A significant shift: Toward the integration of the SDF into Syrian institutions  Translated from Arabic Sawtoroba.by Ibrahim Ebeid.

A significant shift: Toward the integration of the SDF into Syrian institutions

 Translated from Arabic Sawtoroba.by Ibrahim Ebeid.

 The SDF’s acceptance of integration into Syrian state institutions is a significant achievement in the new Syrian leadership’s quest to unify the country, and this agreement has facilitated a change in both internal and external contexts. However, it. This still faces several challenges, both in agreeing on its detailed contents and in external interventions that a united Syria considers an obstacle to its influence.

16 March 2025

Al-Shara, Abdi strengthen unity of Syrian institutions (AFP)

On the evening of March 10, 2025, it was announced in Damascus that Syrian President Ahmed al-Shara and the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Mazloum Abdi, signed an eight-point agreement that stipulates the integration of the Syrian Democratic Forces into the new Syrian army and other state institutions, affirming that Kurdish society is an authentic component of the people and the state, and pledging to guarantee the rights of all Syrians to represent and participate in the political process, and to work to build the Syrian state apparatus based on efficiency. The agreement also affirmed the country’s territorial integrity and rejected partition, without mentioning the issues of decentralization or federalism.

In addition to the establishment of a ceasefire across all Syrian territory, the agreement stipulated that all civilian and military institutions in northeastern Syria, the area under the control of the SDF, would be included in the wings of the new Syrian administration, including border crossings, airports, and oil fields. The agreement also stipulated ensuring the return of all displaced Syrians to their towns and villages in northeastern Syria, and that the SDF would support the state’s efforts to combat the remnants of the former regime and the sources of threat to Syria’s security and unity. In the end, the two parties stressed that the implementation of the agreement’s terms will be entrusted to the agreement’s executive committees, provided that the executive work is completed before the end of this year.

This is undoubtedly a historic agreement, not only for the new Syria, but also for the entire Levant and its peoples, which have long suffered from the oppression of the Kurds and the heavy social and humanitarian burdens of the rampant violence, hatred, and division left behind by the Kurdish armed movements. But what is also certain is that the agreement was written in a general language, ignoring many details that could become general explosive issues when implementation began. What factors and forces led to this agreement? And what does the deal mean for the march of the new Syrian state and for Syria’s neighbors? Why should the future of the agreement be viewed with both caution and hope?

The Road to Agreement

Meetings between the leaders of the new Syrian state in Damascus and the leaders of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have not stopped over the past three months. The meeting that led to the signing of the agreement, on the evening of March 10, was not the first between al-Sharaa and Mazloum Abdi. However, during previous talks, the two sides were unable to resolve the dilemmas that stand in the way of the country’s unity and of extending the Syrian state’s sovereignty over the area northeast of the Euphrates, which is under the control of the SDF. In previous negotiations, the SDF maintained the demand for the establishment of a new Syrian state on a federal or decentralized basis, and demanded a specific share of oil and gas production in the areas under its control, and that its forces join the new Syrian army as a single bloc, and that it be guaranteed tangible representation in the army’s chief of staff and in other state institutions. It was no secret that these demands internalized the demand for Kurdish autonomy in a region of Syria that does not already have a Kurdish majority, and in a country that has not known ethnic or religious division since its independence. It was natural for Damascus to reject such demands.

Although the SDF has remained engaged in talks over the past few weeks, there is consistent evidence that it has provided assistance to groups of former regime remnants that carried out the bloody insurgency movement on March 6-9. Damascus estimates that several thousand former regime officers and soldiers, particularly those who served under Maher al-Assad, fled to Iraq and SDF-controlled areas after the fall of the regime on December 8. A number of these elements returned to the Syrian coast with the help of the SDF. It contributed to the organization of the disobedience movement, which targeted cities and towns on the coast and was organized along Alawite communities. There are those in Damascus who believe that if the insurgency had succeeded in taking control of the coast, pro-rebellion movements would have been launched in Suwayda, Daraa, and northeastern Syria. In other words, since the fall of the Assad regime, the SDF has been operating on two paths: a slow and intermittent negotiation path with the new government in Damascus, and an attempt to weaken this regime, besiege it, and force it to submit to the demands of divisive groups among Syrian minorities. So why does the SDF seem to have finally thrown all its weight into negotiations and surprised everyone by signing a unitary agreement with Damascus?

The first is the climate created by Nidaa Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK’s historic leader, on February 27, calling on Kurdish militants in all branches of the party to lay down their arms, dissolve the party, and engage in Turkey’s democratic political arena. Despite the suspense of the PKK leadership and the ambiguity of their initial response to Öcalan’s appeal, they eventually declared a ceasefire. In early March, Turkish media reported that the PKK was already planning to hold a public conference within a month, possibly in Erbil or Sulaymaniyah, to announce its dissolution.

