PARIS — The Syrian army and Kurdish armed forces began withdrawing from their positions on the outskirts of Syria’s northeastern Hasakah city on Tuesday as part of the latest ceasefire and integration agreement between Damascus and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Earlier in the day, the leadership of Syria’s Internal Security Forces met with their counterparts from the Kurdish Asayish in Hasakah city to discuss joint deployment within the city, local media reported.
The withdrawals came around a week after Damascus’s Internal Security Forces entered Hasakah and Qamishli, SDF strongholds in Syria’s northeastern Hasakah province, as part of the integration agreement announced on January 30.
Government security forces, numbering no more than 150 in each city, are stationed in what is known as the “security square” in both Qamishli and Hasakah, while the SDF and Asayish remain in control of the cities’ residential neighborhoods.
The split control echoes the status quo in the two cities prior to the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in December 2024, when regime forces maintained a presence in the security squares.
The SDF and Asayish have reportedly continued to conduct what residents have described as arbitrary arrests in Arab-majority neighborhoods of the two cities, including after celebrations in response to the entrance of government forces last week.
The latest integration agreement between Damascus and the SDF consists of 14 provisions, including a comprehensive ceasefire, the withdrawal of military forces from points of contact and the entrance of Internal Security Forces into Qamishli and Hasakah to “strengthen stability and security.”
The deal also provides for integrating institutions of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES)—the civilian, administrative counterpart of the SDF—into the state while retaining public sector employees in their positions.
The agreement also launches a phased integration of military and security forces through the formation of a military division made up of three SDF brigades. A fourth brigade of “Kobani forces” is to be formed and included within a separate military division in Aleppo province.
In contrast to previous agreements—in March 2025 and January 18, 2026—both sides are taking practical steps to implement the provisions of the January 30 deal, as evidenced by Tuesday’s reported withdrawals. Still, significant obstacles remain to its full implementation.
One potential obstacle stems from the text of a previous January 18 agreement—upon which the most recent January 30 integration framework is based—which includes the SDF’s commitment to the “removal of all non-Syrian Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leaders and members to outside the borders.”
In recent days, signs of diverging understandings of the current agreement have emerged, with Damascus characterizing it as a comprehensive integration process while voices from within the SDF describe it in terms that, in some cases, amount to an implicit rejection.
Speaking to the British newspaper The Telegraph on February 3, Ruksen Mohammed, the spokesperson for the SDF’s Women’s Protection Units (YPG) said the agreement would see her forces remain as an independent armed group in Kurdish areas, “ready to fight” if the need arose.
Salih Muslim, a member of the presidential council of the Democratic Union Party (PYD)—established in 2003 as a Syrian offshoot of the PKK and now the political umbrella of the SDF—has described the latest agreement as a framework that would usher in only limited changes on the ground.
“The current military structure will be preserved,” Muslim told the Mezopotamya Agency, an Istanbul-based Kurdish news site, on January 30. “Local administrations will be entirely in our hands. Security forces will also remain under our control,” he added.
“The gains achieved by the Kurds to date will be preserved. Education, institutions and organizations will continue as before. Internal security forces [Asayish] will remain in place,” the PYD leader added. “A limited number of personnel from certain state institutions may be present in some areas, but the administration will be entirely in our hands.”
Compared to the announced text of the agreement, such statements point to a deep gap in both interpretation and expected implementation. How the SDF and Damascus move forward will determine whether the latest deal can last, or whether it will fall victim to the same fate as previous agreements.
Notably, those referred to as the “Qandil current” within SDF leadership—influential figures and members with ties to the PKK—have been accused of obstructing any agreement with Damascus and pushing for “non-national” or separatist projects.
What role and influence do such figures maintain within the organizational structure of the SDF, and what does this mean for the success of the latest agreement? And, if pressed, are those within the SDF who appear committed to its success actually capable of acting to remove non-Syrian PKK members, as called for under the January 18 agreement?
Deep ties
Founded in neighboring Turkey in the late 1970s, the PKK, as a transnational political organization committed to increased autonomy and rights for Kurds, put down roots in northeastern Syria over the decades that followed.
Avin (a pseudonym), a Kurdish journalist living in Hasakah, remembers how members of the organization would periodically visit her family’s home in the 1990s. She was taught Kurmanji by one party cadre who used to visit her village when she was five years old.
At the time, PKK members used to visit Kurdish villages to “collect donations and educate Kurds about nationalism and their rights,” Avin told Syria Direct, requesting anonymity for safety reasons.
When she was older, working at a Kurdish educational institution, she attended two private trainings organized by PKK cadres. The first centered around ideological lessons, sports activities and reading political and literary texts chosen by each trainee. The second, which lasted for a month and a half, consisted of specialized lessons in Kurdish language, grammar and literature, alongside ideological lessons and instruction in teaching and interacting with children, she recalled.
The trainings Avin attended did not include explicit calls to join the PKK, but “the trainees were moved by the Kurdish cause,” she recalled. “After every course, one or two people would decide to join and become military members.”
