This Week in Northern Syria [10A.2025]
On the Ahmad al-Shar'/Mazloum 'Abdi agreement
My apologies for the delayed publication, it’s been a hectic week in terms of Syria news. Below is an essay touching on the SCG/SDF agreement and the events on the coast. The weekly events rundown will follow shortly and will be freely available to the public.
A little before 9pm on March 10th the Syrian Presidency announced via social media that President al-Shar‘ and SDF commander Mazloum ‘Abdi had signed an agreement in Damascus “stipulating the integration of the Syrian Democratic Forces into the institutions of the Syrian Arab Republic, emphasizing the unity of Syrian territory and rejecting partition.” Attached to the announcement were photos of al-Shar‘ and ‘Abdi and a copy of the eight point document signed by the two former insurgents. These read as follows:
Guaranteeing the rights of all Syrians to representation and participation in the political process and state institutions based on competence, regardless of their religious or ethnic backgrounds.
The Kurdish community is indigenous to Syria, and the Syrian state guarantees its right to citizenship and all constitutional rights.
A nationwide ceasefire across all Syrian territories.
The integration of all civil and military institutions in northeastern Syria into the administration of the Syrian state, including border crossings, the airport, and oil and gas fields.
Ensuring the return of all displaced Syrians to their towns and villages and securing their protection by the Syrian state.
Supporting the Syrian state in its fight against Asad’s remnants and all threats that endanger its security and unity.
Rejecting calls for division, hate speech, and attempts to incite discord among the components of Syrian society.
The executive committees shall work towards implementing the agreement no later than the end of the current year.
The agreement is much more a general memorandum of understanding and public show of reciporality than a final settlement. Many of these general points reportedly were already agreed to by both sides during the ongoing negotiations that began in late December, with the sticking points being the specific details regarding integration and the implementation process. These issues - for example whether the SDF enters the Syrian military as a bloc or as individuals - are still not addressed in the signed agreement.
Despite these lack of specifics the meeting holds clear historic significance. This was the first public meeting of Ahmad al-Shar‘ and Mazloum ‘Abdi, the two most successful leaders over the course of Syria’s thirteen year civil war - one a former al-Qa‘idah operative, the other raised in the ranks of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Despite the cavernous ideological differences between the two, the success of the two men and their movements can be in part be ascribed to similarities shared by both Jabhat al-Nusrah/Tahrir al-Sham and the YPG/SDF: both possessed experienced cadre, strong organizational capacity, and clear dogma from the very beginning of the war, and both groups localized from international parent organizations, proving adept at adapting to the changing conditions inside Syria.
Within the context of the historical Kurdish movement inside Syria this meeting and point two of the agreement are significant symbolic victories. Beginning with the short-lived United Arab Republic (1958-61), in which Syria merged with Egypt under the rule of Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, Damascus has harshly discriminated against Syria’s Kurdish population. The most notable manifestation of such was the stripping tens of thousands of Kurds in al-Hasakah governorate of their citizenship in 1962, accusing them of being illegal immigrants from Turkey. Due to Syrian citizenship only being passed down through the father the number of stateless Kurds in Syria grew to half a million by 2011, though a large number obtained citizenship through reform measures carried out by the Asad regime in order to appease Kurds at the outbreak of the war. That the agreement specifically states that Kurds are “indigenous to Syria, and the Syrian state guarantees its right to citizenship” is a clear reference to 1962 and its long lasting ramifications.
Another Kurdish grievance that dates back to the heyday of Arab nationalism and Arabization is Syria’s official name: the Syrian Arab Republic. This was adopted by the ‘Seccessionist government’ (1961-63) that replaced the United Arab Republic via coup in order to maintain Arabist legitimacy after destoying the first Pan-Arab union. Many Kurds in Syria would like to see the adjective Arab removed from the official title though this has not been addressed. Additionally the statement does not specifically mention Kurdish cultural rights and the legal status of the Kurdish language.
Other issues touched on in the agreement seemingly include the desire on the part of al-Shar‘ to avoid a consociational system based on ethnic quotas a la Lebanon and Iraq (point one), continued clashes between SNA group and the SDF in eastern Aleppo (point three), the return of displaced Kurds to Afrin and Ras al-‘Ain/Serê Kaniyê (point five), and perhaps most notably the issue of ‘Asad’s remnants’ (points six and seven).
Just several days prior to the agreement Syria witnessed the worst bloodshed seen since the fall of the Asad regime, with hundreds of violent deaths in the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartous.
On March 6th an untold number of former regime loyalists carried out a series of coordinated and deadly attacks against local deployment of the SCG’s Generl Security Directorate (a gendarmerie force affiliated with the Ministery of the Interior), briefly taking control of larges swathes of the countryside and some urban neighborhoods. In response the state deployed large numbers of security and military reinforcements while seemingly ad hoc calls for general mobilization spread across social media, resulting in a disorganized mass of heavily armed pro-government entities and individuals arriving on the coast in the tens of thousands.
