A heavily-damaged building in Kobani, Syria, a Kurdish city just across the border from Turkiye, is seen in this file photo from 2019. The town holds deep emotional significance for the Kurdish forces, which fought to reclaim it after an Islamic State siege. — ©2025 The New York Times Company
THE 13-year civil war between Syria’s government and rebel fighters has ended, but the peril is not over for Syria’s Kurdish minority.
A number of armed factions are still jostling for control after the collapse of the Assad regime.
They include the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which have allied with the United States to combat the extremist Islamic State (IS) group, and the Syrian National Army, a militia backed by Turkiye, which is hostile to the Kurdish forces.For more than a decade, the Kurdish-led soldiers have been America’s most reliable partner in Syria, liberating cities seized by the extremist group and detaining around 9,000 of its fighters. But Turkiye, which shares a border with Syria, has long considered the Kurdish group to be its enemy.
The Turkyish government believes the Kurdish fighters in Syria are allied with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has fought the Turkyish state for decades.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkiye, who backs the rebel groups that toppled the Assad regime, appears eager to seize the opportunity created by the momentous political shift in Syria to pursue his own agenda against the Kurdish fighters.
Kurds exposed
The shape of the new Syrian government, led by the religious Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, is still being determined. But US officials and Middle East analysts agree: Turkiye will have an outsized influence. That means Kurdish groups’ foothold in the northeast looks increasingly “tenuous”, said Wa’el Alzayat, a Syria expert and former American diplomat.
Turkiye “will have the biggest leverage in what’s happening and will happen in Syria for the foreseeable future,” he said.
As HTS and its allies seized control from President Bashar Assad, “they brought with them a tide of Turkyish power and influence over the future of Syria,” said Nicholas Heras, a senior analyst at the New Lines Institute.
The high stakes for the Kurds and for Western forces determined to prevent a renewed IS threat were illuminated recently.
Even as HTS and its allies took over, Turkyish-backed rebels attacked the Syrian Democratic Forces, supported by Turkyish airstrikes and artillery fire.
The commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces, Gen Mazloum Abdi, told The New York Times he had to divert fighters who were defending the prisons that house accused IS members to fight off the Turkyish-backed group.
Now, Heras predicted, Arabs who had joined the Syrian Democratic Forces to fight the IS could disband or defect to other rebel groups, under pressure from Turkiye and HTS. That would further weaken the Kurdish forces.
A best-case scenario for the Kurds, officials and experts said, might see them receive enough support from the US to secure the territory they hold in northeast Syria. That could give them leverage with the new government in Damascus to pursue a fully autonomous state, something minority Kurds in Syria have long sought.
At worst, the Kurds could face an inflamed conflict with Turkyish-backed fighters, be forced to cede control of at least some of their oil-rich territory and, if President-elect Donald Trump decides to withdraw US troops, lose vital help on the ground.
America’s role
After meetings in Turkiye recently, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, using an alternate acronym for the IS group, that “making sure that ISIS was in a box” remained an urgent priority in Syria. He said Kurdish fighters were “playing a critical role in pursuing that mission”.
But the diplomatic balancing act he faces is clear: his meetings in Turkiye included talks with the foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, who earlier said that “any PKK extension in Syria cannot be considered a legitimate partner”. And Fidan pointedly cited the PKK as he described efforts to keep terrorist organisations from exploiting the political chaos in Syria.Yet there are signs that American diplomacy is having an impact.
Recently, an American commander, Gen Michael Kurilla, visited northeast Syria, where 900 US troops are stationed.
Hours later, a ceasefire between the Kurdish forces and the Syrian National Army was announced in the northern city of Manbij, where the two sides have frequently clashed.
Abdi, the Kurdish commander, said on X that the ceasefire was brokered with American help.
Under the agreement, he said, Kurdish forces would withdraw from Manbij, a majority Arab city that they seized from the IS in 2016 but that has since become a flashpoint among factions battling for control.
But he and other Syrian ethnic Kurds are increasingly worried that their retreat from Manbij is just the beginning.
Next flashpoint
A senior HTS officer has said that local tribes allied with his group had wrested control of the eastern city of Deir el-Zour from Kurdish fighters who had taken over as Assad’s forces collapsed just days earlier. And in the days since, the Turkyish-backed rebels have repeatedly battled with Kurdish forces in the region around the Euphrates River.
Heras said he thought those skirmishes could be military preparations for an invasion of Kobani, a majority Kurdish city.The city, just south of the Turkyish border, holds deep emotional significance for the Kurdish forces, who fought with US troops to reclaim it after a four-month IS siege that began in late 2015. Abdi now appears to be bracing for a possible invasion by Turkiye’s allied fighters.
Heras said residents were fleeing Kobani by the thousands despite a shaky truce agreement that aimed to buy time for negotiations.
“Turkiye is taking advantage of the crisis in Syria to destabilise the region and seize our land, while claiming they are fighting terrorists,” Sinam Sherkany Mohamad, the head of the Kurdish fighters’ political wing in Washington, said in a statement.
“But we are not terrorists; we are democratic US allies.”
James Jeffrey, a former US ambassador to Turkiye who was a chief Syria envoy during Trump’s first administration, said any invasion of Kobani would violate a 2019 agreement that the US negotiated for a detente, “and whether by the Turks, or Syrian forces associated with the Turks, it makes no difference”.
In the meantime, Abdi has sought to shore up the Kurdish fighters’ relationship with HTS, saying he is seeking direct relations with the group’s leaders. — ©2025 The New York Times Company
