President Ahmed al-Sharaa is building a military system designed to prevent any faction, including the SDF, from preserving an autonomous chain of command inside the state. The restructuring now moving through the Ministry of Defence weakens commanders associated with abuses against Kurdish civilians, breaks apart factions of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) and brings senior SDF officers into the national hierarchy. Some SDF-linked accounts have presented these changes as evidence that Damascus is responding to Kurdish demands.

That reading misses the wider purpose of the restructuring. The process now separating Abu Amsha, Saif Abu Bakr and other former faction leaders from their forces is likely to be applied gradually to the SDF once its integration and formal dissolution are complete. Removing abusive commanders and unifying the army may serve Syria well. The SDF’s apparent plan to enter the state while retaining a concentrated military and political bloc is nonetheless unlikely to survive al-Sharaa’s centralising strategy.

Breaking the factional commands: The government’s first approach after the fall of the former regime was to absorb armed formations into the Ministry of Defence without dismantling their internal structures. Former faction leaders received military ranks, and many of their fighters entered newly created divisions under the same commanders. That arrangement brought roughly 130 armed formations nominally under state authority without provoking immediate resistance, while preserving much of the factional reality beneath the new titles: commanders continued to lead the same fighters, officers and local networks that had served under them before the new army existed.

The current restructuring moves beyond that transitional stage. Reports differ over whether the final structure will contain five or six corps, but the direction is consistent. Divisions are being reduced, reorganised or placed under wider regional commands, and faction leaders are being transferred away from direct control of the formations built around their personal networks.

Muhammad Hussein al-Jassem, known as Abu Amsha, who formerly led one of the key Turkish-backed SNA factions, has reportedly been moved from command of the 62nd Division to deputy commander of the Central Corps. The new post carries higher formal rank while separating him from the fighters and officers of his former Sultan Suleiman Shah faction, and places him inside a headquarters where authority is divided among a commander, deputies, chiefs of staff and central departments. Saif al-Din Bolad, known as Saif Abu Bakr, the former commander of the Hamza Division, another prominent SNA faction, was removed from command of the 76th Division and offered an administrative role within a corps headquarters; he reportedly rejected the reassignment and resigned from the ministry.

The transfers have also reached the 80th Division, an Aleppo-based formation assembled largely from SNA factions of the northern countryside. Among the officers moved from it into the Second Corps command are Muatasim Abbas, founder and long-time commander of the Muatasim Division; Abdul Nasser Abu Jalal, a defected army captain who founded the opposition’s 9th Division (Special Forces) in the western Aleppo countryside; and Thaer Maarouf, former commander of the Samarqand Brigade and a senior figure in the SNA’s First Legion. Each of the three built his standing on a faction of his own.

These transfers matter because a faction leader’s real power comes from control over a concentrated body of fighters, weapons, bases and subordinate officers. A senior title inside a corps headquarters can remove him from his original force while conferring rank and status inside the state. Once the ministry controls salaries, appointments, ammunition, logistics, training and deployments, the former commander becomes dependent on the institution, and his authority ceases to rest on personal control of an armed organisation.

Why the SDF welcomes the changes: The SDF has clear reasons to welcome the weakening of Abu Amsha and similar commanders. Their forces were involved in Afrin and other areas where Kurdish civilians faced displacement, property seizures and serious abuses; both Abu Amsha and Saif Abu Bakr have been under US sanctions since 2023 over their factions’ conduct there. Removing them from direct command addresses a genuine Kurdish concern.

Claims that the SDF forced Damascus to remove these figures are poorly supported. The restructuring affects multiple divisions and commanders across the army and forms part of a wider programme of military centralisation. The SDF entered the January integration agreement after losing territory, strategic depth and much of its external leverage, and it is difficult to believe it held enough bargaining power to determine the internal command arrangements of several unrelated formations. The more plausible explanation is that al-Sharaa was already moving to dismantle the remaining factional commands and recognised that doing so would also reassure the SDF.

The timing serves him in two ways. He reduces the power of former National Army commanders while making integration look safer to Kurdish officers and fighters, who watch commanders associated with abuses lose control and may conclude they are joining a genuinely national army. That confidence makes the SDF more willing to dissolve its separate command, register its personnel and accept deeper integration. Once that process is complete, the same centralised hierarchy can gradually be turned on the SDF’s own autonomous power.