By the next morning the insurgency had generally been defeated and the coast returned to the hands of the SCG-aligned security and military forces. This was followed by an anti-Alawi pogrom carried out by elements among the counter insurgnecy force resulting in the murder of hundreds of Alawi civilians - predominantly men - in villages and neighbhorhoods across the coast. In some cases these acts of dehumanizing abuse and mass killings were documented by the perpetrators themselves, shared to social media by pro-government (formerly pro-opposition) channels celebrating how ‘remnants of the regime’ treated. In other cases videos show women and children returning to the streets of their villages or neighborhoods to discover the corpses of their male family members dumped on top of one another in piles. We have yet to have a final confirmed number of civilians killed but it seems likely to be in the high hundreds to low thousands. According to Syria Direct and SNHR Sunni civilians were also targeted in a sectarian manner by the anti-government insurgents.
Given the range of armed actors present on the coast that day and many not wearing identifying marks it’s still unclear who the primary factions responsible for the killings were. Many have pointed fingers at various SNA factions and at HTS-aligned foreign jihadi groups though I’m currently unsure whether this is based on reliable information or due to these groups being obvious actors to blame. Given the scale of the killing in terms of numbers and geographical dispersion it’s likely that perpetrators came from the ranks of multiple factions (and possibly unaffiliated armed civilians). So far the SCG has created a committee to investigate the abuses and has publicized several arrests of individual fighters seen carrying out summary executions, but no information has released identifying their affiliations. It remains to be see how thorough and public the government’s response will be.
The massacres are a clear callback to sectarian massacres that occurred early in the war in Latakia, some carried out against Alawi civilians by HTS predeccessor Jabhat al-Nusra and allied jihadi factions. They also raise the issue of significant anti-Alawi sentiment in Syria stemming from both certain historical Sunni theologians and from association of the Alawis with Bashar al-Asad’s regime and the lingering question of what the SCG is to do with former members of the regime’s military and security services, many who have seemingly sat at home t last three months, heavily armed and unemployed.
The massacres also represent a public relations nightmare for the al-Shar‘ government as it seeks to put forth an image of responsible interim rulers and to get sanctions on Syria removed, in particular those imposed by the US. The US State Department condemned the mass killings conducted by “radical Islamist terrorists” in a statement announcing that the US stands with Syria’s “Christian, Druze, Alawite, and Kurdish communities.” This echoes ongoing Israeli discourse that seeks to exploit the issue of minorities in a bid to keep Syria fractured and weak. Surprisingly, rather than lead to further US disengagement and pressure it appears that the Americans took this opportunity to push the SCG and the SDF into making this symbolic public agreement.
Reporting by Reuters and other outlets points to the US playing a key role in the negotiation process and the timeline of this agreement. Talks between the SDF and SCG began in late December with a meeting between Ahmad al-Shar‘ and Mazloum ‘Abdi reportedly held in Dumayr airbase outside Damascus, the latter transported there via American military aircraft. Since then very little infomation has made its way into the public relating to the progress of the talks. According to SyriaTV the vague terms agreed to in the document were actually reached on February 20 in another in-person meeting between the two leaders. There are differing accounts as to why the US pushed for it to go public now with some pointing to fears that Iran would exploit the situation on the coast and others saying that this was to set the stage for a future US withdrawal. The incentives on the SCG and SDF side seem fairly straight forward: for the former its a way to counteract the disasterous events on the coast and stem a series of events pointing towards ethnic disintegration, for the latter their negotiating partner’s stronger hand has weakened.
Regardless of the agreement’s vagueness the announcement was celebrated by many across Syria who viewed it as final end to the war and the reunification of the country following a decades plus of violent division. Others with more circumspect responses still acknowledged the deal as a positive that should help prevent new conflict from breaking out. State media published a map of Syria “liberated completely,” representing an end to northeastern Syria’s separation from the rest of the country. However institutional integration between the SDF/DAANES and the SCG is going to be a long and political difficult process meaning this separation will linger for sometime, perhaps soon leading to dissapointment and a return of tensions.
The international response to the agreement was also quite positive with major stakeholders and neighboring actors the US, Russia, Turkey, the Gulf Cooperative Council and its constituent countries, Jordan, and the Kurdistan Regional Government all weighing in affirmatively. A Turkish official told Reuters that they were "cautiously optimistic" but have questions regarding implementation. The following day a number of Turkish airstrikes targeting the SDF on the Tishrin Dam front were reported indicating that Turkey is not a party to the ceasefire agreed to between al-Shar‘ and ‘Abdi.
Really good summary, and a few details I had not read much elsewhere! Do you have any hope the committee to investigate the massacres of Alawi civilians actually does a thorough job?