To date, Damascus has been prepared to live with a light-touch integration of Kurdish entities into the all-important military and security sectors, with SDF and Asayesh forces maintaining much of their structural integrity under the command of senior officers appointed by Damascus. As a result, Kurdish residents’ primary day-to-day interaction with government forces in the north east has been with Kurdish personnel reporting to an integrated chain of command. Such was still the case after the central state sent more of its forces to the region, most recently through the 1 September deployment of additional personnel to Hassaka city. The approach appears to have been largely successful, extending the reach of state sovereignty throughout the north east while keeping public safety in local hands and mitigating concerns among Kurds about how they would fare with non-Kurdish forces. But the written agreements the sides have signed thus far do not clearly define the terms of these arrangements. Nor do they indicate how long the arrangements will stay in place, leaving open the question of whether and to what extent Damascus might push to deepen central authority as time goes by. 

This ambiguity was a key reason why the SDF repeatedly advocated for solidifying the understandings through some form of constitutional guarantee. Damascus demurred, deferring talks about that demand to forthcoming discussions of Syria’s future constitution. Kurdish leaders have also made clear their intention to press in those discussions for more explicit constitutional linguistic and cultural protections. The timeframe and process for drafting the constitution remain uncertain, as does the mechanism that would allow for input by Kurdish leaders. 

Addressing Challenges, Clarifying Gains

Beyond these gaps, three challenges stand out: returning displaced persons to their homes; managing incidents that threaten to ignite ethnic and political tensions; and addressing the sharp cost-of-living increase that is, at least in part, a by-product of integration. 

The issue of displaced persons counts among the most sensitive in northern Syria. Both Kurds and Arabs suffered large-scale displacement during the civil war, with tens of thousands of Kurds forced to leave their homes during offensives in which Syrian opposition forces backed by Türkiye seized the district of Afrin (in north-western Syria) and the towns of Ras al-Ayn and Tel Abyadh (in the north east) from Kurdish-led forces allied with the SDF. Thousands of Arab residents also fled during various SDF advances. Some of the resulting demographic changes persist to this day, exacerbating ethnic tensions that for decades were stoked by the forced Arabisation policies of Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez. 

Both Damascus and Kurdish leaders assert that securing the safe return of displaced persons is a priority, and they have restated their commitment to that goal at every stage of negotiations. Together, they have achieved significant progress since the 29 January agreement. Between March and July, some 11,000 families returned to Afrin in convoys organised by government officials (including Damascus appointees and former SDF figures) in coordination with a committee representing the displaced. The influx of returnees has helped both restore Afrin’s social fabric and mitigate concerns among senior Kurdish figures who harboured doubts about integration. The government launched a similar cooperative effort to facilitate returns to and around Ras al-Ayn, an ethnically mixed town known in Kurdish as Serê Kaniyê.

Yet serious obstacles have emerged of late. On 10 August, armed men attacked the first convoy carrying Kurdish families returning to Ras al-Ayn. As reports of violence spread, demonstrations erupted in Kurdish population centres in the north east, with a number of protesters reportedly attempting to break into central government facilities. Competing narratives of what motivated the attacks are difficult to parse, and no settled account has emerged. Kurdish leaders and government officials worked together to restore calm, with Mazloum Abdi calling for demonstrators to preserve state institutions and government forces announcing the arrest of several Ras al-Ayn assailants. The incident nevertheless underscored the limits of state authority in an area that until 2025 was controlled by poorly disciplined rebel factions, which seized it from the SDF during a Turkish-backed offensive in 2019. Those factions have since been incorporated into state forces, but their assimilation is far from complete. The government suspended returns to Ras al-Ayn town until conditions improve, which will entail addressing property disputes and dampening ethnic tensions in a location awash with guns. Their success in developing a cooperative model notwithstanding, the government and Kurdish leaders face significant challenges in trying to build on the example of Afrin. 

The returns file is but one example of how local sparks can ignite broader tensions in the north east. On 10 September, Sipan Hazni, a Kurdish former SDF soldier who had recently joined an integrated Syrian army unit, was kidnapped and brutally killed. Purported images of the murder circulated online, along with reports alleging that the killers were Arab tribesmen. As in August, protesters poured into the streets in Kurdish-majority towns and neighbourhoods, and some reportedly attempted to storm government facilities. This time, however, events escalated further in the town of Kobani (known in Arabic as Ayn al-Arab). The interior ministry deployed additional forces to the town, citing altercations that had left security personnel with injuries. Those forces arrested several demonstrators, then attempted to transport some of them from a prison in Kobani to Aleppo – in other words, from a facility still administered by former SDF-aligned personnel to one run by the central government. A prisoner reportedly lit a fire to protest the transfer, and nine detainees perished in the flames. 

Reactions in each camp underlined the challenges integration faces, but also its potential. Mistrust was evident, particularly in the episode’s early hours. An interior ministry official said some of those arrested were former SDF fighters, implying that elements of the former SDF that oppose integration were fanning unrest. Within SDF circles, the government’s deployment of reinforcements and attempt to transfer Kurdish detainees to facilities outside the north east bolstered concerns about further centralisation of security authority. Yet despite such misgivings, officials from both camps cooperated to quell the disturbance and signalled they would work together to investigate the incidents culminating in the prison fire. Mazloum Abdi’s role was particularly salient: meeting in Kobani with grieving family members and a range of local notables, he addressed concerns about the unrest and the integration process in his new capacity as adviser to President al-Sharaa.