The Sun Sets on the Syrian Kurdish Rebellion

The agreement that terminated the Syrian Kurdish enclave was presented by its signatories as a pragmatic settlement. But, in fact, the deal is a major political defeat for the Syrian Kurdish political formations. Certainly, the rapid advance of the Syrian armed groups loyal to President Ahmad al-Sharaa broke the resistance of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the largely Kurdish group, but this advance can only be understood by the total backing given by the United States to the Syrian government against the SDF. The SDF was outgunned and had no air support, which is what they had benefitted from in their war against the Islamic State. The SDF’s Mazlum Abdi signed the effective surrender on behalf of his party and their army. US Ambassador Tom Barrack’s tweet—despite its hyperbole —suggested the end of the Syrian Kurdish experiment called Rojava (the Kurdish word for where the sun sets, or the western part of the Kurdish lands).

The deal formalised what months of military pressure had already made clear. Syrian state institutions returned to the northeast not as partners but as authorities keen on a strong central state loyal to al-Sharaa. Over the course of the past year, border crossings that had been in the hands of various groups returned to central government control and oil revenues began to be collected for Damascus. The Syrian Democratic Forces, one of the last remaining independent military challenges to al-Sharaa after the rout of the Syrian Arab Army, agreed to be subordinated to the military’s central command but did not want its units dismantled; in other words, the SDF wanted to retain its own structures within the Syrian armed forces. This was the agreement that Abdi and others in the Kurdish leadership, such as Ilham Ahmed (former co-chair of the SDF), favoured, but they were outflanked by sections of the Syrian Kurdish leadership that did not want to lose the autonomy of the Kurdish enclave. But now Kurdish political offices have begun to close, flags are being removed, and the language of autonomy has been erased from official documents.

Al-Sharaa came to the presidency of Syria through his politicisation in al-Qaeda’s Syrian fronts. While he has left behind his turban for a suit, there are indications that his own followers are comfortable with the ideology of and links with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and that they welcome an alliance with both the United States and Israel. In the days leading up to this ceasefire and deal, SDF officials reported that the Syrian armed forces focused their attention on the prisons that held Islamic State fighters who had been captured by the SDF; heavy fighting had indeed been reported near Shaddadi prison (Hasaka) and al-Aqtan prison (Raqqa). These attacks, the SDF said, were a ‘highly dangerous development’ since they suggested that the government forces wanted to free the Islamic State fighters from the prisons and put them back on the battlefield against groups such as the SDF. Now the state has control over these prisons and could do what it wants with these prisoners.

The Dawn of Rojava

In 2012, the government of Bashar al-Assad withdrew its military from the northeast so that it could defend the southwest from a cycle of rebellions. This withdrawal provided an opportunity for the Syrian Kurds, who had been fighting for either an independent Kurdistan or autonomy within Syria for decades. The leader of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) Salih Muslim told me in 2013 that the Kurdish political and military forces filled a vacuum. “We organised our society so that chaos would not prevail.” The PYD’s Muslim made three points: Syria must remain united, Syria must belong to all those who live in it, and Syria must be decentralised. The government in Damascus accepted these three points and a tacit understanding was reached between the Syrian Kurdish political forces, other minorities in Syria, and al-Assad’s government. This was the opportunity that allowed for the birth of Rojava.

Over the decade since 2012, the Rojava enclave came under serious attack by the Islamic State (in 2014-15) and the Turkish armed forces (2018) as well as sustained attacks by various smaller groups. In this decade, the army of the SDF, the People’s Defence Units (YPG), the Kurdish Peshmerga (from Iraq), and the armed forces of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK from Turkey) defended this enclave, most dramatically from the advance of the Islamic State. When the Islamic State took Sinjar and began to ethnically cleanse the area of Yazidis in August 2014, it was the YPG and its allies that began a long siege of the area that was only won by them in November 2015 at a great cost. US air support began to assist the YPG and the SDF in their quest to defeat the Islamic State and to exist as an independent enclave from Damascus. Neither Salih Muslim nor other leaders of the Syrian Kurdish groups pinned their faith wholeheartedly on the United States, although the balance of forces set in motion an alliance that was always going to lead to betrayal.

