On the latest developments in the SDF-Damascus integration process, a clearer disagreement is emerging over the future of the judicial system in the parts of Hasakah province that remain under SDF control.

The immediate trigger appears to have been the government delegation’s move into Hasakah city, where it reportedly took over the central court building with relative ease. But when it went to Qamishli the following day to do the same there, it appears to have met firm resistance from the SDF-backed judicial authorities. Reports remain conflicting, and each side is offering its own account of what happened.

From the government’s perspective, the matter is straightforward. Damascus argues that the January integration agreement requires the transfer of sovereign institutions to the state, and that the judiciary, as a core sovereign function, cannot be treated as negotiable or left under any parallel authority. The SDF side, by contrast, argues that this is an integration process, not a unilateral handover, and that the mechanism must be agreed jointly.

At the heart of the dispute is the SDF’s apparent desire for its judicial apparatus to be incorporated as a bloc into the Syrian state structure, rather than simply dissolved and replaced. Damascus is rejecting that logic outright, insisting there can be no separate legal entity or exceptional judicial order in any part of Syria.

The issue is deeper than control over court buildings. In the areas still under SDF rule, the legal system has diverged in important ways over the past decade. Polygamy, for example, has been banned, and civil registration practices, including the registration of children’s names, have followed a different system. Those close to the SDF argue that these are not minor administrative details but sensitive legal and social questions that require negotiated arrangements rather than a simple transfer of authority.

Another major fault line concerns personnel. Damascus appears to be saying that it will restore many judges and judicial staff who served before the SDF era, while also leaving room for some figures from the SDF-linked legal system to be integrated if they meet state standards. That, however, also raises the question of qualifications. Some of those who worked in the courts under the autonomous administration were trained in institutions in northeastern Syria that the Syrian state does not recognise. One reported proposal is for Damascus to retake the institutions, reinstate state judges, and then screen those who served under the SDF system, with some potentially allowed in after passing recognised legal examinations. That points to a possible technical pathway, but it also underlines how politically charged the issue is.

The dispute also seems to extend beyond the courts themselves. There are reports that the SDF side has refused to hand over judicial data and records for government review, again with both sides framing the issue differently. The SDF and its allies portray the government’s approach as an attempt to restore Assad-era state structures, even reviving judges associated with the Baath-era order. Damascus, for its part, presents what it is doing as nothing more than implementation of the agreement: sovereign institutions return to state control, and qualified local personnel can then be absorbed into them.

This matters because the judiciary is not an isolated sector. It sits alongside the more sensitive question of coercive authority: who controls arrests, detention, enforcement, and the broader security presence on the ground. Reports that the government is also expanding its role in Hasakah, Qamishli and elsewhere, and that some checkpoints separating SDF-held areas from the rest have already been removed with more expected to follow, suggest that the argument is really about the gradual unification of authority under Damascus.

That is where SDF fears become clear. Its concern appears to be that Damascus is moving step by step to absorb the strategic levers that matter most — courts, arrests, security presence, military sites, border points and other coercive instruments — in a way that would steadily hollow out SDF power and leave no realistic path back. Those fears are amplified by the fact that there are still no constitutional guarantees and no settled legal framework that would bind the state to any meaningful power-sharing arrangement once control is transferred. In practice, whoever holds coercive power will shape the outcome.

This is the core of the problem. The two sides still appear to be operating with very different expectations of what “integration” actually means. The SDF seems to want an arrangement that preserves much of its de facto authority, with integration remaining limited, gradual and in some areas largely symbolic. Damascus appears to see the process very differently: as the phased restoration of full state sovereignty, including over all strategic sectors, with no room for a parallel order in any form.

That is why the current disputes should not automatically be read as a collapse of the process. Friction of this kind is to be expected as negotiations move from broad understandings to concrete implementation. But they do reveal where the real tests lie. Progress in secondary areas is one thing; agreement over courts, arrests, security control and the machinery of coercion is something else entirely. Those are the points that will determine whether integration can be stabilised or whether the process eventually runs back into confrontation.