In the past year, a fractured and war-torn Syria has been prone to dramatic geopolitical change driven by rapid military advances. In December 2024, a force led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) swept out of Syria’s northwest and ended the Assad regime’s half-century rule in a matter of weeks. Just more than 12 months later, the new Syrian government launched a fast-paced assault that effectively dismantled the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces’ (SDF) control over much of the country’s northeast, which had been in place—with American support—for more than a decade.
The latest transformation did not begin with the sudden January offensive. Rather, it stemmed from the national integration process launched in March 2025 reaching an impasse over the nature of reunification. The March 10 Agreement signed by President Ahmed al-Sharaa and SDF commander Mazloum Abdi had been widely read as a pathway to a managed transition. It envisioned security-sector integration, phased handovers of strategic files—including border crossings, energy infrastructure, and the ISIS detainee file—and an eventual political arrangement to normalize rights and citizenship. Yet the framework was fragile from the outset because the parties were solving fundamentally different problems. Damascus viewed integration as a means of restoring the central government’s sovereign authority throughout Syrian territory, especially a monopoly on arms and a unitary chain of military command; the SDF understood it as a bargain that secured a more decentralized governance structure while preserving certain autonomous rights and its military as distinct units.
As the integration framework reached its end-of-2025 implementation deadline unresolved, room for additional bargaining narrowed, and coercion became the more plausible path out of the deadlock. Concluding that the balance of power had decisively shifted, Damascus began to redefine the integration process. The challenge of designing an equitable, inclusive state was reframed as an urgent need for the central government to impose territorial sovereignty by force.
This strategic shift triggered a breakpoint in early January 2026. A series of high-stakes meetings—including in Damascus and Paris—compressed rather than stabilized the timeline, as the Syrian government publicly framed an ultimatum: integrate or fight. Crucially, Washington did not oppose Damascus’ position and signaled growing readiness to work through the Syrian state and its interim president rather than preserve a distinct SDF role within Syria’s post-war order. Against this backdrop, the January 4Damascus integration talks ended without a tangible breakthrough. Within days, fighting flared in Aleppo’s SDF- and Asayish-controlled neighborhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh, sharpening the sense that the integration track had finally slid from bargaining into enforcement.
By mid-January, the Syrian army and aligned factions expanded operations across the north and east, seizing Arab-majority territories—including Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor—as the SDF withdrew under mounting pressure. Compounding this military pressure, the defection of Arab tribal actors from the SDF underscored the coalition’s inherent brittleness at a decisive moment. Consequently, the SDF’s territorial footprint contracted significantly toward the Kurdish heartland of “Rojava,” with its leadership and remaining forces consolidating in northern Hasakah and the city of Qamishli.
With the SDF’s strategic depth exhausted and the costs of further escalation rising, both sides recalibrated. A 14-point U.S.-brokered deal halted fighting, ceding Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor unconditionally, while outlining a new path for integration. In effect, the March 10 framework was shelved in favor of more stringent terms imposed on the SDF.
U.S. envoy Tom Barrack described the developments as a major opportunity, consistent with Washington’s pivot toward managing Syria through Damascus. The central government also moved to shore up its legitimacy with Syrian Kurds. On January 16, al-Sharaa issued Decree No. 13 (2026), granting citizenship to stateless Kurds, recognizing Kurdish as a “national language,” and designating Newroz—a new year’s celebration marking the start of Spring—as a national holiday. Follow-up steps were reported on January 26, when the Ministry of Education issued executive instructions to operationalize Kurdish curricula and training for teaching staff. These developments reinforce a dual-track logic: coercive consolidation on the ground, paired with selective, state-managed recognition of rights from above.
Although the initial four-day truce was extended twice, primarily to facilitate the U.S.-coordinated transfer of ISIS detainees to Iraq, tensions continued to mount as the Syrian government amassed troops around the remaining Kurdish-held areas and the SDF hardened its defensive lines. The encirclement triggered a wave of re-traumatization across Kurdish communities, resurfacing memories of the 2014-2015 ISIS siege of Kobani, which nearly led to total annihilation. For Kurds in 2026, the escalating military pressure signaled the risk of demographic and political erasure in the post-war Syrian order. If anything, however, this acute fear of erasure—felt locally and echoed across Kurdish communities globally through protests and mobilization—reinforced collective visibility and bargaining resilience.
