On August 25, at the People’s Palace in Damascus, Mazloum Abdi announced the dissolution of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the organization he had led for a decade. Speaking first in Arabic and then in Kurdish, he declared that the force had integrated into the Syrian army and would no longer operate independently. Fifteen days earlier, Turkey’s parliament had passed framework legislation enabling the disarmament of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. That group has long been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, all of which have conducted extensive campaigns against it for decades. Two armed organizations that Ankara had long viewed as a unified security threat stood down within a fortnight.
This represents not merely a security achievement for Turkey but also a significant domestic political victory for its president. Under the prevailing interpretation of Turkey’s constitution, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can seek re-election only if the constitution is amended or parliament votes to renew both presidential and parliamentary elections during his current term. Article 116 requires 360 of parliament’s 600 members to support such renewal. The governing coalition falls short of that threshold. However, the Kurdish-aligned Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party’s 56 deputies could supply the missing votes.
“Snow has fallen on the mountains you dreamed of.”
We opened our December 2024 War on the Rocks article with this Turkish proverb, as Bashar al-Assad’s fall appeared to deliver much of what Ankara sought in Syria, though not without fresh risks. Above all, Assad’s ouster seemed to eliminate the Kurdish threat to Turkey’s position in Syria. Turkey now finds itself in a stronger position: Relations with the new al-Sharaa government in Damascus have deepened, and its regional standing has improved. Yet the forces that generated this advantage remain precarious.
In 2024, we accurately identified the growing interconnection between international, regional, and domestic factors. We did not anticipate, however, how rapidly these pressures would converge or how decisively they would alter the balance. Between spring 2025 and August 2026, these dynamics reinforced one another because Ankara approached the Turkish and Syrian Kurdish issues as a single security challenge. That convergence produced no formal treaty, no independent guarantor, and no constitutional protection. What emerged is a settlement of arms, not yet a resolution of the Kurdish question, and it remains vulnerable to the political and strategic volatility that made it possible.
The Arithmetic of a Third Term
The crackdown on Turkey’s opposition and the opening toward Kurdish politics form part of the same strategy. In May, an appeals court annulled the leadership contest of the Republican People’s Party—Turkey’s storied but long-troubled main opposition party—and reinstated a former leader against the wishes of party members. Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul’s popular and politically skilled mayor, has been imprisoned and under trial since March. In July, the party fractured, with 91 deputies departing. These setbacks weakened the primary partner with which the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party might have constructed an alternative majority. Repression rendered outreach more valuable to Erdoğan and refusal more costly for Kurdish politicians.
The Kurdish issue has long served as the opposition’s vulnerability. The Republican People’s Party risks accusations of negotiating with terrorists when it seeks Kurdish support, yet it cannot assemble a governing coalition when it retreats from Kurdish demands. The pressures of 2026 transformed that dilemma into dependence by weakening the party and narrowing the opposition’s path to power.
Earlier peace initiatives boosted the popularity of the pro-Kurdish party while costing the government nationalist support, precisely when Erdoğan required a parliamentary majority to establish an executive presidency. Negotiations threatened the constitutional project they were meant to advance, leading the government to pursue the ballot box instead. Erdoğan once again needs Kurdish votes for a constitutional objective, but a weaker and divided opposition has reversed the incentive structure. The Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party can now support his project without becoming the focal point of a rival coalition.
Nevertheless, Erdoğan has maintained his distance. Kurdish votes may benefit him, but owning the process could expose him to nationalist backlash. This matters because Erdoğan still relies on the Nationalist Movement Party: Its leader, Devlet Bahçeli, can open political space for negotiations, but Erdoğan’s personal ownership of Kurdish concessions could strain the coalition and alienate the nationalist voters sustaining it. Legislation grants these concessions state authority without making the president their personal guarantor, preserving room to retreat if the political cost escalates. That distance also conceals a policy disagreement. June polling indicated that 68 percent of Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party voters opposed a continued Turkish military presence in Syria, compared with 38.2 percent nationally. Yet they could still reach an agreement—not one built on a shared vision for the country and its people, but on immediate political interests.