During the second training, which she attended to develop her language skills, Avin found herself moved by the party’s ideals, too. However, “I was reluctant to join them because I was afraid of military action,” she said. “I asked for time to get to know more about them and their activities before making the decision to join.”
When the course ended, she went back to her job as an educational administrator. Her workplace was overseen by four cadres from the party, and over the course of several months afterwards she faced “severe psychological pressure” to join, she said.
“They pressed me, calling my nationalism into question, saying I don’t love my cause and don’t want to defend Kurdistan, saying: How will you protect yourself and your family if you are attacked,” she recalled, while “comparing me to my colleagues who joined them.”
Avin continued to refuse, and the cadres ultimately relented after her brother joined the Revolutionary Youth Movement (Ciwanên Şoreşger). The youth group, which is active in SDF areas and has ties to the PYD and PKK, has been involved in recruiting children into armed groups.
From her own experience, Avin feels “their basic goal is for every family to have one person in the party,” she said. “If you decide to leave the party, you will become a traitor and they will eliminate you or slander you, so there are those who want to leave but cannot.”
‘Qandil cadres’ in the SDF
After suffering unprecedented territorial losses and defections by Arab forces in recent weeks, what remains of the SDF is made up primarily of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ). Following the loss of Raqqa and Deir e-Zor, large parts of Hasakah province and much of the area of eastern Aleppo surrounding Kobani (Ain al-Arab), these remaining forces are deployed in the predominantly Kurdish areas of Qamishli, Kobani, Dirbasiyeh and Hasakah city.
“Practically, there is no more so-called SDF in an independent sense,” Kurdish political activist Kawa Jaziri told Syria Direct from his residence in Austria. “They are essentially a creation of the international coalition, originating from the People’s Protection Units, which are ideologically and organizationally linked to the PKK. This was done to avoid classifying them as a terrorist organization and use them to fight the Islamic State.”
The United States, which led the international coalition against IS, considers the PKK a terrorist organization, as does the European Union, Turkey and a number of other countries.
“The end of the operational role of the international coalition has returned things to how they were before. The [YPG/J] remain—the military arm of the PKK in Syria,” Jaziri added.
“Repeated promises made by SDF leadership regarding independence from the PKK have not been fulfilled,” Kurdish political writer Abdulbaset Sieda said. “The Qandil leaders are still influential and active,” which helps explain “the SDF’s hesitation in taking a final position on the agreement with Damascus and starting implementation.”
“Qandil cadres” are present in various departments of the SDF and its administration, “and the actual decisions are in their hands. This situation is similar to that of the Sharaaists [figures tied to Ahmad al-Sharaa or Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)] distributed across the various departments and bodies of the Syrian government,” Sieda said.
“It is not easy to remove their influence, though there are many experienced individuals in the region who could fill the void, if the intentions were sincere,” he added.
A Kurdish political researcher in Qamishli, who asked to remain anonymous on condition of anonymity, agreed. “Separating the SDF and Qandil is not possible,” he said, because “most Syrian SDF leaders are cadres who have worked for years within the PKK, and they adopt the party’s ideas and principles.”
“The current agreement is an attempt by Qandil to buy time and circumvent the al-Sharaa government, and I do not expect it to hold,” the researcher added.
For his part, one Syrian army colonel, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to make statements to the media, stressed that “removing non-Syrian PKK elements is one of the basic terms of the agreement with the SDF, and the Syrian government has lists of their number and names.”
“The Syrian government has no problem with Syrian members of the PKK remaining, so long as they completely break their ties with Qandil,” the officer added. However, he ruled out the possibility of any “Qandil cadres” holding public positions at the national or provincial level.
‘The duality’
The agreements signed between Damascus and the SDF since the start of the year “are the culmination of field operations on the ground, and they are the result of the SDF’s intransigence in implementing the March 10 [2025] agreement” between al-Sharaa and Abdi, said Muhammad al-Sukari, a researcher at the Arab Center for Contemporary Syrian Studies.
While delaying implementation of last year’s agreement, the SDF sought to “exploit the ethnic dimension and promote narratives that ultimately lead to further sectarian and ethnic polarization,” al-Sukari said.
Today, the SDF faces “two options, either become a state actor, meaning integrate militarily into the current reality, or become an underground actor whose effectiveness lies in tunnels, not cities,” he added. “This will cause it to lose its demographic and geographic presence and become a militia, which is what it is.”
While “Mazloum Abdi and Ilham [Ahmed] are not serious about implementing the agreement, they are being forced to do so with international and American blessing,” he added. “The SDF knows that failure to implement it could lead to a military operation that would completely end its existence.”
Accordingly, “we are moving towards implementing the agreement, and there will be no military operations even if the SDF procrastinates,” al-Sukari believes. “Damascus is inclined towards negotiation, and uses violence for coercive diplomacy—using violence to bring the SDF back to the negotiating table.” This “successful, two-pronged approach has yielded military and political gains,” he said.
