Syria’s descent toward a renewed civil war in early 2026 did not occur suddenly, nor was it the result of a single military confrontation. Rather, it emerged through a sequence of political agreements, decrees, and failed negotiations that revealed deep and unresolved disagreements between Syria’s new Arab-Islamist leadership in Damascus and the Kurdish-led autonomous administration in the north and east of the country, commonly known as Rojava.
To make sense of how we reached today’s escalation, sieges, bloodshed, ISIS prison breaks, displacement, collapsing trust, and a country again split along armed lines, it helps to read Syria’s crisis through seven key agreements and decrees. Each one promised “integration.” Each one avoided the hard question: integration into what?
Seven Deals That Failed to Make a New Inclusive Syrian State
Syria finds itself in a new civil war because the country’s post-Assad order has been built on a chain of agreements that never resolved the core dispute: what kind of state Syria will be and who controls the force within it.
For the Kurdish-led Democratic Autonomous Administration in the Northeast Syria (DAANES) and its military backbone, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the goal since 2012 has been to turn battlefield survival into a political settlement: decentralization, constitutional recognition, and security guarantees for Kurds and other minorities. For the new leadership in Damascus, as it was for the former Assad regime, the priority has been the opposite sequence: territorial reunification first, monopoly of force second, politics later, with “later” often meaning after power has been consolidated. This is the booklet of authoritarian regimes the Kurds have lived with since the beginning of the 20th century.
1) The new constitution: the original exclusion that poisoned everything
On 13 March 2025, interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa ratified a constitutional declaration launching a five-year transitional mandate.
For Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS)-led Damascus, this was a state-building milestone: a legal foundation for a new order. For the Kurds, it was the first major signal that the new Syria might reproduce an old pattern: Kurds spoken about, not spoken with. The Kurdish side argues they were not meaningfully included, and more importantly, that the document embedded a centralist logic that treats decentralization as a bargaining chip rather than a principle. For the Kurds, centralization has been traumatic and genocidal since the modern unitary nation-state models came into existence in West Asia.
This matters because constitutions do not only distribute rights; they distribute power. The Kurdish leadership’s fear is not simply cultural erasure. It is institutional vulnerability: if the state’s architecture is centralized, then any promises made by negotiators can be reversed by future decrees, ministers, or security chiefs. The Kurds understand they cannot have central positions in Damascus to prevent cultural and political rights erasure.
In other words, the constitutional declaration created the first strategic mismatch: Damascus’s approach is: “Agree on sovereignty now; we’ll discuss models later.” While the Kurdish approach speaks of: “Agree on the model now; sovereignty without guarantees becomes domination.”
The Kurds in Syria have learned their lesson from the Kurds in Iraq; the model first, as the Kurds in Iraq gained their federal arrangement and secured it through a democratic constitution.
From this point forward, every negotiation carried the same Kurdish question: What stops Damascus from returning Syria to pre-2011 governance the moment we disarm?
2) The March 10 Agreement: a handshake that substituted for a settlement
The 10 March 2025 agreement between Ahmed al-Sharaa and SDF commander Mazloum Abdi was widely treated as historic: a roadmap to integrate DAANES into the Syrian state by the end of 2025, with ceasefire language and commitments on rights and representation.
However, the deal's flexibility was also its weakness. It allowed both sides to interpret “integration” as they saw fit. For Damascus, “integration” meant dissolution of parallel institutions, especially armed ones. For the SDF/DAANES, “integration” meant entering the state as a negotiated bloc: maintaining some chain-of-command continuity, preserving local security structures, and guaranteeing Kurdish rights in binding constitutional language.
According to a Kurdish politician, who preferred to remain anonymous, Kurds are happy to integrate, but what Damascus wants is assimilation.
This disagreement is not merely semantic. It reflects a fundamental difference between a power-sharing arrangement—based on decentralized governance and local security—and a surrender mechanism, in which the central state absorbs all authority and local actors are reduced to employees. Throughout 2025, committees formed and held meetings. But the structural deadlock stayed: Damascus wanted a unitary state; the Kurds wanted decentralization with enforceable guarantees. And Turkey hovered over the process, repeatedly pressing for the dismantling of the YPG[1]-linked security architecture along its border, turning negotiations into a three-player game even when only two signatures were on paper.
