Erbil, Iraq – The merger of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) into the government forces last month has sparked a debate among many Kurds in Syria as well as in neighbouring Iraq and Turkiye about the future of their rights.
Though Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa has promised constitutional protection for Kurdish language and political rights, analysts question if the decision to drop the “armed struggle” will imperil the struggle to secure Kurdish rights and identity.
“We want this day to be the beginning of a true transition from the battlefields to the fields of construction, and from the era of weapons to the era of peace,” SDF leader Mazloum Abdi (also known as Mazloum Kobani) said from the presidential palace in Damascus late last month.
Abdi said an “important page” had been turned in Syria’s history.
While some Kurdish politicians hail the integration as a door for the Kurds to participate in building the new Syria and to demand their rights through the constitution, others consider the step a result of Turkish and US pressure.
Turkiye has calculated close ties with the Syrian government, which came to power after Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December 2024, and has attacked Kurdish fighters along its border with Syria in the past. Although the US helped form the SDF in 2015, it threw its weight behind the al-Sharaa government.
The US-backed SDF, which was formed to fight the ISIL (ISIS) group, controlled Syria’s northeast, home to most of the country’s Kurdish population, for more than a decade. But earlier this year, the government forces took over northern Syria in a swift military push. After months of talks, the SDF was disbanded, and the Kurdish-led Autonomous administration was dissolved.
Talal Mohammed, the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Peace Party in Syria, believes such developments are a turning point in the course of the Kurdish issue.
“This represents an opportunity for the Kurds to be partners in building a democratic Syria,” Muhammad told Al Jazeera. “We already had a self-administration, a military force, but we did not have any international or regional recognition,” he said.
“The coming phase requires uniting the Kurdish ranks and working to attain all our rights … in the new constitution,” he said.
But Mohammad warns that Turkiye is pushing to end the issue of armed Kurdish groups.
Turkiye considers the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which led a decades-long armed rebellion, and its affiliates in Syria, Iraq and Iran as “terrorist” groups. Ankara accuse them of launching attacks to destabilise the region through separatist violence.
The PKK decided to dissolve in May 2025 and end the armed conflict. The move came months after jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan urged the group to lay down its arms in a bid to end the conflict, which has killed thousands. Turkish government welcomed the move.
Ankara views the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which led the SDF, as a “terrorist” group and an arm of the PKK inside Syria.
Mohammad explains that the PKK is the most important Kurdish group in the entire region, and it affects the file of the Kurds in Syria. “Ending the SDF and the PKK was a Turkish dream and a major Turkish project,” he said.
No guarantees
Other Kurdish politicians suggest that the peace initiative in Turkiye and the SDF’s integration in Syria will empower the Kurds and maintain their rights.
Perwin Yousef, the co-chair of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a branch of the PKK in Syria, rejects that the integration is a setback.
“We did not feel any disappointment, and our project continues, and we will continue to work to obtain all our rights through political understandings and agreements within the new Syrian constitution, and our struggle will continue,” Yousef told Al Jazeera.
But she also acknowledges that there are no guarantees so far for the national, political, and cultural rights of the Kurds. These issues, Yousef says, could derail any agreement.
“There are no guarantees for the Kurds so far … we want to guarantee cultural rights and recognition of the Kurdish language as an official language, in addition to the political rights of the Kurdish people, and to be partners in decision-making within the Syrian state,” she said.
The Kurds are an ethnic group of people Indigenous to the Mesopotamian plains and nearby highlands, which today stretch across southeastern Turkiye, northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran and southwestern Armenia. The Kurdish population is concentrated in these areas, where the Kurdish groups have aspired to establish an independent Kurdish state.
“The Kurds have long talked of reuniting their people in a greater Kurdistan,” Joost Hiltermann, a special adviser to the International Crisis Group, wrote in a paper back in 2016.
“These different national populations have discovered over time that what sets them apart may be more significant than what they have in common: differences in dialect, tribal affiliation, leadership, ideology, historical experience,” he wrote.
Kurdish academic Sarbast Nabi, a professor of political philosophy at Koya University in the semiautonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, believes the latest deals between the PKK and the SDF with Turkish and Syrian governments will hinder Kurdish aspirations.
“The SDF found itself compelled to take this decision, which is a decision subject to the Turkish will, because Turkiye holds Abdullah Ocalan,” Nebi explained. “Therefore, this decision is neither Syrian nor Kurdish, but rather it is an expression of a Turkish will,” he said.
“What happened in Syria serves Turkish national security … it worked to marginalise the Kurdish issue, amid perceptions within the Trump administration of winning Turkiye to its side,” he argues.
”The Kurdish issue became a victim of the pressure exerted by the Turkish lobby, while the Kurds in Syria became a tool in the hands of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party … At present, there are no independent discourses for the Kurds in any part of Kurdistan,” he said, referring to the Kurdish region straddling Syria, Iraq, Turkiye and Iran.
A forced choice?
Many Kurds argue that regional and international powers have their own national interests and schemes, and they have used the Kurds for their own agenda and dumped them when their geopolitical utility was over.
Muhammad Amin Penjweny, an expert on the political affairs of the PKK and Turkish politics, argues that Kurdish groups need to be pragmatic after the decline of Western support, especially after the fall of al-Assad’s government.
“What the SDF did through integration with the Syrian forces is not a failure, but rather a victory, because it had no other solution after the withdrawal of American and French forces … leaving it alone without military or political protection in the face of Turkiye and Syria,” he explained.
“It is true that the SDF was a large military force against ISIS, with American assistance, but after the fall of al-Assad the equation changed,” he said, adding that the Kurds had ”no other option” but to integrate into the Syrian army.
Despite the fanfare and what appears to be a ”success”, mistrust and scepticism within Kurdish circles remain high, and the fate of Ocalan could be a decisive factor.
PKK leaders have warned from their stronghold in the mountainous region of northern Iraq to halt the peace process with Turkiye unless democratic reforms are implemented.
“As a gesture of goodwill, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party burned its weapons, but the party will not hand over its weapons until after the release of Abdullah Ocalan and his comrades held in Turkish prisons,” Penjweny said.
“The Kurdish dream of establishing a Kurdish state still stands. There is an American, French, and British position that holds that the Treaty of Lausanne, concluded in the last century, did not lead to stability in the region,” he said, adding that the Kurds were a victim of this treaty over the past hundred years. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, signed by Turkiye and allied powers, divided the Kurdish areas across four different countries.
Sentiments across Kurdish populations in Syria, Iraq and Turkiye differ due to multiple factors. In Iraq, Kurds enjoy the most rights in the region, where their rights are protected by the constitution established after the US-led invasion and the toppling of President Saddam Hussein in 2003. The Kurdistan Regional Government is the official ruling body in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
”What was achieved by Syrian Kurds is better than what they had under Assad. For Iraq, independence or the creation of a Kurdish state is far fetched because Kurdish semi-autonomous region is legal and recognised by the constitution,” said Soran Ali, a Kurdish writer based in Iraq.
But some Kurds in Turkiye have a very pessimistic outlook about the future of the community.
“The Kurdish dream is gone because of the SDF, PKK, Iraq and Iran,” Ahmed Kani, a nationalist Kurdish researcher in Turkiye, told Al Jazeera.
”As long as Turkiye is a strong state, the Kurds in the four parts of Kurdistan will not be able to achieve their dream of statehood,” he told Al Jazeera.