As Sieda reads the situation, SDF commander Abdi and his close associates “want to complete the agreements with Damascus, but there are differences between him and a number of other cadres directly tied to PKK leadership.” While there is “talk about the removal of some PKK leaders and cadres,” the “nature of the party and its lack of transparency in announcing decisions makes it very difficult to verify this.”
“Unless a process of complete and final separation between the SDF and the PKK is completed, the problem will persist and the duality will remain,” Sieda added.
“All the forces present in northeastern Syria represent arms of the PKK, and play different roles. Some deal with the international coalition, while others used to deal with the [Assad] regime and Iran, and there are those who coordinate with Russia and Turkey,” activist Jaziri said.
The question of ousting the PKK from Syria—or non-Syrian members, as under the January 18 agreement—goes beyond “the ability of Mazloum Abdi alone, and it has been discussed for years between Turkey, the US and the PKK itself,” Jaziri said. “Abdi tried to limit the influence of the Qandil current but failed, as it still has the upper hand in decision-making.”
Still, the activist does not rule out “peaceful solutions for each individual member or leader of the PKK,” adding “the file has reached an advanced stage, and it is expected that they will ultimately accept a settlement, especially after losing most of their allies.”
But the Qamishli-based researcher downplayed the chances of the agreement’s success and the SDF’s desire and ability to remove non-Syrian PKK members from the country. “The party can still mobilize its cadres, fabricate problems and crises and escalate against Damascus, especially pressure is exerted to get it out of Syria,” he said.
The Syrian government appears to be betting on “increasing the rift and conflict between SDF currents by strengthening Mazloum Abdi’s current—the Syrian current—and granting its leaders positions and gains in exchange for removing PKK elements,” the researcher added.
It is a gamble he doubts can succeed. “The PKK has penetrated Kurdish society for decades, and there are families known for their loyalty and historical support for the party. It is difficult to get rid of Qandil cadres or permanently remove them from the Syrian scene,” he said.
In addition, the question of former regime fighters within the SDF is “among the most problematic points,” al-Sukari said. “Will the SDF hand over lists of the names of PKK forces and regime remnants whose presence today is concentrated in Qamishli and border regions with Turkey and Iraq?”
For his part, the Syrian army officer expects “the current agreement will hold this time, since it is completely different from what came before. All the cards of strength have been taken from the SDF. It lost vast areas it controlled, lost control of oil and gas wells, and Arabs and Syriacs defected from it,” he explained. Additionally, “there is serious American pressure to make the agreement a success and not go back to square one.”
“Mazloum Abdi is serious about implementing the agreement, but we do not know the extent to which he will be able to abide by his commitments,” the officer added.
Asked whether Damascus would pursue non-Syrian members of the PKK in the event they remain in the country, the officer said it “depends on the developments of the coming days.” For now, “things are going well, and there are positive steps that have been taken cautiously to implement the agreement and resolve issues,” he added.
The PKK’s future in Syria
In al-Sukari’s view, the removal or sidelining of figures most closely tied to the PKK would “have a positive impact on the SDF and the region as a whole, because these forces not only control military and political decisions, but the entire economy.
“Their exit would free the area and give Mazloum Abdi and the SDF more space to work independently,” activist Jaziri echoed.
Sieda feels similarly. “With the exit of PKK elements, many dilemmas would be solved,” he said, citing what he described as Turkey’s experience of “opening up to its Kurds,” which “led to a fair solution to the Kurdish issue there, especially after Abdullah Öcalan’s call to lay down arms and dissolve the PKK.”
Öcalan, the imprisoned founder of the PKK whose political thought is also a guiding principle for the PYD, called in February 2025 for the group to lay down arms and dissolve itself. At a congress the following May, the PKK announced its decision to end its decades-long conflict with Turkey, cease military and political activity in the region and ultimately dissolve.
“If the PYD, which is the SDF’s political arm, severs its ties with the PKK and acts as a Syrian Kurdish faction with Kurdish and Syrian priorities within the general framework, many obstacles will be resolved, and this is what we hope for,” Sieda said.
Whether or not non-Syrian affiliates leave the country or PKK truly dissolves, its legacy and influence in Syria will likely remain, Arvin said. “Their influence may decrease, but it is unlikely their movements would stop. Some are considering becoming employees of government institutions as Syrian citizens, and some others want [the job] as a cover.”
“In the past years, many members of the PKK fled. I know several people who left the party and went back to their families, and the first thing they did was marry,” she added. Committed members of the PKK are prohibited from leaving the party or marrying.
“Whoever stays with the party is either someone who believes in the Kurdish cause, or who cannot escape for fear of defamation or murder,” Avin said.
“There are two types of cadres in the party,” she explained. One is “a local cadre, an unofficial member who has a role in community work, such as organizing people or overseeing the communes. They may participate in war when needed, and they can marry, start a family, live a normal life and leave the party at any time.”
But for official party members, “their work is either fighting or supervising institutions, and these members cannot easily leave,” she added.
This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.
