Kurds on the Edge. Again.
As Syrian government forces advance, regional bargains and shifting alliances have left Syria’s Kurds exposed once more.
A scenario long feared is now beginning to unfold.
Syrian government troops advances deeper into areas held by Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria on Tuesday, pressing rapid gains against Kurdish fighters who vowed to defend their remaining enclaves.
A brief ceasefire has been declared, meant to allow the Kurds to hand control of Hasakah to government forces — or else.
How did we end up in this grim situation?
The Syrian Army, whatever it consists of, has moved to push Kurdish forces east of the Euphrates, forcing the Syrian Democratic Forces, led by the Kurds, to relinquish control first over the Kurdish neighbourhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyah in Aleppo and then over the Arab-majority cities of Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa. Before advancing militarily, the Syrian president made a calculated political gesture, announcing that Kurdish would be recognised as a national language and that Newroz would be declared a national holiday, a signal intended to reassure the Kurds that his government was not hostile to them, even as preparations for a military push were already under way. The manoeuvre was largely meaningless, since there was no constitution in place to anchor these declarations or to offer any legal guarantee of Kurdish rights.
As government forces advanced, Arab tribes that had been incorporated into the SDF, most notably elements of the Shammar tribe, switched sides and joined the Syrian Army, a development that effectively hollowed out what had been known as the SDF, an umbrella structure bringing together the Kurdish PYD and its armed wing, the YPG, alongside Arab components. (The PYD and YPG are ideologically and organisationally linked to the PKK, the Kurdish militant movement founded in Turkey in the 1980s and led by Abdullah Öcalan, who remains imprisoned on İmralı island, a fact that has long shaped both regional perceptions of the SDF and Ankara’s policy towards it.)
As these defections unfolded, the United States remained on the sidelines, as did Israel, whose foreign minister has continued to issue periodic public expressions of support for the Kurds. At the same time, the US envoy for Syria, Tom Barrack, mediated a 14-point agreement between SDF commander Mazloum Abdi and the Syrian government, even as the army advanced towards the Kurdish-held areas of Hasakah and Kobane, collectively known as Rojava. The agreement effectively brought an end to SDF military and administrative autonomy by stipulating that Kurdish forces would be absorbed into the Syrian Army not as units, as previously proposed, but as individuals, while administrative self-rule would be sharply curtailed.
Although both al-Sharaa and Abdi appeared to have accepted the agreement, they had not yet met in person as of Sunday, 18 January, and when they finally did, after a five-hour meeting the following evening, the process unravelled. Abdi later said that Barrack, who was present at the talks, had privately assured him that Kurdish fighters would join the Syrian Army as a division rather than as individuals, that this understanding would not be made public, and that Kurdish administrative control over Hasakah and Kobane would be preserved. Sharaa rejected this outright, pressing instead for the city’s security to be transferred to the Syrian Interior Ministry and for the reassertion of state authority on the ground.
Since then, Syrian Kurdish leaders and figures associated with the PKK have called on Kurdish youth from across the world to come to Rojava’s defence, as the enclave appears increasingly close to encirclement by Syrian government forces. At the same time, videos circulating online suggest that detainees held in ISIS prisons, previously guarded by Kurdish forces, have begun to escape as those forces are redirected towards defending their own positions. Reports indicate that 120 of them escaped amid the chaos.
The current trajectory points toward heavy loss of life and a wider destabilisation extending beyond Syria to neighbouring states with large Kurdish populations, a risk foreshadowed by protests in Iraqi Kurdistan and across southeast Turkey.
Proper nightmare, this is.
Much Has Been Invested in Sharaa
As I outlined in a previous post, Donald Trump’s meeting with Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa marked a decisive turning point, and one that worked against Kurdish interests. From the outset, the Kurdish movement refused to accept al-Sharaa as a legitimate political actor, continuing to view him as a violent jihadist and referring to him by his former nom de guerre, al-Jolani. In private conversations with Kurdish figures from Turkey and Syria, I repeatedly encountered resistance to a reality they were reluctant to acknowledge: that Saudi Arabia and Turkey had invested heavily in al-Sharaa, had succeeded in drawing the Trump administration into that investment, and that even Israel was prepared to move forward with him.
Political legitimacy, after all, is neither fixed nor linear. Leaders gain and lose it in response to shifting internal and external conditions. In al-Sharaa’s case, the initial barrier was high. A bounty hung over his head, and he was widely designated a terrorist. Yet legitimacy, in this context, was conferred not through moral rehabilitation, hard evidence, or judicial reckoning, but through sponsorship. It required the backing of the United States, the Gulf states, Turkey, and several European governments to elevate him into a viable and useful actor. He may yet lose that standing.
