by William Smith
Mazloum Abdi, commander-in-chief of the Syrian Democratic Forces, signs an agreement with Ahmed Al-Sharaa, President of Syria, integrating the SDF into the institutions of the Syrian Arab Republic, 10 March 2025. Source: Wiki CC
The recent agreement between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the new government in Damascus has been hailed as an historic turning point for Syria’s Kurdish minority, recognising them as an ‘indigenous community’ with full constitutional rights, something long denied under decades of Baathist rule. Even more significantly, in calling for a nationwide ceasefire and a merger of SDF and state institutions, the deal suggests a possible resolution of one of the most intractable issues of the Syrian conflict – the future of the SDF-controlled northeast. However, as others have pointed out, the wording of the agreement is vague, as is the proposed mechanism for implementing it. Most obviously, there appears to be no agreement as to how to integrate the rebel group’s military apparatus, a frequent challenge faced by peace agreements, and one that often leads to their collapse.
The gap in understanding between the SDF and Damascus was set out in a recent debate on the pro-government outlet Syria TV. ‘The devil is in the details,’ said Faiz al-Asmar, a former Syrian army colonel who, who cautioned that ‘as negotiations between the two sides progress a lot of problems are going to rise to the surface’. Chief among these, al-Asmar suggested, is the question of whether SDF fighters will be integrated into the Syrian armed forces on an individual or institutional basis. ‘There cannot be an army within an army’, he argued, echoing the position of the new Syrian government headed by Ahmad al-Sharaa, the former leader of the now disbanded Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Dissolving and disarming the SDF is also a core demand of Turkey, a key backer of Damascus, because of links between the group’s dominant faction, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), against which it has fought a decades-long counterinsurgency.
The SDF appears to have other ideas. ‘The term “integration” can be interpreted in several different ways; it looks different depending on the angle you view it from’, argued Aldar Khalil, one of the key architects of the SDF-backed governance system, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). The view from the northeast is that the agreement makes them ‘partners in everything’ with Damascus, in the words of Salih Muslim, a prominent figure in the YPG’s political wing. An SDF spokesman has suggested the group will continue to operate as a single unit in the northeast, while the former head of the SDF’s political wing, Riyad Drar, has floated a possible hybrid approach. Under this model, Kurdish-led internal security forces would remain in charge of ‘domestic’ law and order in the northeast, while borders and defence become the joint responsibility of the SDF and Syrian army.
These maximalist interpretations could be dismissed as mere rhetoric – a highball opening position before a set of working groups meet to thrash out the agreement’s precise details over the coming months. But the SDF’s insistence on retaining its weapons reflects a frequent preoccupation of rebel groups engaged in negotiations with government opponents. By agreeing to disarm and demobilise, how can they be sure their opponents won’t subsequently renege on the terms of the deal? In the absence of a third-party guarantor, a more powerful adversary cannot offer a credible commitment it won’t simply tear up an agreement and resort once more to violence, a fact that has been described by political scientist Barbara Walter as the biggest obstacle to negotiating a peaceful resolution of civil wars.
Despite receiving significant support from the United States and others in the fight against Islamic State, the SDF has come to realise it can never truly rely on its Western partners for long-term protection from its adversaries, particularly Turkey. Paradoxically, as the prospect of an imminent US troop withdrawal from Syria further weakens its negotiating position, the SDF is incentivised to hold fast to a maximalist position. ‘We’ll jointly administer the state […] we’ll run the borders together and share revenues’, Salih Muslim has claimed, insisting that ‘there will be no disarmament’.
The prospects for securing a lasting deal would be better if the issues at stake were limited to improved cultural rights for Syria’s Kurdish minority. Even here, however, the recent signals from Damascus have been less than reassuring. The temporary constitution announced in March defines Syria as an ‘Arab’ republic with Arabic as the country’s sole official language, a move that prompted the SDF to warn al-Sharaa against repeating the mistakes of the Assad regime, and the pro-SDF media to claim that ‘Syria is still ruled by a Baathist mentality’. Discussions such as the one on Syria TV are unlikely to assuage such fears. The retired colonel Faiz al-Asmar suggested that Kurds should only be recruited into the Syrian army on a quota basis that reflects the community’s demographic inferiority, while one of his fellow panellists repeated a claim propagated by the former regime that Syrian Kurds denied citizenship are in fact recent immigrants from neighbouring countries.
But SDF demands go far beyond cultural rights. The group has called for a form of political decentralisation that would allow it to preserve its governance project. The AANES is based on PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan’s concept of ‘democratic confederalism’, a radical vision of stateless democracy (although in fact the presence of a network of PKK ‘advisors’ (kadros) has made this more a top-down than a bottom-up system). But whether in terms of theory or reality, the SDF project is hardly compatible with the highly centralised, Islamist-inspired model practiced by al-Sharaa in northern Syria for the best part of a decade and now enshrined in the country’s new constitutional declaration.
It remains to be seen whether pragmatists in the SDF movement will ultimately shelve their political aspirations in return for promises of improved cultural rights for Kurds, as many – including the US military – are urging them to do. What seems clear however – both from earlier rounds of intra-Syrian talks and from experience elsewhere – is that by attempting to escape the commitment problem and preserve the SDF’s coercive apparatus, the odds will be firmly stacked against them.
Print Friendly, PDF & Email