Syria’s Kurds on the defensive as US turns its back on former allies

In the autumn of 2014, the Kurdish-majority town of Kobani in northern Syria was on the brink of falling to Isis militants. Outgunned and outnumbered, Kurdish fighters were struggling to defend it — until US warplanes began dropping munitions from the sky.

The airlift changed the course of the battle and helped forge a partnership with Washington that would define the Kurds’ fate in north-east Syria for years to come. Those fighters grew into the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which, armed and trained by Washington, helped defeat Isis. The Kurds leveraged the victory into uncontested control over one-third of Syrian territory.

But the decade-long experiment in Kurdish self-rule appeared to be nearing an end this week, following Damascus’s lightning offensive in which government troops reclaimed territory that had been under SDF control for years and shattered the alliance with Washington.

The US has thrown its weight behind Damascus, with special envoy Tom Barrack saying the SDF’s role had “largely expired” and telling the Kurds their best chance now lay with President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former Islamist rebel leader.

Washington’s position, strongly supported by Turkey, is a muscular endorsement of Sharaa’s dramatic redrawing of his country’s map, little more than a year since he toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

The move, a risky gamble that appears to have paid off for Sharaa, marks a pivotal moment in Syria’s transition. He has struggled to unite the fractured country after its 14 years of bitter civil war, but the government offensive has paved the way for his troops to take over the oil-rich region and assert control over the majority of his country.

However, for the Kurds and their supporters, it marks a betrayal — one they worried would happen once Donald Trump returned to the White House last year.

Similar to other minorities across Syria, they are wary of Sharaa’s Islamist rule and his undisciplined forces, and they often do not distinguish between his movement and the Isis militants they fought against in the past.

“Barrack’s statement says everything,” said Kurdish political official Hassan Mohammed Ali. “The Kurdish community feels betrayed. We fought Isis and lost more than 10,000 lives and now the same Isis comes back with the same coalition force . . . We feel we have been sold for others’ benefit.”

Trump, after speaking to Sharaa, on Tuesday said that while he liked Kurds, they “were paid tremendous amounts of money, were given oil and other things”.

“So, they were doing it for themselves, more so than they were doing it for us. But we got along with the Kurds, and we are trying to protect the Kurds,” he added.

The SDF emerged from the chaos of Syria’s civil war, which started in 2011. With ties to Turkey’s Marxist-Leninist-inspired Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, its fighters were seen as the antithesis of Isis’s messianic militants, making them a practical ally for Washington, which nurtured them to serve as ground troops for the US air campaign. The partnership angered Ankara because the PKK had waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state.

The SDF grew into a force of 60,000 men and women, more than half of whom were Arab fighters rather than Kurdish, officials said. While the group’s anti-Isis efforts were widely praised, its domestic rule, including a sprawling civilian administration, was criticised by some Syrian Arabs for its increasingly authoritarian tactics, particularly in the Arab-majority areas it controlled. Many anti-Assad rebels also viewed them with suspicion for prioritising territorial control over opposing the dictator.

When Sharaa seized power in December 2024, a countdown began as the country’s new president made clear he would not tolerate a fragmented state.

The US, which quickly backed him along with powerful allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia, sought to bring the two sides together. In March last year, it brokered a deal between Sharaa and the SDF leader Mazloum Abdi to integrate the SDF and its affiliated bodies into the Syrian state, with the practical details to be hashed out before the end of 2025.

But those negotiations stalled, with both sides trading accusations of bad faith and an unwillingness to compromise.

“Sharaa does not understand the SDF’s devolved, consultative process,” said a person with knowledge of the talks. “And the SDF would only see Sharaa as a diehard Islamist. They did not understand that with every delay, he was losing patience.”

In the weeks before Sharaa’s offensive, Kurdish officials were offered a deal — but on the condition it was accepted immediately, according to Syrian and Kurdish officials as well as people familiar with the talks. The SDF would be able to integrate three divisions and two battalions into the national Syrian army and its leader Abdi would become deputy defence minister.

Barrack, the US envoy, and others urged the SDF to accept the deal, according to a senior Syrian official and others familiar with the talks. They said the deal on offer would only get worse in the future. “We repeatedly told them: when conditions change on the ground, the deal would change,” the Syrian official said.

The SDF tried to renegotiate terms that would “essentially make integration impossible”, the Syrian official said, in an account confirmed by several others. Kurdish officials insist they were simply holding out for security guarantees, given a spate of sectarian killings by government forces and their allies elsewhere in Syria.

The deadline passed, with the SDF rejecting what they did not know would be Damascus’s final offer. The two sides were deadlocked over whether the Kurds would accept Syrian government forces deploying to the north-east.

Days later, on January 6, government troops moved into Kurdish-controlled neighbourhoods in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, in a planned operation that resulted in a US-negotiated Kurdish withdrawal from the city within two days.

From there, government troops moved quickly to seize Raqqa and Deir Ezzor provinces, which fell when Arab tribal fighters defected from the SDF.

Sharaa and Abdi agreed to a 14-point deal and ceasefire on Sunday night. As expected, Damascus drove a harder bargain than before: Kurdish personnel would now only be integrated on an “individual basis” rather than in wholesale units, a blow to the SDF, which had hoped to preserve its influence. The offer to Abdi of the post of deputy minister was rescinded.

After sporadic clashes broke out, particularly near prisons the SDF had long guarded that house thousands of Isis militants, a new four-day truce was announced on Tuesday to allow the SDF time to consider its prospects. It is set to expire on Saturday evening.

“What happens next is the million-dollar question,” said the senior Syrian official. “We’re all hoping this ends diplomatically. But the ball is in the SDF’s court.”

Having lost Washington’s support for its autonomy, it is unclear who will now back Kurdish aims. The Kurds’ intransigence on vital issues lost them crucial allies in recent days, as did their decision to abandon their posts guarding some Isis prisons and detention camps, people familiar with the talks said. Kurdish officials contend the withdrawal came after attacks from Damascus.

The US military began transferring prisoners to Iraq, in case new clashes erupted — a sign it thinks the ceasefire might not hold.

One western diplomat said: “They’ve now shown we can’t trust them with the prisons; their willingness to abandon them, to risk hardcore Isis prisoners running free, pissed everyone off.”

Some Kurdish fighters have retreated to where it all began, hunkering down in heavily fortified Kobani. They say they are readying for a fight with government forces they accuse of committing atrocities, in an atmosphere rife with disinformation. “We want this to end diplomatically, but we are mobilising and ready to fight,” Kurdish leader Ilham Ahmad told the FT this week.

The SDF and residents there say the town is already under siege, accusing the government of cutting off electricity and water. “They are besieging us like Isis once did,” said Kawa Shwani, a teacher who lives in the town. Damascus denies the claim, with the senior Syrian official saying it is working to restore power and water supply after infrastructure was damaged in the fighting.

Dareen Khalifa, a senior adviser at Crisis Group, said: “Throughout this year, the SDF misread signs and miscalculated — they didn’t fully account for the ramifications of the US no longer relying exclusively on them as the main counterterrorism partner. Although trust is low, both sides need to quickly return to negotiations and finalise a deal to avert more fighting.”

Additional reporting by Andrew England in London and John Paul Rathbone in Istanbul