3) The April Aleppo agreement: the “pilot project” that became a warning
In April 2025, the Kurdish neighborhoods of Aleppo, Sheikh Maqsoud, and Ashrafiyah became a test case. The agreement aimed to restore state authority while protecting Kurdish cultural identity, with security arrangements involving the Ministry of Interior and the Asayish (internal security linked to the SDF).
A Kurdish official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described it as a 'mini-March 10': if this could work in Aleppo, perhaps national integration could work too.
But what made the Aleppo deal fragile was the same question: who ultimately commands coercion? In centralizing states, local security forces are often tolerated only temporarily. When political pressure rises, the center pushes to replace “coordination” with “control.”
That is what happened. By January 2026, Aleppo became an arena of coercive bargaining: sieges, heavy fighting, and mass displacement. Instead of proving coexistence, Aleppo revealed something darker: without constitutional guarantees and reliable enforcement, local agreements can become traps for all parties involved. For the central government, they limit sovereignty; for the Kurds, it can be revoked at gunpoint. Aleppo also exposed a narrative collision:
Damascus framed the operations as efforts to “restore order” and dismantle an armed enclave. Kurds, however, experienced them as collective punishment and as a preview of what “integration” would look like elsewhere. When a pilot project ends in siege and displacement, it does not remain a local incident; it becomes a lesson.
4) Decree No. 13: cultural recognition without political safety
On 16 January 2026, al-Sharaa issued Presidential Decree No. 13: recognition of Kurdish cultural and linguistic rights, Newroz as a national holiday, and cancellation of discriminatory measures linked to the 1962 Hasakah census, including pathways to citizenship for previously unregistered/stateless Kurds.
Historically, this is significant. Symbolically, it is unprecedented.
Politically, however, it came at a moment when Kurdish civilians were witnessing sieges and bombardments, not reading decrees. This is why many Kurdish voices treated the decree as insufficient: language rights do not stop tanks. Kurds have suffered many losses. They were not expecting to be given anything by the new Syrian Arab State; they were expecting the new state to recognize their political gains.
“The deeper Kurdish critique is institutional: decrees are reversible”, another Kurdish politician reported. Constitutional protections are harder to undo. So Decree 13, while meaningful, did not answer the Kurdish fear that matters most: If Kurdish forces integrate individually and the autonomous institutions dissolve, who protects Kurdish-majority areas from hostile factions, revenge violence, or “security campaigns” justified by terrorism narratives?
In a country where armed groups have repeatedly abused civilians (remember the Druze and Alawites massacres in 2025), Kurds are not only bargaining for identity; they are bargaining for survival and protection mechanisms.“
5) The Paris mechanism: external diplomacy that changed the battlefield
On 6 January 2026, U.S.-mediated talks in Paris produced a coordination and communication mechanism between Syria and Israel.
For Damascus, this was a strategic breakthrough: reduced risk of Israeli escalation and a pathway toward international normalization. For Turkey, it lowered uncertainty and helped align priorities with Damascus in the northeast. For the Kurds, it looked like the ground shifting beneath their feet: when major powers reconfigure “stability,” minorities often become negotiable.
The Kurdish reading is straightforward: as Damascus gained external room to maneuver, it gained internal coercive confidence. And as Washington’s posture tilted toward state consolidation, Kurdish leaders felt they were losing the leverage that came from being the Coalition’s key local partner against ISIS.
One can see this geopolitical logic in recent reporting: Syria’s government advanced militarily while the U.S. emphasized integration and ceasefire management rather than protection of Kurdish autonomy. It is familiar with the Kurds; the Kurds had a similar experience with the U.S. in 1975 and 2017.
6) The January 10 agreement: integration terms the Kurds read as “disarm first.”
By early January 2026, amid fighting and shifting lines, ceasefire understandings began to circulate, some described as a January 10 ceasefire or integration framework. Public reporting around that period emphasized the same unresolved issue: Damascus demanded accelerated integration; the Kurdish side warned that deals without guarantees amounted to surrender. In fact, the Syrian leadership clearly asked Mazloum Abdi to surrender in his last meeting in Damascus.
