This Week in Northern Syria [8.2025]

February 19-25: the National Dialogue Conference, continued northern Aleppo integration, intra-Syrian oil trade restarts, and more...

Notes to reader:

I’m offering a 20% discount a year long subscription, available here until the end of the month. This gets you access to the weekly newsletter and a full archive of previous issues.

Friend of the newsletter

Selim Koru

’s new book ‘New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country’ is out and available for purchase here. I’m only halfway through it but so far I’m finding it to be an insightful look into how Erdoğan has approached Turkish state institutions over time.

---

Syria’s long awaited National Dialogue Conference has come and gone in lightning speed, resulting in an 18 point list of non-binding recommendations for President al-Shar‘ and his caretake government, in addition to a host of criticism from actors across Syrian society. The suggestions - available in English here - focus on the issues of state sovereignty, temporary and permanent constitutional frameworks, citizenship and tights, transitional justice, economic development, institutional reform, and the role of civil society, with varying degrees of vagueness.

The conference was held on February 24th and 25th in Damascus and reportedly attended by 533 individuals out of a total 550 invited, largely pulled from various sectors of civil society. The bulk of the conference occurred on the second day and featured six workshop groups organized around topics of transitional justice, constitutional construction, institutional construction and reform, personal freedoms and human rights, the role of civil society, and economic issues, as well as speeches made by President al-Shar‘ and Foreign Minister al-Shaibani, and a concluding sessions featuring the final statements.

As detailed last week the entire National Dialogue process started on February 12th with the formation of the seven person Preparatory Committee. Between the 16th and the 22nd the committee ‘spoke with’ approximately 4,000 individuals as part of consultative meetings dedicated to each of Syria’s fourteen governorates. It’s unclear how these 4,000 individuals were chosen and how consultative these single meetings featuring hundreds gathered in auditoriums actually were. The Preparatory Committee meetings for al-Hasakah and al-Raqqah were held in Damascus due to ongoing SDF control of these governorates.

It was not until February 23rd that the Preparatory Committee announced the date of the National Dialogue Conference and send out invitations to desired attendees. To give a sense of how rushed the entire process appears just two days prior committee member Hasan al-Daghaim told the AP that the date and timing of the conference had yet to be decided, suggesting that a transitional government might be created prior to it. Some invitees living abroad were not able to attend due to lack of time.

As far as I am aware no one has published a list of all 533 conference attendees. According to A‘zaz Media Center 200 individuals were there as representatives of the fourteen governorates, seemingly weighted for population and split 50-50 by. Their breakdown of supposed provincial ‘delegates’ goes as follows: Aleppo - 46, Rural Damascus - 26, Damascus - 18, Homs - 18, Hama - 16, al-Hasakah - 12, Idlib - 12, Deir ez-Zour - 10, Latakia - 10, Dar‘a - 10, al-Raqqah - 8, Tartous - 8, al-Suwayda’ - 4, al-Qunaitrah - 2. Provided these figures are true it’s unclear how the other 350 invitees breakdown, for example Reuters reported that 24 individuals overall were invited from al-Suwayda’. What is clear is that the conference adhered to the guidelines set out by President al-Shar‘ regarding pre-existing political and social entities: all attendees were invited and attended as individuals rather than as representatives of parties, unions, organizations, etc.

The widespread criticism of the National Dialogue Conference has fallen along several lines including: the incredibly rapid time line, the opacity of the invitee selection process and the ensuing questions of representation, the forbidding of participation by political and social entities, the lack of constitutional substance produced, and the conference and its recommendations lacking any binding power. Various key actors condemned the conference as it played out, including both the DAANES and its main Kurdish rival the previous-opposition aligned ENKS. The Syrian Turkmen Council - which features former president of the Turkish-backed SIG ‘Abd al-Rahman Mustafa - also rejected the conference over lack of invitation. Meanwhile in a highly critical and now deleted tweet Muhammad al-Jasim (aka Abu ‘Amshah) - a key Turkish ally and so far one of only a handful of SNA commanders reportedly appointed a position in the new Syrian military - called the conference a failure.

Overall one can read the National Dialogue Conference as an attempt on the part of the Caretaker Government to build internal and external consensus and legitimacy through overtures to inclusion. However, the manner in which the conference was organized and conducted has significant potential to degrade public good will. Another concern is that the conference produced recommendations rather than binding results, more reminiscent of Islamist ideas of consultative government rather than anything resembling democracy, though as with all ongoing political developments some can point to this being a result of the extraordinary crisis context of the current regime. Key questions moving forward are do what degree the Caretaker Government will use this conference as a corner stone of its domestic legitimacy, and whether this style of opaque, seemingly ad hoc, and non-binding process will be replicated in future political deliberations.

As for what this means with regard to ongoing negotiations between Damascus and the SDF/DAANES it does seem that al-Shar‘ has intended to keep the two processes separate until some form agreement is reached with the northeast. The results of the conference will surely not fully incentive the SDF to concede to the SCG’s demands and the third point of the conference calling for the state to regard “any armed formations outside the official institutions as unlawful groups” will be read as inflammatory. That said ongoing regional and intra-Kurdish dynamics continue to weigh heavily on the shape of Damascus/SDF talks.