As the Syrian army advances toward Hasakah city and presses deeper toward Syria’s core Kurdish areas, the SDF is increasingly on the diplomatic defensive. Its leadership is being pushed toward further concessions that many inside the movement view as tantamount to surrender. A key meeting in Erbil, hosted by KDP president Masoud Barzani and attended by SDF commander Mazloum Abdi and the US envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, appears to have produced contradictory messaging. Syrian Kurdish officials have suggested they received an “oral” assurance that the SDF would remain a cohesive bloc within the Syrian army, even as the written agreement points in the opposite direction.

Context: On 17 January 2026, Masoud Barzani hosted a meeting in Erbil between Mazloum Abdi and US envoy Tom Barrack. On 18 January, President Ahmad al-Sharaa announced an agreement with the SDF, which Abdi had already signed. Reports suggest Abdi signed during or immediately after the Erbil meeting, as Barrack subsequently met al-Sharaa in Damascus and the agreement was announced following that meeting, while Abdi did not travel to Damascus at the time.

Later on 18 January, al-Sharaa called Masoud Barzani. According to the Barzani readout, they discussed the agreement’s content, and Barzani also praised al-Sharaa’s presidential decree recognising Kurdish rights as a “solid basis” for protecting Kurdish rights in Syria.

On 19 January, Abdi, Rehelat Erfin, and other Syrian Kurdish officials travelled to Damascus to meet al-Sharaa and senior Syrian officials to discuss the agreement further. Syrian Kurdish officials say the talks did not produce an understanding and that the agreement effectively collapsed.

Analysis: Senior Syrian Kurdish commander Rehelat Erfin told Rudaw TV that Abdi did indeed sign the agreement, but added three key points. First, the immediate aim was to establish a ceasefire. Second, SDF officials were “orally” promised that the force would join the Syrian army as a bloc rather than being absorbed individually. This directly clashes with the written text, which explicitly states the SDF would join the army on an “individual basis.”

Third, Erfin indicated that a major sticking point in follow-on talks was the status of Hasakah city, the provincial capital. According to his account, al-Sharaa pressed for an immediate SDF withdrawal from the city—an insistence that Syrian Kurdish officials viewed as unacceptable given Hasakah’s strategic and symbolic importance as the only provincial capital that remains under their control.

What exactly has happened since remains unclear. But the trajectory suggests Barzani is under heavy pressure, and it is possible that Barzani and SDF officials are now operating on divergent tracks or reading the Erbil meeting’s outcomes differently. Furthermore, the trajectory of events — and the fact that Syrian Kurdish officials signed a written agreement that plainly contradicts what they claim they were promised privately — points to one of three possibilities: either they were naive to rely on an oral assurance that conflicted with the text they signed; they were simply outmanoeuvred; or they panicked under mounting pressure and are now trying to backtrack. In each case, it suggests serious weaknesses in the SDF’s diplomatic handling of the negotiations.

Meanwhile, protests in support of Syrian Kurds have spread across multiple cities in the Kurdistan Region, including Erbil, as emotions run high and many residents perceive the latest developments through the familiar lens of Kurdish “betrayal.” Whether or not that characterisation is fair is a separate question, but it is clearly shaping the public mood. Adding to the anger, Syria’s Ministry of Endowments issued a statement intended to bless the army’s advance that opened with a verse from Surat al-Anfal. For many Kurds, that reference is inseparable from historical memory: it evokes the same “Anfal” framing associated with Saddam Hussein’s campaign against the Kurds, intensifying alarm and outrage.

Barzani is thus balancing a surge of popular anger with the need not to cross lines that could trigger backlash from Turkey, the US, or other backers of the new administration in Damascus—backlash that could, in turn, jeopardise his own political position in the Kurdistan Region. He also has to weigh relations with Sunni Arab tribes in Iraq and across the Syrian border, as well as his ties to influential Sunni Iraqi leaders such as Khamis al-Khanjar, who has openly supported al-Sharaa. Many of Khanjar’s supporters are based in Erbil and have publicly backed the Syrian army’s advance.

Barzani has remained relatively quiet over the past two days, but his role is increasingly central as he is pushed—by circumstance and by regional expectations—into the position of a key broker for Syria’s Kurds. That is a striking turn of events given that the dominant factions in the Syrian Kurdish areas are aligned with the PKK’s orbit and shaped ideologically by Abdullah Öcalan’s movement.