A year after Assad's fall, divisions grow between Syria Kurds, Damascus

QAMISHLI/RAQQA — On a bright sunny day in late November, hundreds of college students celebrated their graduation in a din of ululation and patriotic songs at a fairground in the town of Qamishli in Kurdish-led northeast Syria. In scenes typical the world over, fresh graduates in prune-colored gowns waved their diplomas in one hand while tossing their caps into the air with the other. The jubilation was infectious, the swell of pride rising from their loved ones overwhelming.

But what comes next? It’s a pressing question. The credentials just received from the University of Rojava, or Western Kurdistan — established in 2016 by the Kurdish authorities — are not recognized by the central government in Damascus and therefore not outside Syria either.

Khalil Hamdi, who received his degree as a medical doctor after six years at Rojava University, said he was unfazed by the fact that he would not be able to practice his profession outside the region. “I am doing everything for my people and sooner or later my certificate will be recognized. We had a real revolution here,” Hamdi told Al-Monitor.

Squabbles over education are just the tip of the iceberg.

One year after a surprise offensive led by former jihadi Ahmed al-Sharaa brought down Syria’s longtime dictator, Bashar al-Assad, the Kurdish-led entity and Damascus remain more estranged than ever. A US-brokered deal signed on March 10 between Sharaa and Mazlum Kobane, the commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces, was meant to serve as a blueprint for integration but remains unimplemented.

Aldar Khalil, a top official in the Rojava administration, told Al-Monitor in a recent interview that Sharaa had promised to fix the problem of university and high school diplomas issued by local institutions that operated independently — teaching their own curriculum — during the Assad regime. Yet “nothing has happened,” leaving thousands of students in the lurch. 

Rojava University students wave diplomas during a graduation ceremony in Qamishli on Nov. 22, 2025. (Amberin Zaman)

Sinister Saturday 

On Saturday, Turkey’s chief of general staff, Selcuk Bayraktaroglu, met in Damascus with Sharaa and Syria’s defense minister, Murhaf Abu Qasra. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency reported that the Turkish army chief also inspected a Turkish-Syrian joint operations center in the Syrian capital.

That same day, the Ministry of Defense sent a revised proposal to the SDF that essentially called for its complete subjugation to the national army, according to well-placed sources who believe Ankara is dictating the terms. The SDF subsequently denied ever having received any such document even though Qasra himself announced that one had been sent without providing any details. 

The moves have fueled speculation that Turkey and Damascus are planning a long-threatened military offensive against the SDF as the December deadline set for the latter to fold into the national army ticks closer. 

Also on Saturday, Tom Barrack, the US envoy to Syria, reverted to the hawkish rhetoric he had espoused in the early days of his appointment in May. Speaking to reporters at the Doha Forum in Qatar, Barrack, who also serves as the US ambassador to Turkey, said that “decentralization has never worked in this region.” He cited the examples of the Balkans, Iraq and Lebanon, asserting that decentralization had led to “a mess” in those countries.

The SDF, whose core fighting force is made up of determinedly secular Kurdish men and women, played a central role in helping the US-led collapse of the Islamic State's so-called caliphate in Syria, losing more than 11,000 of its warriors in the five-year fight. That in itself should warrant greater US and Western support for the Kurds as they seek constitutionally enshrined guarantees for preserving their long denied ethnic rights, Syrian Kurdish officials say. 

An oil production site is seen in Rmeilan, northeast Syria on Nov. 24, 2025. (Amberin Zaman)

In a message to mark the first anniversary of the fall of the Assad regime on Dec. 8, the Kurdish-led Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES) pointedly observed that this should be a moment of collective remembrance for all Syrians who “sacrificed their lives for freedom and dignity.” Yet in its own territory, the administration had banned public gatherings or celebrations of the anniversary, citing heightened security risks amid a rise in Islamic State attacks. Centralization, marginalization of minorities and unilateral decision-making would repeat the failures of the Assad regime and undermine trust at a moment when Syria needed a “genuine democratic, free and decentralized state,” the statement added. 

Those demands have hit a wall. Sympathy for the Kurds is in short supply among Sunni Arabs, who accuse them of supporting the Assad regime by virtue of their decision to not fight it and concentrate on their “separatist agenda” instead. 

With neither side willing to back down, the risk of a violent showdown is mounting, with government-friendly news channels spouting anti-Kurdish rhetoric as if to egg one on, Syrian Kurdish officials say. 

What would conflict look like? Two-thirds of the SDF, which according to Kobane has around 70,000 fighters, is ethnically Arab. Would they stick with the Kurds or would tribal leaders defect to Damascus? How would the United States Congress, which is poised to fully repeal remaining sanctions on Syria, react? And would Israel rush to the Kurds’ defense, as it did with the Druze during the violence in Suwayda in July? Wouldn’t the Islamic State be the primary beneficiary? And what of Turkey’s current efforts to forge lasting peace with its own Kurds?

Deepening divide

As stakeholders weigh such imponderables, the deepening divide with Damascus is impacting life across the Kurdish region as the central government pursues a deliberate policy of encumbering daily life for citizens living there, Syrian Kurdish officials say. “The plan is to get ordinary people to blame us for the lack of implementation by making them pay the price,” one of the officials speaking to Al-Monitor on background said.

For more than two months now, three crossings linking the northeast and the rest of the country via Tabqa, Raqqa and Der Hafer have remained closed by Turkish-supported Sunni militias that fall notionally under the command of Syria’s national army but continue to act in concert with Ankara. Some exceptions are made via Raqqa for students or people in need of urgent medical treatment.

