Syria’s army took control of swathes of northern Syria and threatened to bomb parts of Raqqa province on Saturday after Kurdish forces pulled back from ethnically Arab territory they had held for over a decade.
The Syrian army said it had begun entering the city of Tabqa in Raqqa province, adding that it was “encircling” the Kurdish forces at their military airport.
“Syrian army forces have begun entering the city of Tabqa via various axes, in parallel with encircling the PKK terrorist militias inside Tabqa military airport,” the operations unit of the army told the official SANA news agency.
The Syrian government, which has close relations with Turkey, sometimes accuses the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) of being a front for the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which has fought the Turkish state since the 1980s.
The government appeared to be seeking to extend its grip on parts of the country under Kurdish control a day after President Ahmed al-Sharaa issued a decree declaring Kurdish a “national language” and granting the minority official recognition.
The Kurds have said the move fell short of their aspirations.
The army drove the SDF from two Aleppo neighbourhoods last week and took control of an area east of the city on Saturday, after implementation stalled on a March deal that was supposed to see SDF forces integrated into the state.
The SDF control most of northeastern Syria, including oil-rich areas where the majority of the population is Arab rather than Kurdish.
Authorities later announced they had seized two oil fields near the city of Tabqa in Raqqa province.
An AFP correspondent in Deir Hafer, some 50 kilometres (30 miles) east of Aleppo city, saw several fighters from the SDF leaving the town and residents returning under heavy army presence.
Syria’s army said four soldiers had been killed, while SDF forces reported several fighters dead, as both sides traded blame for violating the withdrawal deal.
Kurdish authorities ordered a curfew in the Raqqa region after the army designated a swathe of territory southwest of the Euphrates River a “closed military zone” and warned it would target what it said were several military sites.
SDF claims ‘betrayal’
SDF chief Mazloum Abdi on Friday had committed to redeploying his forces from outside Aleppo to east of the Euphrates.
But the SDF said Saturday that Damascus “violated the recent agreements and betrayed our forces during the implementation of the withdrawal provisions”.
It said Kurdish forces were clashing with troops in an area south of Tabqa, “which was outside the scope of the agreement”.
The army meanwhile urged the SDF leadership to “immediately fulfil its announced commitments and fully withdraw to the east of the Euphrates River”.
US envoy Tom Barrack was in Erbil on Saturday to meet Syrian Kurdish leader Mazloum Abdi, a source in the presidency of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region told AFP.
The United States for years has supported the SDF against the Islamic State extremist group but also backs Syria’s new authorities.
The US Central Command on Saturday urged “Syrian government forces to cease any offensive actions in the areas between Aleppo and al-Tabqa”, in a post on X.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron and the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Nechirvan Barzani, called for deescalation and a ceasefire, the French presidency said.
Sharaa’s recognition of Kurdish rights
Sharaa’s announcement on Friday was the first formal recognition of Kurdish rights since Syria’s independence in 1946.
The decree stated that Kurds are “an essential and integral part” of Syria. They had previously suffered decades of marginalisation and oppression under former rulers, including under deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad and his late father Hafez.
It made Kurdish a “national language” and granted nationality to all Kurds, 20 percent of whom had been stripped of it under a controversial 1962 census.
The Kurdish administration in Syria’s northeast said the decree was “a first step” but “does not satisfy the aspirations and hopes of the Syrian people”.
“Rights are not protected by temporary decrees, but… through permanent constitutions that express the will of the people and all components” of society, it said in a statement.
In Qamishli, the main Kurdish city in the country’s northeast, Shebal Ali, 35, told AFP that “we want constitutional recognition of the Kurdish people’s rights”.
Yara, 42, a Kurdish artist in Damascus who declined to provide her full name, said the government needed to “provide guarantees to earn the Kurds’ confidence”.