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Lowtuff In reply to Todyo1798 [2017-05-14 20:35:13 +0000 UTC]

They held out better than anyone else, yeah. I'll go poach from my notes to help detail it out.
The Democratic Federal System is the direct successor to Rojava/Northern Syria, and is by all standards one of the largest powers of the new world. They struggled in the early days, but who didn't?
(Daesh, energised by a clear harbringer of armaggedon, went totally off the deep end even by their modest standards of sanity)

After succeeding in staying afloat past the stormy first decades, Qamishli found itself in a pretty advantageous position. The old regime, long unable to do much more than keep what remained of Syria under their control was ripping at the seams as the central government struggled to administer farflung settlements with stretched supply lines and little capable infrastructure to speak off - portions of the military jockying for power in their place. Those remnants of IS that had survived in *Iraq and elsewhere were beginning to join their predecessors in burning themselves out; wracked by the inherent instability of their social order, biting shortages of basic resources as scraps of more advanced technology began to falter in earnest, as well as a populace of settlers chafing under rule by the sword, but increasingly cognizant of these facts. (Large portions of IS groups splintered long ago during the first decade due to violent disagreements over the ultimate meaning of Year Zero. Many of the more old-school 'less killing, more repressing' types ended up on a trek to refound the holy cities.*

*Many more religious types from regime and rebel controlled areas, of course, had the same idea. It took quite a while for the dust to settle.

Bringing new farmland into their control from the wilderness was a great challenge, and between food shortages and refugee influxes the SDF found itself able to do little more than toe the line and defend the borders from bandits and jihadis. But between frontier settlements making cropland from bush** and this world being a wetter one, a new balance began to establish itself. And slowly but surely, through the hard work of engineers and technicians, poring over dog-eared books and smuggling old and broken equipment from the old cities, things began to move forward.

**hard work, but looming famine is a hell of a motivator)

These days the Democratic Federal System stands astride the northern expanses, beneficiary of perhaps the strongest civil society in the world. It is a multiethnic mess of Kurd and Arab groups, governed by an eclectic mixture of overlapping communes and a long championed democratic tendency. The ideals of feminism, equality and a loud and brash cosmopolitanism are widely (self righteously, say visitors from further afar) held, but an energetic culture of political experimentation has found room to grow in the burgeoning confederation. This has been much to the dismay of central administrators and traders alike, as they grapple with anarchist townships, regions of countryside adhering only to the NAP, and several circulating currencies.

To the disappointment of many, the growing divisions amongst varying socialist tendencies don't seem likely to slow down any time soon. For many in major cities, these days street-corner preachers seem as likely to espouse doctrines of class struggle than of divine revelation. Of course though, with bountiful plains to spare (so espouse the more boosterish types) beyond the frontier, many groups have struck out to find their own slice of utopia.

(The men and women of the Marksabad Soviet often shake their heads sadly when they see DFS cargo ships stacking with survey equipment plying the routes to outposts in *Ukraine. Don't those sailors know that by feeding the furnace of industry with donbass coal they help strengthen the very same capitalists that keep them in chains?)

It's a hectic world overall, but one where poverty has been reliably downwards for a while now in most states - alongside recovering standards of living overall thanks in part to an oil-fueled boom. The DFS may scoff at such advances with its long democratic tradition, but the long-autocratic status quo in many states has been increasingly giving way to freedom of a sort these days.*** More than one wag has suggested in the broadsheets, indeed, that this may be the end of history...

***That said, if someone steals bread in New Baghdad, they're probably getting shipped over to the Indian penal colonies.

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