A Partnership That Ended on Schedule
Washington began collaborating with Kurdish-led forces in northeastern Syria in 2014, and the Syrian Democratic Forces became its primary local partner after their formation in 2015. This partnership had one stated objective: defeating the Islamic State. However, due to its connection to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, Turkey strongly opposed the partnership and launched successive military campaigns against Kurdish forces in northern Syria. Nevertheless, a decade of cooperation between Syria’s Kurds and Washington endowed the relationship with broader political significance. The Syrian Democratic Forces’ battlefield record established the Kurdish-led system in northeastern Syria, which they call Rojava, as an international cause. European supporters embraced its claims to local democracy and women’s participation, and the European Parliament continued pressing for Kurdish rights in February 2026. That support raised hopes about what the partnership might preserve, but it never evolved into a security guarantee. When Washington determined the mission complete, American forces withdrew from Syria in April. On August 24, the United States rescinded Syria’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, marking a further pivot toward the new central government in Damascus.
Abdi had understood the partnership’s limitations for years. In a January 2022 interview, he objected to Washington tying its commitment to the military defeat of the Islamic State and argued that American forces should remain until a political settlement was achieved. His complaint revealed the fundamental problem: He sought to transform a counter-terrorism partnership into a political guarantee. Abdullah Öcalan’s February 2025 appeal for disarmament then offered a pathway away from armed struggle that Abdi exploited to negotiate terms with Damascus. When hostilities threatened northeastern Syria in January 2026, Öcalan urged Kurdish leaders to combine resistance with diplomacy and maintain the integration agreement.
Many Kurds experienced the American withdrawal as abandonment, and with good reason. Yet Washington’s departure narrowed their options without making those choices for them. With Öcalan promoting a political course, Abdi exchanged a vulnerable military position for an uncertain role within Syrian institutions. Kurdish politics in Syria shifted from defending territory under an American umbrella to bargaining over local authority, constitutional rights, and representation in Damascus. The United States had never pledged to preserve Kurdish autonomy, but its presence had allowed the Syrian Democratic Forces to negotiate as if such a commitment existed. Nothing comparable remained after the troops departed.
Syria reinforced the distinction. From 2013 to 2015, Syrian Kurdish forces gained standing in Washington and European capitals through their fight against the Islamic State. Kurdish actors in Turkey believed that success strengthened their position, while the siege of Kobani in September 2014 brought the Syrian conflict into Turkish politics and deepened mutual mistrust. Syria subsequently expanded Kurdish options. The American withdrawal and dissolution of the Syrian Democratic Forces have now narrowed those options.
A Window That Closed
In December 2024, we anticipated that regional instability would enhance the strategic value of Kurdish actors. The conflict with Iran partially confirmed that assessment. After American and Israeli strikes began in early 2026, Iranian Kurdish armed groups based in Iraq offered Washington something Iran’s exiled opposition lacked: organized networks spanning Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. These groups attracted American interest as a potential ground component against Tehran, but that interest never translated into the sustained backing necessary to generate political leverage.
The Trump administration discussed operations in western Iran with Iranian Kurdish groups and requested that Iraqi Kurdish leaders facilitate their cross-border movement. Kurdish leaders in Iraq resisted. They feared Iranian retaliation and were unwilling to enter a ground war. Turkish officials also contacted Kurdish leaders and reportedly pressured U.S. officials to discourage intervention. By March 7, Trump was urging Kurdish forces to remain uninvolved, and Iran’s foreign minister later credited Ankara with helping prevent a new front. The episode demonstrated that Kurdish strategic value had increased. It also revealed how quickly Kurdish caution and Turkish diplomacy could constrain it.
Military evolution further narrowed the opportunity. Guerrilla forces once relied on terrain, concealment, and time to outlast stronger states. Drones, surveillance, and precision weapons have undermined that model. Turkey spent a decade employing these tools against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Iraq and Syria, limiting its ability to hide and regroup. Ankara also acted to prevent foreign interest in Kurdish forces from developing into a lasting relationship or fostering a Rojava-like entity in Iranian Kurdistan. Its engagement with Öcalan and its pressure on the Syrian file narrowed that possibility before another crisis could expand it.
