Capitulation or compromise? What SDF's dissolution means for Sharaa, Turkey and Syria's Kurds

One year, five months and 15 days after Syria's President Ahmed al-Sharaa and the commander-in-chief of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces Mazlum Kobane signed a landmark deal for the integration of all Kurdish military and administrative institutions with the central government, Kobane declared the dissolution of his forces, marking the end of a chapter suffused with glory and defeat.

The scenes playing out on the late summer night could have been straight out of Shakespeare's "King Lear." Standing alone before an audience of Syrian and Kurdish officials in Damascus, Kobane announced first in Arabic and then in Kurdish "the end of the mission of the Syrian Democratic Forces" and "their dissolution as an independent military force."

The Trump administration's Syria envoy, Tom Barrack, called the announcement "absolutely historic," crediting President Donald Trump's "far-sighted leadership" for "the SDF's orderly transitions into Syrian state institutions." A spokesperson for Turkey's ruling party said that an "important threshold" had been passed "towards strengthening Syrian unity."

For countless Kurds in Syria and beyond who dreamed of achieving federal status like their brethren in Iraq, however, it felt like capitulation. Images of Kobane and his colleagues sitting on opposite sides of Syrian officials in the icy marble splendor of the People's Palace, with Sharaa presiding at a distance in a gilded chair, was more than many could stomach after 14 years of semi-independence under the umbrella of US special forces deployed in northeast Syria to back the SDF-led fight against the Islamic State.

According to local media reports, under the terms of the agreement struck on Tuesday, Sharaa will sign three separate decrees. One assigns Kobane the role of adviser to the president, ostensibly on Kurdish affairs. The second makes Ilham Ahmed, the Kurdish-led administration's de facto foreign minister, a member of the Syrian Parliament from the quota allotted to Sharaa. Ahmed is expected to be part of a committee dealing with diaspora affairs and another dealing with the drafting of a new constitution. And finally, two hours per week of instruction in and of the Kurdish language will be introduced to the state curriculum as an elective course for Kurdish-majority areas. Additionally, the all-female Kurdish-led Women's Protection Units will be folded into the Interior Ministry in a counterterrorism capacity.

The decrees will complement existing reforms, including a presidential decree in January that recognizes Syria's estimated 2.5 million Kurds as an "essential and authentic" part of the Syrian people, grants citizenship to Kurds deemed "stateless" by the Baath regime and integrates thousands of SDF fighters into four brigades, with at least one more under consideration for the Kurdish-majority enclave of Afrin.

The measures are unprecedented in Syria and go way beyond what Turkey, host to the world's largest Kurdish population, is weighing during current peace talks with Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). That process is closely intertwined with talks between the SDF and Damascus for two reasons. One is that Turkey has considerable leverage over Damascus allowing it to exercise effective veto power over the limits of Sharaa's Kurdish opening.

The other is that so far, Ocalan has uncontested influence over Kobane and his comrades, because he and many others operated under the PKK leader’s  command when he ran the PKK from Syria until his eviction in October 1998 under Turkish military threats and subsequent capture in Kenya by Turkish forces in February 1999.

Ocalan's intervention is believed to have been pivotal in forcing Kobane to accelerate the SDF's end and to accept a role as Sharaa's adviser. It has long been evident that the dismantling of Kurdish autonomy in Syria is a sine qua non for advancing talks in Turkey aimed at definitively ending the PKK's four-decade conflict with the Turkish military. A framework law establishing several bodies that will oversee the demobilization of PKK fighters and legal reprieve for those who qualify was adopted by the Turkish Parliament last week. However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with an eye on Turkish nationalist blowback that might affect his own electoral fortunes, has maintained a determined distance from the entire process. The dissolution of the SDF has handed him a big win, allowing Erdogan to justify any concessions made to the PKK, which announced its own dissolution in May 2025 in line with Ocalan's demands. The PKK leader has learned from several unsuccessful previous rounds in 2013 that hiccups in northeast Syria could prompt Erdogan to pull the plug and revert to military operations and political repression against Kurds on both sides of the border.

Either way, Sharaa needs little restraining from Ankara. Since his days leading Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the jihadi group that fought the Assad regime for long years before marching to victory in December 2024, Sharaa has sought to concentrate power in his own hands. He will have reckoned that having Kobane within close reach without granting him any real authority is the best way to keep the Kurdish leader and his people's ambitions in check.

To be sure, getting Kobane to declare the SDF's dissolution while blocking the Kurds' pathway to autonomy was clearly a triumph for Sharaa as well. The integration deal is being touted as a blueprint for the country's rebellious Druze to make peace with Damascus and a poke in the eye to Israel, which has sought to exploit minority grievances to weaken Sharaa. Hikmat al-Hijri, a leading Druze sheikh, remains a thorn in Sharaa's side, telling an audience in Suwayda on Monday that the Druze were "an inseparable part of Israel." Much of the Druze-majority governorate remains outside government control since mass sectarian violence erupted there in July last year that left over 1,700 people, most of them Druze civilians, dead.

The question for the Kurds remains: What was the alternative? Renewed conflict with Damascus and Turkey? The Trump administration threw its weight solidly behind Sharaa following the Assad regime's ouster and sat on its hands when his forces overran the oil-rich Arab-majority provinces in January that were under the SDF's control. In April, US forces in the northeast fully withdrew, leaving the SDF with no cover. On Monday, the United States formally removed Syria's designation as state sponsor of terrorism.

With few immediate options, Kobane had to play along. His presence in Damascus makes it harder to build a political movement from the ground in the Kurdish region uniting diverse communities that could emerge as a countervailing force to Sharaa. But that isn't to say that Kobane, together with Ahmed in the Syrian Parliament and Sipan Hemo, the former SDF commander who is now a deputy minister of defense, won't be able to establish new alliances and networks in the Syrian capital that may prove more tenable.

In his last interview with Al-Monitor in May, Kobane said he was likely to be received by the Turkish government. That idea no longer seems far-fetched. The Turkish government has for the first time in Turkey's modern history adopted legislation, however imperfect, after negotiating with a Kurdish leader. Whatever Kobane's trajectory, 14 years of self-rule have seen Kurdish nationalist ideas firmly planted in the minds of an entire generation of Kurds who have known nothing else. 

"Long insurgencies teach populations to wait quietly, avoid frontal confrontation, preserve networks, think in decades. Just like what [Sharaa's] HTS did in Idlib for many years before assaulting Damascus," Dunya Basol, an academic specializing in Middle Eastern affairs, observed on X. "History is littered with empires that crushed rebellions militarily, only to collapse generations later because they underestimated what had already been planted in children's minds."