Qamishli's airport, which provided the only air links to Damascus, remains occupied by Russian troops who stayed on even after Assad’s forces fled. “They are probably just sitting around playing chess,” Khalil speculated jokingly. “They say they will only leave if Damascus tells them to.”

The closures have led to renewed spikes in the prices of essential goods due to higher transportation costs. These include fruit and vegetables, spare parts for machinery and construction materials mostly coming from Turkey via the Bab al Hawa border crossing in Idlib, Ahmad Yousef, co-chair of the DAANES finance authority, said in an interview with Al-Monitor. 

Any goods going from the northeast to areas under government control are currently treated as smuggled items. "They are trying to strangle us,” Yousef added. This reality marks a sea change. When Sharaa first seized power, goods began to circulate more freely as numerous checkpoints set up by Assad regime forces and Turkish-backed Sunni opposition rebels to extort fees began to melt away. 

Yousef reckons the trade halted because Sharaa’s closest Arab ally, Saudi Arabia, has been providing free oil to Damascus since November. 

The de facto finance minister said the autonomous administration was earning roughly $650 million annually from oil sales, adding that if prices were not subsidized, the figure would be around $850 million. 

He declined to reveal the amount of oil that was being sent to Damascus. However, the pause in sales will have sapped revenues. This serves as an additional lever for Damascus, notably to make Kurds cave to its demands that they cede control of Deir ez-Zor, which has emerged as a flashpoint in the negotiations.

Benjamin Feve is a senior research analyst at Karam Shaar Advisory, an independent consultancy focusing on Syria’s economy. "It would be easy to think that since oil represents 75% of DAANES' revenues, anything to reduce these revenues can be seen as a way to weaken the AANES fiscal position,” he told Al-Monitor. “It could be a pawn for the negotiations, too,” Feve noted. 

Predictably, multiple smuggling routes scattered along 150 kilometers (93 miles) of the river are filling the void. There are around 50 of them, according to the Syria Report. Some of the oil is also sold to the Kurdistan Regional Government, again at a heavy discount, while some is thought to make its way to Turkey. 

The sole remaining land link to Damascus is via Deir ez-Zor. This has doubled distances for residents in Tabqa and surrounding areas traveling to and from the capital.

Employees at several companies that ferry passengers between Qamishli and Damascus confirmed that customers are routinely forced out of the buses for lengthy questioning by government forces and sometimes arbitrarily detained. A bus driver who had just returned from the nine-hour journey told Al-Monitor there were more than 10 such checkpoints on the government-held side that is demarcated by the Euphrates River. 

At the National Hospital in Qamishli, the sole central government-run medical facility in the northeast, radiologist Dr. Mohammed Hassan feels helpless. Citing the non-implementation of the March 10 agreement, the central government refuses to replenish medicine stocks.

In November 2024, prior to the fall of the regime, the hospital was still functioning across all departments and seeing around 400 patients daily, Hassan told Al-Monitor. Currently, only a few departments such as radiology, obstetrics and surgery remain partially operational, with the number of patients dropping to fewer than 40 per day, Hassan explained. “The most affected are cancer and cardiac patients due to the unavailability of necessary treatment in northeast Syria, as well as the lack of specialized medical staff capable of performing complex surgeries who are available in Damascus,” he said.

With no pharmaceutical production in the northeast, most medicines are imported via the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. They include Turkish and other drugs of dubious quality and origin. Others produced in Syria are smuggled from government held areas, pushing up prices by up to 50%, Hassan added.

Life on hold

Lawyer Shukriya Youssef is struggling with a different set of problems. The state-run courts across the northeast have ceased to function since the regime’s collapse, when DAANES took control of the buildings and removed state-appointed judges and other administrative staff in moves repeated across other central government institutions, including marriage and land registries and immigration offices. 

DAANES has urged Damascus to appoint new staff to no avail, administration officials say. As a result, getting formal identification documents, marriage certificates and passports has become incredibly difficult, Youssef told Al-Monitor. Residents in the northeast are forced to travel to courts in government-held territory in order to register births or marriages, doubling the cost of the process from $500 during the Assad regime to around $1000, she noted. 

In turn, unregistered births and marriages mean that families cannot access humanitarian aid and other forms of social assistance because they lack legal documents, Youssef said. Her clients in the diaspora have also been affected, especially in family-reunification cases. Reunification has halted due to the lack of official documents.

The suspension in property registration has led to widespread forgery and illegal property sales. “Homes are now being sold to multiple buyers using falsified documents,” Youssef said. Prior to Sharaa’s takeover, she and her husband, who is also a lawyer, used to jointly handle 115 cases per month. “Currently we have no active cases due to the closure of the state-run courts in Qamishli and al-Hasakah,” she said.

To meet citizens' needs, members of the local bar association have pressed DAANES authorities to come up with an interim solution that would mirror some of the governance practices in Idlib, the northern province where Sharaa’s self-declared Syrian Salvation Government ruled until he overthrew Assad. They have also called for the adoption of regional courts that would notionally defer to central authority.

"The administration responded that such a decision is tied to a broader political resolution for the region,” Youssef said. “Therefore, the most viable solution to ease the burden on citizens, particularly in matters related to personal status and civil affairs, is the implementation of the March 10 agreement, which includes the integration of civil institutions and the reopening of courts and land registries in North and East Syria,” Youssef concluded. 

Freelance reporter Khabat Abbas contributed to this report from Qamishli.

Update: Dec. 8, 2025. This article has been updated since its initial publication.