Viewed retrospectively, Öcalan and Erdoğan’s coalition partner, Devlet Bahçeli, had already recognized that the same shift was underway. Öcalan declared that armed struggle had reached its limit, while Bahçeli extended an olive branch to Kurds in Turkey and beyond. Their initiatives emerged from different positions but together opened a political channel amid strategic pressure.
Disorder raised Kurdish strategic value, but Turkey helped prevent that value from becoming durable leverage. By the time Bahçeli opened a political channel domestically, Ankara had reduced the regional alternatives available to Kurdish actors. Regional pressure and the domestic arithmetic were beginning to reinforce one another.
The Last Authority of Abdullah Öcalan
Turkey’s limited amnesty crystallized this alignment into an outcome by linking the Turkish and Syrian tracks. It takes effect only after the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and all affiliated organizations cease their activities, dissolve, and surrender their weapons. Turkish security institutions must verify compliance before the National Security Council activates the law. By including affiliated organizations, parliament tied the fate of the Syrian Democratic Forces to the return of fighters from Turkey. This linkage entered law on August 10, fifteen days before Abdi announced the dissolution in Damascus.
The law defined compliance, but Öcalan’s intervention made that compressed timeline possible. His authority over commanders who had served with him in Syria before his expulsion in 1998 enabled him to steer Kurdish leaders toward a common course after decades in prison. The political opening in Turkey and military integration in Syria could then proceed in tandem. Yet this represents a vulnerability as well: His authority is personal, finite, and cannot automatically transfer to a successor or institution.
The law still excludes Öcalan from the arrangement he helped make possible. Individuals serving life sentences for offenses committed before 2005 remain outside its scope, so his release remains a demand of the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party rather than a term of the settlement. His February 2025 appeal had already renounced separate nation-states, federations, administrative autonomy, and “culturalist solutions.” He narrowed the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s objectives before the law gave him a personal or institutional stake in the outcome.
Öcalan also operated within limits set by Turkey’s influence over Damascus. Ankara shaped what President Ahmed al-Sharaa would concede. Kurdish leaders gained positions within the Syrian state and cultural rights, but they did not preserve the institutions through which they had governed. The agreement replaced a parallel Kurdish-led order with a struggle for influence within a centralized state. Turkish power established its outer boundaries.
Yet neither Öcalan nor Abdi speaks for a unified Kurdish constituency. The Kurdish National Council joined the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Democratic Union Party on a common platform only in April 2025, but the agreement did not place the council under Abdi’s command. Nor did dissolution erase divisions within the Syrian Democratic Forces: Arab tribal defections contributed to the January collapse, while the Women’s Protection Units resisted losing their separate status. The mixed reaction in the northeast demonstrated that Abdi could dissolve a command without resolving how these constituencies would be represented.
Northern Iraq also remains part of the process. Much of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s armed presence resides there, and the first symbolic disarmament near Sulaymaniyah brought together Turkish intelligence, the Kurdistan Regional Government, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party. Nechirvan Barzani also mediated between Abdi and Damascus. Verification therefore depends on cooperation from both Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. If either withdraws, Öcalan’s call and Ankara’s law may not establish whether disarmament has occurred.
These divisions do not alter the fundamental Kurdish demand. After withdrawing fighters in late 2013, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party sought constitutional rights that no government could reverse. In August 2026, it again described the framework only as a first step toward constitutional protection. Ankara has also maintained its existing framing. Earlier legislation was titled the Law to End Terror and Strengthen Social Integration. Today’s measure is the Law on Strengthening National Solidarity and Social Integration. Both laws integrate an armed movement without resolving the constitutional status of Kurdish rights.
The comparison with 2015 illustrates why favorable conditions do not last. Domestic and external pressures can bring actors together and then separate them when the balance shifts. The current convergence is genuine, but it remains a favorable moment rather than an achievement that can survive the conditions that created it.
