The Latest on SDF-Damascus Integration:

• The region is in a transitional period, and security has been deteriorating steadily but at an accelerating pace across the SDF-held pocket, especially in the key cities of Hasakah and Qamishli. In response, the Asayish, the SDF-linked security force still operating under that name, has launched a new one-month campaign in Hasakah city.

• Social media discussion around the campaign points to ethnic and political tensions across the pocket, particularly in its Arab and mixed areas.

• Although the pocket appears uniformly SDF-held on the map, its real area of Kurdish control is considerably smaller. Significant Arab tribal influence runs through much of the triangle from Tel Hamees through southern Qamishli to Tel Brak, an area that has only ever been nominally under the SDF. Even under Assad, before December 2024, these Arab villages maintained their own arrangements with Assad and the SDF had little say there. This tribal Arab belt extends to the villages to the north of Hasakah city, and eastwards towards Tel Tamir.

• Hasakah’s newly appointed deputy governor, Ahmed al-Hilali, a local, Kurdish-speaking Arab appointed by Damascus, says the government will interview more than 9,000 SDF-linked security personnel, the Asayish, including around 1,000 women, for the governorate’s Internal Security Directorate. He frames this figure as a pool to be vetted individually rather than a guaranteed intake, though Damascus will likely accept a large share of them, folding the SDF’s security apparatus into the state. The directorate’s projected total is put at around 20,000 across all branches, so even if most of those interviewed are accepted, former Asayish would still remain below half the force.

• Damascus has released more than 1,200 SDF fighters. A small number remain detained, but al-Hilali says it is “on unrelated personal or criminal matters”, however these too will be freed once their legal cases are cleared.

• On displacement, roughly 1,650 Afrin families remain in the Hasakah area, meaning the vast majority have already returned; a final convoy is expected within weeks, after which the Ras al-Ain file opens.

• The government’s greater eagerness to implement follows from the fact that the 29 January agreement favours it heavily at the strategic level. On the displacement file in particular, rapid implementation works on two tracks at once: it demonstrates compliance and shifts the demographic balance towards Damascus. Returning Kurds thin the Kurdish concentration in the Hasakah area, while returning Arab IDPs, many of whom had fled areas now inside the SDF pocket, push the balance further still.

• A key clause in the agreement separates Kurdish from non-Kurdish areas, and a mixed or Arab-majority district does not qualify as such. Damascus’s core aim is to keep Hasakah and Qamishli, along with the crossings and oil fields, out of SDF hands, since those are the prerequisites for any viable autonomy.

• Rapidly moving SDF members into state appointments also serves a divide-and-rule function, splitting those who accept integration from those who resist it and creating two distinct incentive sets within what was a single bloc. The wedge has limits, though. Because the SDF is now largely a Kurdish movement, a strategy that turns on individual incentives may not hold against that ethnic cohesion, and Damascus could be overplaying its hand.

• Al-Sharaa may have concluded that the principal SDF threat, the geographic depth that could sustain a viable region, has already been neutralised. He achieved the territorial recapture without repercussions, and the remaining areas present a different and more manageable problem.

• The Arabic signage at the Palace of Justice in Hasakah has been torn down eight times by an apparently PKK-linked group, whose members filmed themselves, in at least two instances, singing the PKK anthem as they waited outside the building to remove it. Their grievance is that the signage carries no Kurdish; the government counters that the Palace of Justice is a sovereign institution, that nothing in the integration deal requires Kurdish on it, and that it will not compromise on the point. That the group filmed itself raises obvious questions, since the handful of youths involved would be straightforward to identify. The signage now appears to be back in place, though whether it will be torn down again is unclear.

• Significant friction between the two sides remains. In a recent interview with Al-Monitor, the SDF’s Mazloum Abdi essentially called the integration cosmetic, repeating his view that Damascus’s objection is only to “names” and “labels,” and that while it will not formally recognise the area as a region, it will accept one in practice. This is most likely a misreading of what Damascus actually intends.

• Abdi’s difficulty is that he signed an internationally mediated agreement that heavily favours Damascus. With legal and institutional authority residing in Damascus, and with the area’s demographics too precarious to sustain a viable SDF region, the government can continue to hollow out the SDF gradually. Abdi may be betting that time, and a shift in regional geopolitics, will eventually work in his favour, but for now the trend runs against him, and even time favours al-Sharaa.

• Once Damascus succeeds in reactivating Hasakah’s Palace of Justice and the main prisons pass to its authority, the file will have moved from territory and personnel towards the question that governs all the others: who commands coercive power. Until that is settled, the extent of any decentralisation, and the survival of the agreement itself, remain open.

• The SDF file is now a contest of strategy and of who can outmanoeuvre whom. The danger for the SDF is that al-Sharaa has shown himself to be a highly capable strategist, skilled at breaking factions and files into smaller pieces, absorbing the useful parts, and moving against the rest at the decisive moment. The only way to counter him is with a player of the same calibre.