There is a high possibility that this may be the case if he cannot consolidate his power over the factions within his movement and loses control. But not right now. The Kurds made a strategic error in treating that possibility as a foundation for their short- to medium-term planning. In doing so, they underestimated both Turkey’s entrenched influence in Syria and its diplomatic reach in Washington and Riyadh, and overestimated the currency of their alliance with the US.
Or they did not see another way. I do not know. Because there is no sound explanation for how a politically experienced leadership such as the Kurds could have failed to notice that the balance had shifted conspicuously, and for some time, against them.
The implications were already visible at the White House meeting attended by al-Sharaa and the Syrian foreign minister, Shaibani, at which Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, was also present to discuss the future of the SDF. The configuration itself should have been awkward. Awkward but instructive, with Turkey’s foreign minister seated alongside the Syrian president and his foreign minister in a way that resembled something closer to a mandate-like arrangement.
It signalled that Washington had already made its choice, and that the alliance forged with the Kurds during the fight against Islamic State was in the process of being transferred to the Syrian state. That handover was built into the deal from the outset. The meeting in Paris last week between Israeli and Syrian officials, which produced a security arrangement, merely confirmed the direction of travel. Israel, which had previously sought to draw Kurdish actors to its side after Assad’s fall, did nothing to intervene.
For some time, then, it had been clear that the Kurds were being left without a partner and without the prospect of a fair settlement. Murat Karayılan, the head of the PKK’s armed wing, spoke yesterday of “the betrayal of the Kurds by global powers,” before calling on young people to “join the resistance of Rojava.” That betrayal, I am afraid, has resembled a train that chose its track at the beginning of autumn 2025 and has been drawing closer by the day.
Arab resentment towards the Kurds
The speed of the SDF’s retreat has raised an obvious question. The Syrian army was operating with outdated Russian weaponry, had been weakened by repeated Israeli strikes, and remained fragmented after the fall of Assad. The SDF, by contrast, claimed a force of between fifty and seventy thousand fighters. How, then, did Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor fall so quickly? The answer lies in the withdrawal of American support and the defection of Arab tribes.
The YPG had entrenched itself in these areas during the war against ISIS, aided by US-led coalition air power, weapons, and political cover. Its authority did not stop at the Kurdish-majority north. Arab-majority regions such as Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, rich in oil and gas and bordering Iraq, were drawn into this arrangement. At the time, this expansion was justified as a wartime necessity inherited from the Assad era. What had been presented as provisional, however, gradually hardened into a more permanent order and, increasingly, into something experienced as an imposition.
This was the point at which Arab tribal resentment began to take shape. In Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, and across the Arab villages of the Euphrates basin, opposition was not initially ideological, even if it later acquired ideological overtones. It was, more fundamentally, a rejection of a system imposed without consent and sustained by external force.
That resentment first surfaced openly during the fighting in Aleppo’s Kurdish districts of Ashrafiyah and Sheikh Maqsoud between 6 and 10 January, clashes that left at least ninety-one people dead. As Syrian army units pushed into Ashrafiyah, members of the Bagara tribe embedded within the SDF-linked security apparatus turned their weapons on Kurdish counterparts and facilitated the advance. Once again, Damascus demonstrated its capacity to peel away tribal actors from within the SDF when circumstances allowed.
Throughout this period, the United States remained heavily involved in brokering ceasefires and evacuation arrangements in Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyah. CENTCOM commanders were on the ground, alongside the team of Ambassador Barrack. On Friday, 16 January 2026, a US military convoy travelled to Deir Hafer to meet with the SDF; according to sources, representatives of the Syrian government briefly joined the encounter, enough to signal contact rather than coordination.
Turkey, meanwhile, moved closer to the centre of the crisis. At least six drone strikes hit SDF positions over the course of four days. Barrack’s meeting with Turkey’s defence minister on 15 January confirmed Ankara’s inclusion in the unfolding settlement.
What had held the Kurdish-American partnership together in Syria was, above all, the United States acting as a shield for the Kurds through its protection and commitments, alongside the shared fight against ISIS and Kurdish control over prisons and camps holding ISIS detainees. After the Trump–Sharaa meeting, those sources of leverage rapidly lost their force.
In moments of crisis, the SDF’s fragile, tribe-based alliances and long-standing Arab–Kurdish tensions resurfaced. In mixed provinces such as Hasakah, these sociological fault lines proved decisive. Arab tribes had clashed with the SDF before, but in earlier episodes Washington intervened to contain the fallout. This time, it stood aside.