Against this precarious backdrop, the two sides announced a comprehensive agreement on January 30 to stabilize the ceasefire and launch phased integration. The latest deal halts hostilities, withdraws forces from frontlines, and deploys Interior Ministry security units to Hasakah and Qamishli, with local Asayish forces integrated into state structures. Militarily, select SDF units are reorganized under Syrian command, while heavy weapons, borders, crossings, oil fields and main roads transfer to state control. Administratively, autonomous institutions are to merge into state bodies, with civilian staff retained. The agreement also commits to settling Kurdish civil and educational rights, facilitating returns, and jointly managing crossings and airports. This deal represents a negotiated resolution to the deadlock, incorporating concessions from both sides while prioritizing Syrian sovereignty.
How the integration process flipped
Drilling down further on the Syrian government’s altered approach in January, the pivot toward a force-led consolidation appears adapted from—and enabled by—Türkiye’s PKK disarmament playbook: Apply decisive pressure to reshape the balance on the ground, then negotiate from a position of strength. Damascus adopted this logic wholesale, despite its own perceived fragility and desperation for legitimacy. Rather than producing restraint, the government’s shaky foundations incentivized it to consolidate its position through the exercise of decisive force. The SDF’s leverage—control over oil, borders and detainees—proved inconsequential, strategic assets only insofar as external patrons provide protection and local coalitions remain cohesive. In this instance, both pillars buckled as Washington signaled clear limits to its patronage, while the SDF’s internal tribal alliances frayed under the pressure of a coordinated regional squeeze.
Türkiye’s stance further complicated linear assumptions. Many observers assumed Ankara’s domestic Kurdish peace process would discipline its Syria posture. Instead, Ankara consented to Damascus’s new approach. The core framework of its hardliners—preventing PKK spillover to Syria and insisting on SDF dissolution and disarmament—remained unchanged. These hardline voices were not simply “hawkish”; they were reading a familiar regional pattern in which sovereignty and unity are culturally fused, decentralization is equated with partition, and communal recognition framed not as a hard-won right, but as a status granted by and contingent on the state’s protection.
In the final analysis, the Kurdish political project in Syria is not ending so much as being forcibly narrowed. The rapid contraction of territorial control in the northeast marks a shift away from a period of maximal opportunity toward a more constrained but still consequential phase of rights-based negotiation. Kurdish self-rule is being compressed into local administrative competences, localized policing arrangements and cultural guarantees—spaces that remain contested, but not illusory. Under acute pressure, Kurdish actors recalibrated rather than collapsed, preserving the institutional cadres and bargaining channels that make their presence and rights undeniable.
What now?
The January 30 agreement formalizes the bargaining channel that survived January’s escalations, trading SDF autonomy for Damascus’s sovereignty terms. Ideally, this evolves into rights-based integration that stabilizes Kurdish areas through monitored governance and credible protections—shifting the focus from state control to human security and reconstruction that local communities can own.
Maintaining this fragile equilibrium also requires narrative discipline. Framing the process in terms of total victory or defeat risks fueling future resentment. Instead, the transition must be understood—and communicated—as a mutual preservation of integrity: sovereignty restored without erasing Kurdish political existence, and Kurdish rights safeguarded without territorial partition. In post-conflict settings, this narrative symmetry is a stabilizer.
Fundamentally, the latest agreement can only be a bridge. Without a constitutional framework that anchors cultural rights, local governance and political participation in binding law, any calm remains provisional. Integration without constitutionalization is merely managing an issue rather than resolving it. Syria’s post-war order will be judged not by how effectively the central government reasserted control, but by its ability to convert coercive pressure into a political settlement that constituent communities can defend—without returning to arms.
