ANS: the Syrian National Army, an aggregate of scattered groups that are supported and armed by Ankara, whose vocation is to fight against Kurdish forces on the Syria-Turkey border.
AANES: the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, which was set up by the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which governs the north-eastern quarter of the country.
HTS: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (“Levant Liberation Organization”), formerly the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, which has claimed to have broken with jihadism, the driving force behind the offensive that led to Bashar al-Assad’s flight from Syria.
SDF: the Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance between the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia organization and Arab armed groups from Syria’s northeast.
PKK: the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a separatist movement operating in Turkey, originally inspired by Marxism-Leninism, which took up arms in 1984 and is considered to be a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union..
PYD: the Democratic Union Party, the main Kurdish political movement in Syria, which Turkey has deemed to be an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
YPG: People’s Protection Units, a Kurdish militia organization formed by the Democratic Union Party and supported by Western powers in the context of the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group.