Statements from Salih Muslim and Mazlum Abdi that silence about the Turkish invasion of Afrin in 2018 would “cost Syria its unity” or that the YPG was the only “barrier against Turkish occupation” did not count for much. Assad was not going to enrage the Turkish government at this time (in fact, it was in this period that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signed a deal to demilitarise Idlib and allow the al-Qaeda inheritors, including al-Sharaa’s Hay’at Tahrir al’Sham or HTS to build their strength in peace and wait a turn of fortunes). Perhaps if Assad were a better chess player, he would have provoked Turkey by defending the Syrian Kurds, thereby preventing a deal and forcing his Russian allies to provide air support while the Syrian Arab Army entered Idlib to fight the remainder of the HTS and its allies. But Assad began to allow the Russians to do his strategic thinking and therefore conceded a point of strength in the hope that the Turkish government would cease its attempt to overthrow his government.

Turkey’s Erdoğan refused to see the Syrian Kurdish rebellion as anything other than an extension of the fight of the Turkish PKK. In 2020, he told his party cadre at a meeting, “Turkey will never allow the establishment of a terror state right beside its borders. We will do whatever is necessary and drain this swamp of terrorism”. This should have been clear to both Assad and the Syrian Kurds that there was going to be no support from Turkey and no end to the attempt at destabilisation by Turkey’s NATO partner, the United States. Over the past five years, Erdoğan leaned on the political leadership of the PKK to withdraw its rebellion and to effectively capitulate. In 2025, from his Turkish cell, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan announced “the end of the method of armed struggle”. The Syrian Kurdish project, linked with the PKK, lost its broader strategic depth. Pressure mounted from the Turkish side for the Syrian Kurds to end their project of “armed autonomy”, as Turkish officials said. Turkish military pressure continued with reduced international condemnation or even consideration and diminished Kurdish legitimacy.

The mysterious role of Israel in this entire fiasco has yet to be properly written.

The Fall of Assad

With the full weight of Israeli and US air strikes, the forces of Hay’at Tahrir al’Sham led by Ahmad al-Sharaa dashed into Damascus. This victory marked a decisive rupture for the Syrian Kurds. Al-Sharaa, the new president, said that his government would reclaim the northern lands (but he said nothing about Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights and nothing about the hundreds of square kilometres of the UN buffer zone seized by Israel after al-Sharaa took Damascus). Statements coming from Damascus sent a warning to the Kurds, although the Kurdish leadership hoped against any logic that the United States would protect them (in December 2024, Abdi said that the Syrian Kurds were in ‘continuous communication with our American friends, who support our efforts to stop the escalation and guarantee the rights of all Syrian components, including the rights of the Kurds within the framework of a unified state’). The United States began a withdrawal, and the Syrian Kurds began to voice their hopelessness. One SDF official told me that their forces had fought ISIS and had taken huge casualties but now were —in her words—”nothing at all”. Syrian forces flooded the north. “Syria does not need experiments imposed by force”, said al-Sharaa. Rojava was in his crosshairs. It did not take long to finish the job. “We are determined to protect the achievements of the revolution”, said Abdi, but this seems more like wishful thinking.

The example of Syria has sent a cold breeze across the border to the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. Iraqi leader Muqtada al-Sadr posted a message on X with a warning that what happened in Syria “should not be taken naïvely”. “The danger is imminent”, he wrote, “and terrorism is supported by global arrogance”. With the change of strategy of the Turkish PKK and the defeat of the Syrian Kurds, any faith in Irbil (Iraq) that the Kurdish autonomous region is eternal will now fade. Al-Sadr suggested unity in the face of external aggression. It is a suggestion that would be hard to reject in these times.

The collapse of Rojava was not merely the failure of a local revolt to be sustained. It was the defeat of a political wager: that decentralisation and armed self-defence could rely upon the support of the United States. The language of democracy and dignity might have appealed to an occasional US diplomat, but it meant nothing in Washington. “We built Rojava on a swamp”, said a Syrian Kurdish official to me a few hours after the deal.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.