Syria’s government announced on Sunday that it had reached a ceasefire agreement with the secular-led Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as part of its effort to unite the nation following 14 years of bloody civil war. Under the agreement, the government will take over land held by the Kurdish armed group.
Despite this, Syria’s army and the SDF both reported on Monday night’s ongoing gun battles in the country, particularly around an ISIL (ISIS) prison.
What did the two parties agree on Sunday?
President Ahmed al-Sharaa said the Syrian Army would take control of three eastern and northeastern provinces – Raqqa, Deir Az Zor and Hasakah – from the SDF as part of the deal.
According to this agreement, an official from Syria’s defense ministry said government-affiliated forces had arrived on the outskirts of the city of Hasakah in the country’s northeast on Monday.
As part of a wider 14-point agreement, Syria’s defense and interior ministries are now incorporating the SDF.
Al-Sharaa’s government pledged to reunify Syria following the ousting of former President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. A decree recognizing Kurdish as a “national language” and granting official recognition to the minority group was issued by al-Sharaa on Friday.
The end of the SDF is what Omar Abu Layla, a Syrian affairs analyst, told Al Jazeera.
The SDF in Syria represents the struggle of the Kurdish people, an ethnic group present across the Middle East.
The Kurds are who?
The Mesopotamian plains and nearby highlands, which are now home to southeastern Turkiye, northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and southwestern Armenia, are home to a group of people called the Kurds. The Kurdish population is concentrated in these areas, which are collectively referred to as Kurdistan.
Kurds do not have a state of their own because they are spread across several different Middle Eastern nations. Additionally, they have a sizable diaspora population, with the majority in Germany and other European nations like France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
There are between 30 and 40 million Kurdish people around the globe. The Kurds are regarded as the world’s largest stateless ethnic group, having a shared culture and a strong Kurdish language.
The dialects of Kurdish, a language spoken in the northwest of Iran, are diverse and linguistically distinct. Most historians agree that Kurds constitute the Iranian branch of the Indo‑European peoples.
While the majority of Kurds adhere to Sunni Islam, there are also Kurdish communities that practice Christianity, Yazidism, and other faiths.
Why are the Kurds stateless?
When the Ottoman Empire seized the majority of Kurdish-held territory in the 1500s, the Kurds lost their land.
Post-World War I peace treaty, the Treaty of Sevres, established the Ottoman Empire in 1920.
Under this, the Allied powers proposed creating an autonomous Kurdistan. The emerging Kurdish nationalist movement saw this as a significant advance, but the treaty was never implemented. Later, Turkishye and the Allies renegotiated the post-war agreement, and the 1923 Lausanne Treaty completely rejected the notion of a self-governing Kurdistan.
Since then, Kurds have repeatedly tried to establish their own state, but those efforts have so far failed.
How do Kurdish grievances in Iraq, Syria, and Turkiye differ?
Kurds have endured years of difficult relations with their respective governments in each of the four countries.
Syria
Kurds make up about 10 percent of the population in Syria, according to the CIA World Factbook.
Repression and unfair treatment have been practiced against Syrian Kurds.
About 120 000 Kurds were denied Syrian citizenship in 1962 by a special census in al-Hasakah province. Their children and grandchildren remained stateless, and later estimates from early 2011 put the number of Kurds without citizenship at around 300, 000.
Arab communities have also been given access to Kurdish land as a result of Arabization policies.
When the uprising against al-Assad started in 2011 and turned into a civil war, the Kurds were initially at peace. However, in 2012, Syrian government troops pulled out of many Kurdish areas, and Kurdish groups took control.
ISIL (ISIS) fighters began attacking three Kurdish areas in northern Syria that were close to the organization’s territory in 2013. The Syrian Kurdish political party, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), fought them off with the Syrian Kurdish armed group People’s Protection Units (YPG). The YPG was backed by the Turkiye-based Kurdistan Workers ‘ Party (PKK).
Kobane, a Syrian Kurdish town, was taken over by ISIL in 2014. In early 2015, Kurdish forces led by the YPG and supported by American-led air strikes retake control of the town after months of intense fighting. Later that year, in October 2015, the YPG and allied Arab and other factions formally established the SDF as a broader coalition to fight ISIL across northern and eastern Syria.
The SDF pushed into Deir Az Zor, ISIL’s final major stronghold, before capturing Raqqa, the de facto capital of the SDF in Syria, in October 2017. Baghouz, the final piece of ISIL-held territory in Syria, was taken by the SDF by March 2019.
Al-Assad remained in power until he was ousted in December 2024 by Syrian opposition fighters led by al-Sharaa, who is now the interim president.
Al-Sharaa issued an official decree on Friday as part of his campaign to unite Syria that officially recognizes Kurdish as a “national language” alongside Arabic, enables its teaching in schools, and grants citizenship to all Kurdish Syrians. Additionally, the decree removes measures that were used to actively deport many Kurds from Syria in the Hasakah province census of 1962.
