Syria after Assad: The SDF is officially dead. What comes next?

A decade ago, the final and most consequential step in former US President Barack Obama’s Syria policy – one that helped push the country further into catastrophe – was the creation of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in 2015. 

Obama had already offered the Assad regime a political lifeline after it crossed the chemical weapons red line. With the formation of the SDF, Washington shifted the centre of gravity of the Syrian crisis to an exaggerated Islamic State (IS) threat. 

This, in turn, effectively green-lit the open-ended support of Russia and Iran for the regime. All opposition groups fighting then-president Bashar al-Assad were thus rebranded, by the regime and its allies, as IS-adjacent under the banner of counterterrorism. 

This “legitimacy transfer” shattered the opposition; only those forces backed by Turkey managed to survive, narrowly, in Idlib.

Meanwhile, the SDF – benefitting from a vastly inflated legitimacy transfer and western protection – morphed into the country’s dominant armed force in practice. 

The People’s Protection Units (YPG), the primary element of the SDF, was elevated to become the sole and natural representative of all Syrian Kurds. In western media and policy discourse, “Kurds”, “YPG”, and “SDF” became interchangeable terms. When Turkey’s objections were dismissed, Ankara crossed the Syrian border militarily.

For a decade, under the cover of intense US air power, the SDF came to control Syria’s most strategic cities. During this period, IS – never a deeply rooted force in Syria – was largely eliminated. 

Yet even after its raison d’etre disappeared, the SDF was preserved and expanded under American and European pressure. Encouraged by exaggerated western backing, it succumbed to the illusion of de facto statehood. 

Simple formula

At the same time, the SDF drifted entirely out of touch with Syria’s political and human realities. The mass killings carried out by the regime, the millions displaced, the thousands tortured in prisons – none of this featured in the group’s world view. 

Its formula was simple: avoid confronting Assad, keep the IS threat rhetorically alive to guarantee western support, and maintain IS prisons that themselves became synonymous with war crimes.

For the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), none of this was new. The pattern was already established more than four decades ago, in 1980, after PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan walked into Syria to seek refuge, and established a seamless relationship with the Mukhabarat. 

In a post-IS Syria, the PKK risks becoming the next organising threat around which instability is once again defined

Turkey views the SDF as an extension of the PKK, which itself is a Cold War artefact that was nurtured under the Syrian Baath regime as a Soviet-aligned proxy, and flourished amid Turkey’s era of military repression. Just as Ocalan spent years in Damascus without protesting against the state’s systematic denial of Kurdish existence or the regime’s human rights abuses, the PKK’s primary focus during the 14-year Syrian civil war was not on the broader national struggle, but on how to leverage fragmentation to extract a status akin to Iraqi Kurdistan.

That story ended on 8 December 2024 with the fall of the Assad regime at the hands of Syrian opposition forces.

From that moment onwards, the “S” in SDF was irreversibly altered. The PKK struggled to accept that Syria itself had changed. The “D” became untenable, given that none of the cadres leading the SDF had ever gained local legitimacy, and the “F” was also problematic, as the Arab Sunni tribes that had been added to mask the PKK’s identity lost relevance once Damascus transformed.

What remained of the SDF was, quite simply, the PKK. This was widely known, yet throughout 2025, no one dared say that the emperor had no clothes.

Colliding with reality

Instead, negotiations were pursued between Damascus and the SDF to avoid renewed conflict – despite the fact that Syria’s army was eager to reclaim occupied territory, and Washington had signalled it would not intervene directly. 

Israeli provocations unsettled Damascus, shifting its priorities in line with Turkish and American advice. A reasonable agreement was signed last March with the SDF, but progress quickly stalled, and tensions escalated. 

In recent days, Syrian army operations in Aleppo have forced partial SDF withdrawals. Then, the very power that created the SDF, the US, announced its dissolution this week. A dystopia inflated by years of speculative analysis finally collided with reality. For anyone familiar with American patterns, it was a familiar ending.

The US often relies on armed proxies and then withdraws support when priorities shift, leaving those partners exposed. From the Iraqi Kurds in 1975, to South Vietnam, to the Afghan mujahideen, to the Contras and the SDF, Washington has treated proxies as disposable instruments, not partners. 

Its rhetoric on values and ideology collapses under tactical expediency: arming Islamists against communism, later condemning political Islam, and then backing the Marxist PKK-rooted SDF in Syria. This is not a series of accidents, but a governing logic: risk is outsourced, abandonment normalised, and moral language deployed only when convenient.

With the SDF now gone, the PKK must decide what it intends to do in Syria. Any long-term agreement with Damascus is implausible so long as the PKK maintains an armed presence. 

As the Syrian state consolidates and rebuilds institutional capacity, a confrontation will be unavoidable. Agreements designed merely to postpone conflict cannot hold under these conditions. 

An organisation that has survived for decades by violently eliminating rival Kurdish movements lacks the political maturity to grasp Syria’s new reality. Recent statements by PKK-linked figures openly courting Israeli support only underscore this blindness.

The PKK’s internal worldview has failed to recognise the collapse of the proxy order itself. We are now entering a phase in which even Saudi Arabia and the UAE – states long accustomed to proxy competition – are confronting one another more directly, setting intermediaries aside. 

In such an environment, was it ever plausible for the SDF to survive as a proxy force – especially in Syria, where the regime was ultimately overturned by forces whose principal external backer was Turkey?

Historic opportunity

Turkey, meanwhile, faces a historic opportunity to resolve its Kurdish question – an opening that has existed for more than a year. Ocalan has repeatedly urged PKK cadres in Syria to become part of this new framework, but the group fears disarmament more than it values armed struggle. 

This fear stems not only from political atrophy, but also from the comfort of living inside a self-contained “PKK world” – with its own language, theology, psychology and conceptual universe. It is a world difficult to penetrate from the outside.

We are, in a strange way, back in 2014 in northern Syria – the moment when the PKK first embedded itself across the region. But history never repeats itself cleanly, and this time, almost everything that once sustained that reality is gone. 

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Assad is no longer the immovable centre of gravity. Russia and Iran are no longer the guarantors of the old order. IS, once the justification for everything, has disappeared. And the US has quietly but decisively changed course. 

In Turkey itself, a process aimed at ending the PKK’s armed struggle is underway. Yet in the context of Syria, the PKK behaves as if none of this matters – as if time has stood still. That insistence carries a dangerous implication: in a post-IS Syria, the PKK risks becoming the next organising threat around which instability is once again defined. 

If history teaches us anything, it is that when armed movements refuse to adapt to new political realities, they are eventually recast not as solutions, but as problems.

Now, the integration of such a structure into Syria is being discussed. In this conversation, the PKK is almost the last actor one should have in mind. Stripped of the SDF camouflage, the risk looms large of the PKK reverting to its core identity – one not of coexistence, but of exclusion and the violent elimination of dissent. Missteps are likely unless Turkey helps manage the process. 

At this stage, the only viable path is for PKK affiliates in Syria to join the broader resolution process Ocalan himself has advocated in Turkey. The dissolution of the SDF must be followed by the dissolution of the PKK.

If Damascus is prepared to recognise legitimate Kurdish rights, it cannot allow the PKK – having already exacted a half-century toll on Turkey’s Kurds – to impose the same cost on Syria.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.