After troops of Syria’s transitional government had captured the Kurdish neighborhoods of Aleppo, events in northeastern Syria escalated rapidly.
On Saturday, the leadership of the Arab Shammar tribe in Syria—long among the most important Arab allies of the Kurdish People’s and Women’s Defense Units (YPG and YPJ)—officially withdrew its support for the Kurdish-dominated Democratic Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES) and recognized the transitional government in Damascus.
Early on Sunday, the takeover of the Arabic-speaking regions of the DAANES by the government in Damascus finally began. While units loyal to Syrian transitional president Ahmed al-Sharaa crossed the Euphrates in the early hours of Sunday morning in Deir ez-Zor province—thereby attacking territory previously controlled by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—fighters from various Arab tribes seized areas along the river. To prevent an attack on Raqqa, the former “capital” of the “Islamic State,” the SDF blew up a key bridge over the Euphrates that had only been rebuilt in 2024. At the same time, however, an Arab uprising broke out within the city itself. By midday, the SDF had largely lost control of the eastern Euphrates Valley, the oil fields located in Deir ez-Zor province, and large parts of their Arab units. Over the course of the afternoon, the SDF were then also forced to withdraw from Raqqa.
As a result, within a matter of hours the most important Arab regions of the DAANES came under the control of Arab tribal units operating in alliance with the transitional government in Damascus. Entire units of Arab allies of the Kurds disintegrated.
Conservative Arab Tribes
The situation in Deir ez-Zor had long been precarious. Since the SDF captured the area from the “Islamic State” between 2017 and 2019, the rule of the DAANES there had rested on an alliance with local Arab tribes that cooperated with the Kurds less out of political conviction than out of opportunism. Some of these Arab allies of the Kurds had already been through a varied political career.
The Deir ez-Zor region has always been among the most conservative areas of Syria and has been shaped far more strongly by tribal structures than the western part of the country. Both the social structure and the Arabic dialect of the region more closely resemble those of central Iraq than those of Arabs in western Syria. Politically, there were sympathies here as early as the 1990s for Iraqi Baathism under Saddam Hussein and later for the jihadist insurgency in Iraq, whose supply routes ran precisely through this region. Some of the Arab tribes of the area were among the first to cooperate with the “Islamic State,” but they also changed sides again whenever it suited their interests.
No one could ever be certain of these tribes’ loyalty. Illustrative of the political allegiances in this region is the career of Ahmed Khbeil, alias Abu Khawla, who began as a criminal, then in 2013 formed a brigade of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), defected to the Islamic State, fled to Turkey after the murder of his brother, and from 2016 onward switched to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as an ally of the Kurds, before being arrested in 2023 for criminal activities. His arrest at the time led to tensions between Arab tribes and the SDF and to several minor skirmishes in the region.
The Kurdish units within the SDF were never entirely certain of the loyalty of their Arab allies, even though unity and brotherhood were always emphasized publicly. The Kurds exercised great restraint in asserting their own ideological positions in the region. The feminist ideology of the governing Kurdish party, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), would have turned the conservative Arab tribes against the DAANES much earlier. As a result, this alliance remained a precarious one.
Arab Uprising
The rapid takeover of these areas now underway is essentially based on an alliance between these conservative Arab tribes and government forces. The SDF has not lost all of its Arab allies, but it has lost the decisive ones.
The fact that even the Shammar—together with the al-Sanādīd militias that have existed since 2013 and control Shammar tribal areas in the eastern part of Hasakah province—have turned away from the DAANES shows that the ruling Kurdish PYD has failed to bind significant Arab forces to itself over the long term.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), formed in 2015, remained a temporary alliance of convenience that could only bind the Arab tribes to it for as long as they regarded it as a meaningful alternative for themselves. With the defeat of the Islamic State and the collapse of the Assad regime, key reasons for this alliance of convenience ceased to exist. The Sunni Islamism and Arab nationalism of the new regime in Damascus correspond far more closely to the sociopolitical positions of the Sunni Arab tribes of the region than does the socialist feminism of the Kurdish-dominated DAANES.
Turkey also certainly played a role, having from the outset pushed for a takeover of the DAANES by the transitional regime in Damascus and an end to Kurdish-dominated autonomy. The fact that over the course of the past year the DAANES responded to infiltration attempts from Damascus and Ankara primarily with repression did not help improve Arab–Kurdish relations; instead, it merely reinforced the already existing alienation between Kurds and Arabs in northeastern Syria.
Ceasefire
After the collapse of the DAANES in most Arab areas, a ceasefire was finally negotiated on Sunday evening between Ahmed al-Sharaa and the commander-in-chief of the SDF, Mazlum Abdi.
The ceasefire includes the withdrawal of all SDF military formations east of the Euphrates, the complete and immediate administrative and military handover of the provinces of Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa to the Syrian government, and the integration of all civilian institutions in Hasakah province into the institutions of the Syrian state and its administrative structures.
Furthermore, under the ceasefire agreement the Syrian government is to assume control over all border crossings as well as the oil and gas fields in the region. The Syrian Democratic Forces are to be fully integrated, on an individual basis, into the structures of the Syrian Ministries of Defense and Interior. Essentially, the appointment of a candidate for the post of governor of Hasakah is intended to provide a guarantee of political participation and local representation for the Kurds. Informally, the name most often mentioned for this position has been that of the current SDF commander-in-chief, Mazlum Abdi.
However, Hasakah province includes only the eastern Kurdish-populated areas, not the region around the city of Kobanê, which gained international prominence in 2014 through the fight against the “Islamic State.” The district of Ain al-Arab, as the city and district are officially called in Arabic, belongs to Aleppo Governorate. According to the agreement, the strong SDF military presence there is to withdraw, and a security force composed exclusively of local residents is to be established. At the same time, the agreement also stipulates the retention of a local police force for Kobanê, which will be administratively subordinate to the Syrian Ministry of Interior.
In addition, the handover of IS prisoners and camps to the Syrian government was agreed upon. The SDF is to submit a list of candidates for senior military, security, and civilian positions within the central state structure in order, as it is stated, “to ensure a national partnership.”
Finally, Presidential Decree No. 13 of 2026 is explicitly welcomed, as it includes a degree of recognition of the cultural and linguistic rights of the Kurds. The SDF commits itself to removing all non-Syrian leaders and non-Syrian members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) from its ranks. In accordance with the agreement, the Syrian state undertakes “to continue the fight against terrorism (ISIS) in order to ensure the security and stability of the region” and to work toward “an agreement on the safe and dignified return of the residents” of Afrin and the Kurdish neighborhoods of Aleppo.
The agreement thus provisionally brings the fighting to an end and protects the civilian population. At the same time, however, it also ends the de facto autonomy of the Syrian Kurds as it has existed until now—and does so without any security guarantees for the promises made by the new regime.
The autonomy of Rojava, as it had been able to develop since 2012, is therefore, for the time being, a thing of the past. In the coming months it will become clear how much of their cultural and political rights the Syrian Kurds will be able to preserve within the new Syrian state. Even if the military fighting now comes to an end for the time being, the political struggle will continue.
Thomas Schmidinger is a political scientist, social and cultural anthropologist, and member of the Research Centre “Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society”. He is an associate professor at the University of Kurdistan Hawler in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, and teaches at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and the University of Vienna.
The German original of this article first appeared in Der Standard. This English translation, by Daniel Mang, first appeared on the Left Renewal Blog.
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