Behind closed doors, the United States pressed the SDF to withdraw from the Deir Hafer pocket and consolidate east of the Euphrates. The SDF initially refused. Abdi then appeared to make concessions, agreeing to the 14-point plan he had earlier signed digitally in an effort to avert civil war. When he met al-Sharaa face to face, however, he held his ground, insisting on administrative autonomy in Rojava and on integrating YPG forces into the Syrian army as divisions rather than as individuals.
Sharaa’s rejection of these demands culminated in the clashes now under way, developments that will shape not only Syria’s future but the region’s wider trajectory.
Is this really good for Turkey?
The document proposed by Sharaa’s government to the SDF delivers almost everything Turkey has sought. A day earlier, Turkey’s nationalist leader and Erdoğan’s ally, Devlet Bahçeli, had outlined an eight-point plan that bore a striking resemblance to the final text. On reflection, the similarity was less surprising than it first appeared, given the steady accumulation of evidence over the past year pointing to Ankara’s growing influence over Damascus.
Under the agreement, all military and security elements affiliated with the SDF are to be individually integrated into Syria’s Ministries of Defence and Interior after security vetting. This effectively removes from the table the SDF’s long-held ambition to maintain an autonomous deployment organised as three divisions and two brigades and partly insulated from central command. This alone constitutes a structural defeat.
Another provision establishes a locally recruited police force in Kobane, to be placed under the Interior Ministry, while the city itself is stripped of heavy military assets and left with only local security forces. For senior military, security, and civilian positions, candidate lists submitted by the SDF will be reviewed, with appointments made at the discretion of the central authorities.
Responsibility for prisons and detention camps holding ISIS members is also transferred to the Syrian government, marking a significant shift in the SDF’s relationship with the West. The handover of all border crossings, as well as oil and gas fields, to the central government completes the picture, depriving the SDF of its most powerful bargaining leverage.
Taken together, the agreement compresses Kurdish bureaucratic presence into a narrow administrative space while steadily eroding its military capacity. In this sense, Turkey’s demands appear to have been met. But this raises a more difficult question than the celebratory tone adopted by pro-AKP newspapers would suggest.
Turkey has certainly demonstrated that, in a Trump-shaped international environment, it is the preferred partner when strategic choices are made. Hakan Fidan’s shuttle diplomacy between the Gulf states, Damascus, and Washington produced precisely the document Ankara wanted, one imposed on the Kurds under intense pressure.
Mashallah and congrats!
But is this, in fact, a good outcome?
The Kurds have chosen to resist and to seek support wherever it can be found. If this trajectory is not checked, it is likely to produce bloodshed and a prolonged period of instability. More importantly, the Kurds have lost trust in every major external actor. Given the number of political ordeals they have already endured, neither the United States, nor Israel, nor Turkey will have come as a surprise to Kurdish leaders.
What is new is the scale of disillusionment among younger generations, who have been left angrier, more exhausted, and more hopeless almost overnight.
How, then, can this plausibly serve Turkey’s interests? How does cornering the Kurds in Rojava help when the Kurdish movement inside Turkey is watching developments there so closely? And how is this supposed to advance the prospects of a peace process at home?
Öcalan’s reading of the events
On 17 January, Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK and the ideological reference point for the Kurdish movement in Syria, met his lawyer on İmralı island and offered his reading of events. At this juncture, that reading matters.
Öcalan warned that the attacks would not stop where they were. They would expand, he said, and eventually target all of north and east Syria. His effort was directed at preventing precisely this outcome. Such a trajectory would not only strike the Kurds but would inflame hostility among the region’s peoples more broadly. To weaken the Kurds in order to govern the Middle East through their injury, he argued, is a 200 year-old divide-and-rule strategy, a recurring mistake, a trap that has reproduced itself for over a century. In his view, a new pincer was taking shape, intended to pit the peoples of the region against one another.
In Öcalan’s reading, the process initiated by the Paris talks [by which he means the recent Israeli–Syrian contacts] aims to turn northern Syria into another version of the south: Israel would secure Golan and Suwayda, while al-Sharaa would be offered the territory between the Euphrates and the Tigris. For Turkey to interpret this process as working in its favour, he warned, would amount to a serious historical error.
Öcalan’s approach to Syria and Rojava, the lawyer underlined, has consistently been framed around the idea of a ‘Democratic Syrian Republic’ and a solution grounded in local democracy. Neither Öcalan nor the Rojava project has ever reduced the issue to Kurdishness alone. The central problem, as he sees it, lies in how power and sovereignty are distributed between the centre and the local. The model he proposes is one in which the centre does not crush the local, and the local does not seek to dismantle the centre, but where a durable balance between the two is deliberately constructed.