Al-Sharaa’s established method: Al-Sharaa has long experience in dismantling rival armed organisations. In Idlib, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or HTS, the movement al-Sharaa led before taking power in Damascus, moved gradually from a fragmented factional environment towards a centralised political and military structure. Rival groups were pressured, absorbed, subordinated or defeated, fighters from different backgrounds were placed in common training programmes and permanent formations, and decision-making became increasingly concentrated.

The current process is broader and more institutional, but the method is the same. Armed groups are first accommodated inside a larger system, their leaders are given titles and positions, and the state then centralises the functions that make those leaders independently powerful.

The SDF is a harder case because it entered through a negotiated political settlement and retains deeper institutions than most former opposition factions: an established command, internal security services, administrative structures and a substantial social base in parts of the northeast. Damascus therefore has to proceed more carefully. The expected result can still be the same, with SDF commanders retaining rank and political visibility while losing direct control over a self-contained military organisation.

Where the SDF fits: The January agreement requires SDF military and security personnel to enter the Ministries of Defence and Interior individually after security vetting. It allows the SDF to nominate candidates for senior military, security and civilian positions, and it preserves no independent SDF General Command above them.

The subsequent military arrangement provides for three SDF-derived brigades within a division for Hasakah Governorate and a separate Kobani brigade attached to a division in Aleppo Governorate. This gives the SDF an initial collective format for integration, since its forces are not immediately scattered as individuals across the army, but the protections end there. The text leaves brigade commanders without fixed terms, requires no SDF approval before they are transferred or replaced, and contains nothing that keeps the brigades exclusively composed of former SDF members or prevents the Ministry of Defence from assigning new recruits, academy graduates or officers from other formations to them.

The wording also leaves the Hasakah division open-ended. It says the division will include three brigades containing integrated SDF forces, which allows Damascus to add further brigades, support regiments, artillery units, engineering formations, logistics battalions and headquarters structures staffed through direct government recruitment. The division is defined as a formation for Hasakah Governorate as a whole, so its area can cover Qamishli, Malikiyah, Hasakah city, Shaddadi, al-Hol, Markada, Jabal Abdul Aziz and the wider countryside, and nothing in the agreement reserves particular sectors for the three former SDF brigades or restricts where they can be deployed within the governorate.

The separate provisions on locally recruited security forces apply mainly to the Interior Ministry and local policing, particularly in Kobani. Local recruitment is a geographic concept covering Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians and other residents of the relevant area, and it establishes no Kurdish-only army formations.

The scale of the SDF’s integration looks considerably smaller when set against the emerging structure of the army. On the five-corps version of the order of battle, and counting the brigade-level formations identified so far, the army appears to contain roughly 75 to 80 brigades. The four SDF-origin units therefore account for about 5 per cent of its brigade-level formations, or one in twenty.

Those four are also the only explicitly SDF-origin formations the agreement guarantees. Further SDF personnel can still enter the army, and how to accommodate them remains under discussion, with senior SDF commander Sipan Hamo suggesting battalions, regiments, attachments to existing brigades or additional brigades as possible formats. Nothing guarantees further exclusively SDF units, and the restructuring is moving towards breaking factional structures down rather than reproducing them.

The manpower figures point the same way. A government source confirmed in July that around 6,000 SDF officers and fighters had been registered with the Defence Ministry, roughly 5,000 of them inside the three Hasakah-area brigades. Other reporting puts the nominal strength of each new SDF-origin brigade at about 1,300, although the Qamishli brigade returned from training with 1,170 fighters. The four formations together therefore represent somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 soldiers. They are widely assessed as understrength, closer to reinforced battalion groups than to fully staffed Syrian brigades, which makes them smaller in practice than their designation implies. Even at nominal strength they amount to roughly half the manpower of a single standard division of about 10,000 personnel in the new force structure.

Damascus is building towards an army of approximately 200,000 personnel. Against that planned structure, 5,000 to 6,000 SDF-origin soldiers would represent around 2.5 to 3 per cent of total manpower. The figure is an intended end state rather than a verified headcount, but it is the relevant comparison for the force now being assembled.