It is not yet clear whether the peace train and the resolution of the Kurdish issue in Turkey will proceed without tangible obstacles, and there are no guarantees that there will be no further regression from the path of peace and resolution. But Ocalan’s initiative and the response of the PKK leadership have set off a climate of cautious optimism that the Kurdish issue in the Middle East as a whole is heading towards a historic juncture. Because the SDF’s Kurdish leadership in Syria is closely linked to the PKK, the SDF had to take into account the rapidly changing trajectory of the Kurdish issue in Turkey.

The second reason relates to the Trump administration’s position on the U.S. military presence in eastern Syria, and Washington’s commitment to sponsoring the SDF financially and militarily, which has continued since the second Obama administration. The U.S. presence and sponsorship provided the SDF with resources that helped it recruit tens of thousands of Arab tribe members east of the Euphrates and protect it from repeated Turkish invasion plans. Trump, who has never attached any importance to Syria in his perception of U.S. global strategy, tried in his first administration to withdraw U.S. forces from east of the Euphrates and end the relationship with the SDF. Still, U.S. military leaders in Washington and the Middle East convinced the president of the need to maintain the status quo he inherited from the previous administration.

Recently, although there has been no explicit announcement from Washington, there have been reports that senior U.S. officers have visited the area east of the Euphrates and met with SDF (and allied Arab tribal leaders), telling everyone involved that a U.S. withdrawal from Syria is imminent and that they should work hard to reach an agreement with Damascus. The Wall Street Journal even published a report late on March 10 saying that U.S. officers had already helped broker the deal.

The third reason is the defeat inflicted by the new Syrian administration and the Syrian people in general on the armed insurgency movement in the Sahel. Within hours of the outbreak of the insurrection, on the afternoon of March 6, tens of thousands of internal security forces, Defense Ministry forces, and residents of nearby Syrian provinces moved to strengthen the state’s presence in the Sahel and quell the insurgency. Indeed, the persecution of the remnants of the former regime and the suppression of the insurgency witnessed painful abuses against hundreds of Alawite civilians. Still, it is also true that by the morning of March 10, the rebellion had been extinguished, the remnants of the regime had been defeated, and life had returned to normal in all the cities of the Sahel. This swift resolution of the disobedience prompted the Ministry of Defense to announce the withdrawal of the military forces and the return of the responsibility for maintaining order in the Sahel to the General Security Agency.

The failure of the insurrection in the Sahel and the manifestations of the rally of all Syrians around their young state sent a clear message to all parties lurking in Damascus that the clock will not turn back, and that the Syrian majority seems more ready than ever to defend the state and the unity of the country. This message has been enough to recalculate the divisive forces in eastern and southern Syria.

Agreement in the External Perspective

Most of the Arab countries that established good relations with the new regime in Damascus welcomed the agreement within hours, led by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait. But Turkey, which is closely related to Damascus and more concerned with the Kurdish issue than any other country in the region, has not directly issued an official statement outlining its position on the agreement.

It is not inconceivable that the Turkish government was aware of the negotiations with the SDF, given its central role in privileged relations with the Syrian leadership. The day after the announcement, Reuters quoted an unnamed Turkish official as saying Ankara’s cautious welcome to the deal and that Turkey was waiting for what had been agreed to be implemented. A few hours after the Reuters report was published, Turkish President Erdogan was quoted as saying that the Syrians are the winners of the agreement and that only the full implementation of its provisions will bring peace. In all this, it was clear that Turkey’s position on the agreement was expressed in a language of welcome and reservation. There is no reason to be surprised by the Turkish language of reservation. As long as the Kurdish issue in northeastern Syria is closely related to the Kurdish question in Turkey, and the Turkish state sees the SDF as an arm of the PKK, Ankara will refrain from suggesting reassurance about the PKK’s intentions, and will wait for the party’s practical response to Ocalan’s call for a political solution and laying down arms.

On the other hand, the deal, at least in light of the promises it carried, appears to have deeply disappointed Israel and Iran. Israel has based its approach to the new regime in Damascus on a view that it poses a threat to the security of the Jewish state, and that it is necessary to keep Syria weak and fragmented. Over the past few weeks, Israel has been actively trying to persuade the Trump administration not to withdraw U.S. troops east of the Euphrates. The Israeli prime minister, defense, and foreign ministers expressed Israel’s readiness to provide protection to the Druze in Sweida and the desire to establish cooperative relations with the Kurds in the northeast of the country. Therefore, the possibility of successfully implementing the agreement without major obstacles will lead to the withdrawal of the Americans from the east of the Euphrates, thereby contributing to strengthening Damascus’s sovereignty over the entire country and causing the new Syrian leadership to deal a painful blow to Israel’s plans in Syria.

In Iran, circles in the Islamic Republic’s regime still seem to be hoping to thwart the new regime in Damascus, or even overthrow it. These circles may have pinned great hopes on the SDF, whether to provide protection and support to Damascus’s opponents in Syria, or to confront the new Syrian regime and its defense and security apparatus. By closing the horizon of such cooperation, if the deal does succeed in bringing about it, Iran will have lost a significant ally in trying to regain influence in Syria.

