristic intimacy over the daily life of the observed, far superior to other types of aircraft (Gusterson, 2014). Consequently, drone remote technologies create a constant unidirectional visual proximity. These optical capabilities will primarily enable the identification of local social networks and the categorisation of individual behaviours within a given population.
The first flight of the TB2 drone and its incorporation into the armed forces was carried out in 2014 (Ismail, Masri, 2014). The Turkish company Bayraktar tested its first drones with surveillance missions on the PKK (Witt, 2022) while in 2016, the TB2’s first strikes were publicised and targeted members of the latter. It was the most widely used drone in northeastern Syria during the fieldwork period (2019-2023).
Images of a car shredded by a drone are broadcast, and a ticker scrolls quickly with words that everyone in northeastern Syria knows by heart: “urgent”, “Turkish drone”, “people have been injured”, and “a person has lost their life”. Living under armed drones thus requires developing survival techniques in order to frame the randomness of death. In fact, individuals encountered in the field are aware of the possibility of being scrutinized by drone operators, and organise their lives accordingly. Different strategies are thus used daily to increase one’s chances of survival: for example, wearing clothes that do not correspond to the Kurdish revolutionary movement, or trying to drive faster.
Roofs are built over markets or some busy roads, and cars that correspond to those used by the Syrian Democratic Forces are to be avoided. These camouflage and risk reduction techniques show that the population of northeastern Syria constantly thinks about being under surveillance. These are risk reduction techniques based on understanding the interpretations that could be made by Turkish drone operators.
Relegated under the umbrella of counter-terrorism, the entire population becomes suspect, and this undeniably blurs the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Through an ethnography of everyday life “from below” the drones, the author found that inhabitants of northeastern Syria consider the possibility of being victims of an aerial attack: “I don’t know if you realise…” indicates a woman from the Cezîre region, “You just have to go out for something trivial, going shopping for example [to be targeted]”.
Thus, Turkey’s implementation of terror is built on the population’s awareness of being seen while not being able to see. The surprise effect of strikes feeds this impression of being hunted amid “the vulnerability of the highly visible local while enabling the targeter to withdraw into the invisibility of the global” (Gusterson, 2014, p. 199-200). It should be noted that, even if populations are aware of this constant surveillance and the fact that their actions, movements and appearance may be a determining factor in the decision to strike against them, they also know that drones are not constantly above them. The problem lies in the fact that it is difficult to identify the presence of a drone. This feeling of constant surveillance is consequently built on the near impossibility of knowing its actual presence in daily life.
One of the specificities of the armed drone is that it enables the establishment of a sovereignty apparatus capable of eliminating potential threats outside zones of armed conflict (Hippler, 2014). Thus, as Hippler notes, the attractiveness of the drone is mainly based on the fact that it presents itself as “a technical solution to the problem posed by police-type operations conducted with warlike intensity on global scale” (Hippler, 2014, p. 217). The use of drones to carry out extrajudicial executions offers a significant advantage to Turkey. First of all, this allows for exercising sovereignty over the populations of northeastern Syria by, in Achille Mbembe’s words, killing in small doses (Mbembe, 2016); and thus by holding the power to negotiate uncertainty – of life, of death, of loss and of destinies. Alisson defines the armed drone as an instrument of sovereign power to decide which life is worth living (Alisson, 2015).
The drone, furthermore, allows for not deploying armed forces on the ground, an act that could generate an international media reaction, as was the case in 2018 and 2019. In the same vein, Hippler notes that the massive use of drones by the United States is based on a strategy that takes care “not to cross the threshold beyond which public opinion will perceive the conflict as a ‘war’. In other words, the actions may be quite close in themselves to classical doctrines in terms of counter-insurgency – what changes is the fact that they take place outside the framework that traditionally defines war” (Hippler, 2014, p. 210).
The armed drone thus avoids both mobilisation and media coverage. In summary, this strategy allows for killing without going to war.
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