Why did Kurds “not like” those terms?
The Kurds perceived the Damascus sequence as potentially locking them into a dangerous path: first, withdraw or hand over territory; second, dissolve armed formations; and only then discuss political arrangements. For the DAANES/SDF, following this sequence was seen as existentially risky.
By contrast, their preferred sequence has always been the opposite: first, agree on decentralization and protections; second, constitutionalize those protections; and only then integrate security arrangements under a negotiated model.
This highlights the fundamental clash: Damascus aims for a typical so-called Arab Middle Eastern unitary state. At the same time, the Kurds seek a new social contract within a multinational Syria—a Syria for all, not just for Arabs.
When those two visions collide, the battlefield becomes a negotiating tool. Each clash is not just a security event; it is a bargaining signal about who will accept whose sequence.
7) The January 19–20 ceasefire: “Full integration” as the price of stopping the war
On 18 January 2026, SANA, a Syrian Arab news agency, published a 14-point “Ceasefire and Full Integration Agreement” between the Syrian government and the SDF. It included: immediate ceasefire; withdrawal of SDF formations east of the Euphrates as a step toward redeployment; handover of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor administrations; transfer of border crossings and oil/gas fields to Damascus; individual integration of SDF personnel into Defense and Interior Ministries; ISIS detainee files transferred under state responsibility; and provisions on Kobani security and removal of non-Syrian PKK members.
This agreement is a watershed because it formalizes what had been the quiet drift of the past months: the autonomy project shrinking under combined military, diplomatic, and economic pressure.
The agreement also sheds light on the underlying priorities that have shaped the conflict. Issues such as sovereignty, control over resources and crossings, ministerial authority, vetting procedures, redeployment, and chains of command are emphasized. Conversely, questions of constitutional decentralization, long-term power-sharing guarantees, women’s governance structures and mechanisms for minority protection receive less attention. This imbalance clarifies the framework within which the conflict is currently being addressed.
That imbalance explains Kurdish skepticism. The Kurdish fear is not only losing territory; it is losing the institutional DNA of DAANES – local councils, women’s political architecture, and pluralist protections – inside a centralized state that can later reshape them.
And the violence around the ceasefire shows how thin trust has become: ceasefires are announced, then tested, violated, renegotiated, and tested again. Recent reporting describes a fragile truce and intense U.S. pressure to maintain it while integration plans are demanded on short timelines.
In short, three fundamental disputes recur across these seven milestones: centralization versus decentralization; monopoly of force versus negotiated security; and cultural rights versus political power.
How this ends, and what “success” would actually look like
If Syria manages to avoid a wider civil war, it will not be because another ceasefire is signed. Rather, it will be because the parties finally resolve the sequencing problem. Damascus must accept that minority integration cannot be sustained by coercion alone because coercion produces compliance rather than loyalty. Meanwhile, the Kurdish leadership must accept that permanent parallel armies are incompatible with a unified state and that security integration must be collective, phased, and guaranteed.
For many Kurds in Syria, a workable settlement would likely require four pillars:
- Constitutional guarantees (not just decrees) recognizing Syria’s pluralism and decentralizing key governance domains.
- A phased security integration model – local policing first, joint commands second, defense integration last – monitored by credible third parties.
- Protection of DAANES institutional gains that have broad social legitimacy, especially women’s participation and minority safeguards.
- A credible ISIS detention and counterterrorism framework that does not collapse under political revenge or administrative chaos.
- Power and revenue sharing, in which Kurds and other minorities will be assured that they are heard in the center and that revenues are delivered to them.
Until then, Syria’s agreements will continue to function as they have for the past year: as temporary pauses in a struggle over the state itself.
And in that struggle, the danger is not only the Kurdish-Arab conflict. The danger is the re-normalization of a Syrian rulebook where power is centralized, dissent is securitized, and minorities are offered symbolism instead of safety. When that happens, “unity” becomes a slogan for domination, and the country returns to the logic that led to its collapse in 2011.
The 15-day extension of the ceasefire between the Syrian Arab Army and the SDF has raised cautious hopes that, under U.S. and French pressure, Damascus and the northeast may reach a political agreement that meets Kurdish demands.
[1] YPG is the Kurdish-led armed force.