The end read out at the palace
Mazloum Abdi, commander-in-chief of the Syrian Democratic Forces, stood in the presidential palace in Damascus on Tuesday and read his own force out of existence. "We announce today the end of the mission of the Syrian Democratic Forces and declare, with full responsibility, their dissolution as an independent military force." He said the announcement followed the completion of the process of integrating his fighters into the brigades of the Syrian army. The force had been created in 2015 at American instigation, after Kurdish fighters broke the Islamic State group at Kobane; at its height it held around 100,000 Kurdish and Arab fighters and wide stretches of the oil-rich north and northeast.[1]
The bargain was struck from weakness. Kurdish forces lost large chunks of the northeast to government troops in January, and after Ahmed al-Sharaa's army took Raqa and Deir Ezzor the Arab units inside the SDF defected en masse, leaving the force at half its strength, according to the Syria specialist Fabrice Balanche. Turkey, which mounted repeated incursions against those fighters between 2016 and 2019 and treats them as an arm of the PKK, collected a clause of its own: the January agreement commits the SDF to expelling every non-Syrian PKK leader and member from the country.[1]
Why now?
Ground lost in January explains the timing only in part. In the middle of that same fighting, President Ahmed al-Sharaa signed a decree enshrining the Kurds' national rights and recognising Kurdish as a national language, a step without precedent since Syria's independence in 1946. That is the unusual item in this exchange. An armed body raised for a war against the Islamic State group has been wound up, and what its constituency carries away is a legal status no government in Damascus had conceded before.[1]
This column argued on 20 August that Syria's north draws in outside powers whenever central authority in Damascus weakens, and that Damascus's own agency was what kept the outcome undecided. Tuesday closes that question in Damascus's favour, along a route the earlier piece did not weigh: rather than defeating the outside claims in the field, the centre took the SDF into its own brigades and left the claimants with nothing to claim.[1], [2]
The distance between a decree and a constitution
Whether the settlement holds turns on what becomes of that decree. Announcing last week that the integration of the Kurdish administration into the Syrian state was complete, Abdi added: "Our struggle will continue, to cement our people's rights in the constitution." Read plainly, that is an acknowledgement that the rights now rest on an executive act. A decree travels with the government that issues it, while a constitutional clause has to be defended by the institutions that administer it. Folding the brigades together removes the means of contesting the bargain without settling what the bargain grants.[1]
The comparison that fails here is the Turkish one. Ankara tried to end the Kurdish zone by force between 2016 and 2019 and did not manage it; Damascus ended it with one January of fighting and a signature, and Ankara then collected its objective, the expulsion clause, from a document it was not party to. Force applied from outside hardened the zone, while a bargain offered from the centre dissolved it. The test now is narrow and dated: whether the language decree is carried into constitutional text, and whether the expulsion clause is executed, before the year is out.[1]