What the Settlements Still Lack
Turkey’s arrangement remains conditional. The law suspends sentences for probationary periods of five to ten years and places investigations in abeyance, but only after the National Security Council publishes a verification finding, expected following its October meeting. Turkish security institutions determine whether disarmament has occurred, and the council decides when benefits begin. The state is simultaneously a party to the process and its arbiter.
Syria made more visible concessions. Damascus granted citizenship to Kurds left stateless by the Baath regime, authorized Kurdish-language teaching, and promised senior state roles to Kurdish leaders, including Ilham Ahmed. These gains matter, especially when January might have ended in broader warfare. Yet they also reveal the terms of the compromise: Damascus replaced collective autonomy with individual offices and rights granted from the center. No constitution yet makes those rights binding.
That gap matters because the Syrian state has not demonstrated that it can protect minorities. Mob attacks and reprisals continue, perpetrators seldom face charges, and the new security services remain predominantly Sunni. Minority recruits often fill administrative or unarmed roles. A government that cannot yet protect Alawites, Druze, and Christians cannot secure Kurdish rights through decrees alone.
The absence of an outside guarantor leaves both tracks vulnerable. Kurdish representatives sought third-party involvement during previous Turkish peace talks, but Ankara rejected even the monitoring commission discussed at Dolmabahçe in 2015. Today, a vice president chairs the Turkish board, four working groups manage implementation, security bodies verify compliance, and a council chaired by the president makes the final decision. Damascus likewise controls its constitutional process and the implementation of its own decrees. Both settlements, therefore, ask the party granting rights to certify that it has honored them.
Syria’s constitutional process will determine whether the settlement endures. It can transform appointments and decrees into rights that survive the interests behind them. American pressure for such protections will create friction with Ankara, which opposes a separate Kurdish armed command and territorial autonomy in Syria. Yet equal citizenship, Kurdish-language education, political participation, and elected local administration can fit within the unitary Syrian state that both Washington and Ankara support. The disagreement is genuine, but narrower than a dispute over autonomy.
Washington should define enforceable protections in institutional terms. Syria’s constitution should protect equal citizenship, Kurdish-language education, political participation, and elected local administration. Implementing laws should establish deadlines, budgets, and avenues for appeal. Most broad American leverage has already been expended: Comprehensive sanctions ended in July 2025, Congress repealed the Caesar Act in December 2025, and Washington rescinded Syria’s terrorism designation in August 2026. Waiver authorities tied to that designation have also lost much of their value. What remains includes targeted sanctions, licenses for controlled exports, and American influence over the World Bank and donor financing. Projects that strengthen central ministries, the security sector, or state financial institutions should proceed in stages tied to public implementation benchmarks.
Reporting need not depend on Damascus. The Fiscal Year 2026 defense law already requires an unclassified presidential report every 180 days for four years on minority rights and implementation of the March 2025 agreement. The State Department should draw on U.N. human rights bodies, Syrian civil society, the Kurdish National Council, and Arab and Kurdish local representatives, publishing the evidence in an annex. Damascus may contribute, but it should not certify its own compliance.
The Turkish track offers outsiders less leverage. Washington cannot condition a domestic amnesty law, and visible American sponsorship could reinforce Ankara’s claim that Kurdish politics are directed from abroad. The safeguards must therefore be created within Turkey: Parliament should publish verification criteria before benefits begin, provide judicial review, add cross-party and civil-society participation to monitoring, and issue regular implementation reports. Verification in northern Iraq should include authorities in both Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. The United States and European governments can press for these measures privately and support independent documentation, but they cannot substitute for a guarantor that Ankara refuses to accept.
Another Turkish saying holds that “with patience, the sour grape becomes sweet halva.” Patience helped produce the agreements now taking shape on both sides of the border, but political choices have not yet been secured through law. Domestic, regional, and international interests now point in the same direction. They have transformed Turkey and Syria. Still, they have not yet produced peace. Until law and institutions can hold the settlement together when those interests shift, favorable conditions will remain a condition rather than an achievement.