The decree officially recognises Kurdish identity as part of Syria’s national fabric for the first time and declares Newroz, the Kurdish New Year festival, a paid national holiday.
Additionally, it establishes penalties for “initiating to ethnic strife,” grants rights to Kurdish Syrians, and prohibits linguistic or racial discrimination.
The Syrian government’s north and northeast region’s Kurdish government said in a statement that the decree was “a first step, but it does not fulfill the aspirations and hopes of the Syrian people.” It called for more action.
It stated that “rights are not protected by temporary decrees, but rather by permanent constitutions that express the people’s and society’s goals.”
Turkiye
Kurds make up 19% of Turkiye’s population, but generations have seen their names and outfits be banned.
The Kurdistan Workers ‘ Party (PKK) was founded in 1978 by Abdullah Ocalan, with the aim of creating an independent Kurdish state in southeastern Turkiye. The group launched an armed rebellion against the Turkish government in 1984, attacking state institutions and security forces with guerrilla attacks.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and many more have been displaced in Kurdish-majority areas as a result of the PKK-Turkish security forces’ subsequent conflict.
In the 1990s, the PKK rolled back its demands, instead seeking greater cultural recognition. It continued to use affiliated parties and organizations to advance its armed resistance against the Turkish state.
The Turkish-based PKK has ties to the SDF’s secular Kurdish leadership. Although the PKK signalled in early 2025 that it would lay down its arms and disband, it is still listed as a “terrorist” group by Turkiye, the European Union and the US. PKK fighters and Turkish forces continue to engage in violent clashes.
Despite this, the US supported the SDF because it was a successful partner in the fight against ISIL, which the SDF and a US-led coalition had already defeated in northeast Syria by 2019.
Iran
Kurdish people make up nearly 10 percent of Iran’s population.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was established in Iran as a result of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Kurdish forces in Tehran frequently clashed with the Persian-speaking, Shia Muslim government over Kurdish demands for political autonomy and cultural and linguistic rights, despite the Islamic Republic’s initial support for the Islamic Republic and briefly controlling parts of Iran.
Several Kurdish groups have long opposed the government in western Iran, where they form a majority, and there have been periods of active rebellion against government forces in those areas.
In Iran, violent uprisings in the 1980s and 1990s were severely suppressed. Important Kurdish parties were forced to leave their strongholds, and many of their fighters and leaders retreated across the border to bases in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region. Civilian communities were also forced into Iraq, although large Kurdish communities remained inside Iran.
As an armed conflict with Iran’s Islamic Republic, the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PKK) was established in 2004. Since then, it has been conducting guerrilla attacks and ambushes against Iranian security forces from positions along the Iranian-Iraq border.
Iraq
Kurdish people make up between 15 and 20 percent of the population in Iraq. They have historically enjoyed greater rights than the Kurds in neighboring countries, but they continue to face oppression in Iraq.
In 1946, Kurdish nationalist leader Mustafa Barzani established the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) to fight for independence in Iraq. In 1961, he launched a full armed struggle in what is often referred to as the First Kurdish–Iraqi War or the September Revolution.
The conflict continued into the 1970s, with occasional clashes in Iraq’s northern provinces. The government then began settling Arabs on Kurdish soil and relocating Kurds in the late 1970s. Some of them – many Yazidis – settled in “Mujammaat” or army-controlled towns or settlements in northern Iraq.
A Kurdish uprising was led by Barzani’s son, Masoud Barzani of the KDP, and Jalal Talabani of the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Iraq in 1991, the year Iraq lost the Gulf War. The administration of the time, led by Saddam Hussein, violently suffocated it. More than 1.5 million Iraqi Kurds fled to Turkiye to escape a crackdown by Hussein’s regime. In response, Turkey imposed its own borders. In northern Iraq, the United Nations established a “safe zone” for refugees in April 1991, killing thousands along the border. Eventually, most people returned to their homes in Iraq after the situation stabilised.
The Kurdistan National Assembly, the first democratically elected parliament in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, established the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in 1992. The KRG took control of the now semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq after the UN granted them protection in 1991.
While the KDP and PUK agreed to share power, they experienced rifts and at times engaged in armed fighting with each other between 1994 and 1998.
However, the two organizations worked together to defeat Hussein in 2003. Duhok, Erbil, and Sulaymaniyah were the three provinces that Masoud Barzani led the KRG controlled. In 2005, Talabani became Iraq’s first Kurdish president.
In the semi-autonomous Kurdish region and in disputed, Kurdish-claimed regions like Kirkuk, which is south of Erbil in northern Iraq, the KRG held an independence referendum in 2017. Baghdad rejected the poll as unlawful despite more than 90% of voters’ support for independence.
The Iraqi Supreme Court ruled that the referendum was contrary to the Iraqi Constitution, which calls for the preservation of Iraq’s unity and territorial integrity.
The Kurds lost significant oil revenues and attempted statehood were severely hampered by Iraqi forces’ subsequent invasion of Kirkuk and other disputed, dispersed regions.