Uncertainty surrounding the agreement

The text of the agreement suggests that the administration of President Al-Sharia is committed to the constants it announced since the first days of its takeover from Syria: preserving the country’s unity, equal citizenship for all Syrians, and ensuring its takeover through fair representation of all components of the Syrian people’s governance. The text is also completely devoid of any tendency to accept the principle of quotas, autonomy, or to refer to any system that suggests administrative or sovereign division. However, the agreement was also drafted in general terms and did not address the necessary details for integrating the SDF, its organs, and its forces. The agreement also gave the parties (or rather, the SDF) an extended period, until the end of this year, to implement its provisions.

Critics of the agreement say that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey considers the SDF’s parent party, had previously reached two contracts with the Turkish government between 2013 and 2015 for a ceasefire and abandonment of armed action, and then reversed course. Given the general wording of the agreement’s terms, there is nothing to prevent the SDF from arguing that a decentralized system of government does not necessarily contradict the provision to preserve Syria’s unity, or even to return to the demand that the SDF’s integration into the Syrian army’s multitude be accomplished by maintaining the current formations of the forces as they are. The SDF may also find one way or another to interpret the text stipulating that the state will regain the oil and gas fields to ensure that its administration in the governorates of Al-Hasakah and Raqqa receives a certain percentage of the oil and gas revenues, as long as the agreement does not clearly and categorically say the dissolution of the SDF administration, nor how the central state will restore the oil and gas fields.

The biggest problem behind these fears is that the SDF’s decision is not necessarily in the hands of its well-known leaders, such as Mazloum Abdi, but ultimately the decision of the PKK leadership in the Qandil Mountains. Because the SDF’s experience is the first and only one in which former PKK leaders have been able to establish a quasi-governmental, semi-autonomous administration in an area of Kurdish presence, there is some doubt that Qandil’s leadership will abandon the Syrian experience. What is most doubtful is that, since 2015, the SDF has been able to build international relations, whether with the United States, Europe, Russia, or others, and it will be difficult for it to abandon its global ties and join the Syrian national arena.

The Significance and Dimensions of the Agreement

But, despite these concerns, the agreement is a significant achievement for the legitimate administration of the president. The mere signing of the contract at this early and critical moment in the new Syria’s life is, in itself, a tremendous lever for advancing Syria and preserving its life and unity. If the agreement is implemented within the Syrian administration’s optimistic vision of its provisions, it could have a far-reaching impact on the entire Kurdish issue in the Levant.

The announcement of the agreement came just four days after the outbreak of the bloody disobedience on the Syrian coast, and the collective anxiety and pessimism among the Syrian people about the future of their country and the hopes pinned on the victory of their Revolution. It was natural that the signing of the agreement generated a stormy atmosphere of optimism and joy, not only in Damascus, Daraa, Homs, Idlib, and Hama, but also in the cities of the east and northeast, such as Latakia and Tartus, all of which witnessed mass celebratory gatherings that renewed confidence in the new state and its path. Even if the SDF leadership signed the agreement with tactical calculations and in anticipation of another favorable opportunity to achieve its previous divisive goals, the agreement should give Damascus valuable time to build new state security and defense institutions capable of maintaining the country’s unity and state sovereignty.

At the Syrian level, the day after the agreement was signed, it was announced that understandings had been reached between the Syrian Ministry of Interior and the notables and representatives of the people of Sweida on the full integration of the agreement into the new governing institutions of Sweida governorate. As soon as the understandings were announced, unionist activists in Sweida quickly raised the new Syrian flag on the governorate building in the city. The move strengthens efforts to unify the country. It may serve to abort the efforts to declare autonomy in Sweida, which were planned by the advocates of partition, and to weaken the central government. On the same day, it was also announced that the work of the committee drafting the interim constitutional declaration, which was submitted to the president of the republic and ratified on March 13, had been completed, which would pave the way for the formation of the transitional parliament and the formation of a transitional government of broadly representative competencies that would have the constitutional authority to make significant decisions.

These developments would not have been possible, or at least not facilitated, without the defeat of the insurgency in the Sahel and the signing of the integration agreement with the SDF. After the new Syrian leadership was able to contain the excesses of the confrontation with the regime’s remnants in the Sahel, which were foreshadowing a hardline international stance on Damascus, all these developments will likely strengthen the legitimacy of the new regime and its shares in the Arab and global arena, and push for more steps to lift international sanctions and the heavy siege measures that were imposed on the former regime.

Behind all this, the experience of negotiation between Damascus and the SDF could advance the process of peaceful-democratic transition on the Kurdish issue in Turkey, help ease the level of tension in the relationship between the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan and Baghdad, and work to bring about a historic coup in the course of the Kurdish nationalist movement in the Levant, and in the relationship of the Kurds with their Arab and Turkish surroundings, and with the countries under which they live and against which they have long struggled. The post-World War I regime in the Levant was a significant disaster for Kurds, Arabs, and Turks alike. Perhaps the time has come when Kurdish nationalists, like Arab and Turkish nationalists, realize that salvation lies in working together to overcome the post-WWI regime, not in more fragmentation and division, or more nationalist extremism and policies of oppression and subjugation.