The negotiating trajectory is more revealing than any single figure. In late 2025 the SDF and the PYD were still pressing for formulations that would preserve a large collective military structure. Senior PYD figure Saleh Muslim spoke publicly of three corps, and negotiations at the time included discussion of a three-corps arrangement under SDF commanders with Defence Ministry supervision. By December, SDF commander Mazloum Abdi was describing a narrower understanding, under which three SDF divisions and two specialised battalions, including border-security and women’s formations, would be preserved.

The January 2026 arrangement, reached after the SDF’s frontal collapse earlier that month, narrowed the outcome much further, to three brigades in Hasakah and one in Kobani. What was being discussed a few months earlier as a large and cohesive military bloc had become a handful of brigade-level units inside a national hierarchy. The result is less the incorporation of the SDF as a parallel army than its containment and dilution within a much larger force. Organisational continuity survives through four identifiable brigades and a number of senior appointments, while the military weight preserved under the final arrangement is substantially smaller than what the leadership was seeking only months before.

Direct government recruitment is likely to become the main instrument for changing the Hasakah formations, and the small size of those formations makes the task easier. The Ministry of Defence is opening recruitment offices across the provinces, including the northeast, and can recruit directly from Hasakah Governorate and assign personnel according to military requirements. These recruits may initially enter new brigades, divisional headquarters and support formations, and can later be added to the three SDF-derived brigades as the units expand, replace personnel or undergo internal restructuring.

The government therefore has no need to dissolve the brigades or move them out of Hasakah in order to dilute their inherited identity. A brigade can keep its name and base while receiving new recruits, centrally trained officers, logistics personnel and specialists, and former SDF commanders can be transferred to corps headquarters, ministry posts or military academies. Over time the brigade remains regionally based while losing the command relationships that made it part of a unified SDF structure.

The SDF has not yet formally dissolved, so its General Command remains a collective body able to negotiate over commanders, deployments and implementation. Dissolution converts its officers into individual members of the Syrian military hierarchy, and disputes over transfers, promotions and appointments can then be handled as internal Ministry of Defence business.

That shift gives the government greater room to promote senior SDF figures into prestigious national positions while separating them from their original forces, the treatment already visible with the former faction commanders. Damascus is unlikely to apply it aggressively to the SDF at once. The process remains politically sensitive, rapid changes could destabilise the agreement, and serious restructuring may take months, potentially extending into 2027 and beyond. The government can begin instead with administrative measures: centralising salaries, registering weapons, controlling ammunition, managing promotions, introducing common training and appointing officers to divisional and corps headquarters. Once those systems are established, the former SDF brigades will depend on Damascus well before their visible leadership changes.

The restructuring also carries consequences beyond the factional question. Syria remains in a transitional period without a permanent constitutional order or strong institutions capable of checking presidential power, and the current constitutional declaration gives the president extensive authority over the executive and considerable influence over the wider state structure.

Former armed factions are no substitute for constitutional checks, yet their military strength imposes practical limits on central authority because their cooperation has to be negotiated. Breaking those formations removes the remaining informal centres of power before effective civilian, legislative or judicial oversight has been established. The emerging army may become more unified and professional while also becoming more directly dependent on al-Sharaa and the military circle closest to him, and in the absence of stronger institutions the centralisation of the armed forces concentrates political power around the presidency.

For the SDF, the restructuring is useful in the short term. It weakens former enemies, offers senior positions to Kurdish commanders and helps its leadership justify integration to fighters and supporters. Its longer-term effect runs against what the SDF is trying to preserve.

The SDF appears to want to convert its existing military power into lasting influence inside the state through regionally based brigades, senior appointments and continued local presence. Al-Sharaa is likely to accept many of those arrangements during the transition because they make peaceful integration possible, while ensuring that ranks and representation carry no autonomous military power. The three SDF-derived brigades may remain in Hasakah, Kurdish officers may hold senior positions and local security arrangements may continue. Damascus, meanwhile, will control recruitment, appointments, logistics, deployments, training and weapons, and those functions determine who actually commands the military.

The treatment of Abu Amsha and the other factional leaders is best read as a demonstration of how Damascus intends to handle every faction that enters the army: recognition and positions first, then the gradual separation of commanders from their forces as effective authority moves to the centre. The current restructuring reassures the SDF today and previews the treatment its own units can expect once integration is complete.