Why Turkey Was Right to Reject the SDF Model

First:
“I will do my best to fix the problem we have created for your country, Turkey… If we leave without thinking this through and without addressing the YPG problem we ourselves created, northeastern Syria will be far worse off… There are elements among the Syrian Kurds that constitute a legitimate national security threat to Turkey. Turkey’s concerns regarding the YPG must be addressed in a real way to ensure secure borders. Any final settlement in Syria must take Turkey’s national security interests seriously.”

Later:
“If the new Syrian government uses military force against the Syrian Kurds and the SDF, it would cause massive instability and tell me everything I need to know about this regime. Should such military action occur, I will do everything in my power to reinstate the Caesar Act sanctions—this time in an even more crushing form.”

These are not merely the inconsistencies of a single controvertial name confronting a serious crisis. They reflect a deeper contradiction—one that the United States and Europe themselves manufactured through the PKK problem they helped internationalize. Years ago, I described this contradiction on these pages as “Another killer solution for Syria: using one group of terrorists to fight another.”

A decade ago, in 2015, the final and most consequential step in Barack Obama’s Syria policy—one that helped push the country further into catastrophe—was the creation of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Obama had already offered the Assad regime its first political lifeline after it crossed the chemical weapons red line. With the formation of the SDF, Washington shifted the center of gravity of the Syrian crisis to an exaggerated ISIS threat. This, in turn, effectively greenlighted Russia and Iran’s open-ended support for the regime. By 2015, all opposition groups fighting Assad were rebranded—by the regime and its allies—as ISIS-adjacent under the banner of counterterrorism. This “legitimacy transfer” shattered the opposition; only those backed by Turkey managed to survive, narrowly, in Idlib.

Meanwhile, the SDF—benefiting from a vastly inflated legitimacy transfer and Western protection—morphed into the country’s dominant armed force in practice. The YPG was elevated as the sole and natural representative of all Syrian Kurds. In Western media and policy discourse, “Kurds,” “YPG,” and “SDF” became interchangeable terms. When Turkey’s objections were dismissed, Ankara crossed the Syrian border militarily.

For ten years, under the cover of intense U.S. airpower, the SDF came to control Syria’s most strategic cities. During this period, ISIS—never a deeply rooted force in Syria—was largely eliminated. Yet even after its raison d’être disappeared, the SDF was preserved and expanded under American and European pressure. Encouraged by exaggerated Western backing, it succumbed to the illusion of de facto statehood. At the same time, it drifted entirely out of touch with Syria’s political and human reality. The mass killings carried out by the regime, the millions displaced, the hundreds of thousands tortured in prisons—none of this featured in the SDF’s worldview. Its formula was simple: avoid confronting Assad, keep the ISIS threat rhetorically alive to guarantee Western support, and maintain ISIS prisons that themselves became synonymous with war crimes.

For the PKK, none of this was new. The organization did not enter Syria in 2015. Forty-five years ago, when Abdullah Öcalan walked into Syria on foot and established a seamless relationship with the Mukhabarat, the pattern was already set. The PKK is a Cold War artifact—nurtured under the Syrian Baath regime as a Soviet-aligned proxy, flourishing amid Turkey’s era of military repression. Just as Öcalan spent years in Damascus without ever raising the systematic denial of Kurdish existence or the regime’s human rights abuses, the PKK showed no interest in the Syrian people’s struggle over the last fifteen years. Its calculation was always the same: invest in Syria’s fragmentation and extract an Iraqi Kurdistan–style status while having a grave shortage of Kurdish population.

That story ended on December 8, 2024, with the Syrian revolution. After that moment, the “S” in SDF was irreversibly altered. The PKK struggled to accept that Syria itself had changed. The “D”—“Democratic”—also became untenable, given that none of the PKK cadres leading the SDF had ever gained legitimacy through the locals. Finally, the “F”—“Forces”—entered crisis, as the Arab Sunni tribes added to mask the PKK’s identity lost relevance once Damascus itself transformed.

What remained of the Syrian Democratic Forces was, quite simply, the PKK. Everyone knew this, yet throughout 2025 no one dared say that the emperor had no clothes. Instead, negotiations were pursued between Damascus and the SDF to avoid renewed conflict—despite the fact that Syria’s army was eager to reclaim occupied territory and Washington had signaled it would not intervene directly. Israeli provocations unsettled Damascus, shifting its priorities in line with Turkish and American advice. A reasonable agreement was signed in March. The SDF complied with none of its provisions—hardly surprising to anyone familiar with the PKK. Tensions escalated. Syrian army operations beginning in Aleppo forced partial SDF withdrawals. Then, the very power that had created the SDF—the United States—announced its dissolution through its ambassador. A dystopia inflated by years of speculative analysis finally collided with reality. For anyone familiar with American patterns, it was a familiar ending.

The United States has repeatedly relied on armed proxies and then withdrawn support when priorities shift, leaving those partners exposed. From the Iraqi Kurds in 1975 to Indochinese allies, South Vietnam, the Afghan mujahideen, the Contras, and the SDF, Washington has treated proxies as disposable instruments, not partners. Its rhetoric on values and ideology collapses under tactical expediency—arming Islamists against communism, later condemning political Islam, and then backing the Marxist PKK-rooted SDF in Syria. This is not a series of accidents but a governing logic: risk is outsourced, abandonment normalized, and moral language deployed only when convenient.

The SDF is now gone. The PKK must decide what it intends to do in Syria. Any long-term agreement with Damascus is implausible so long as the PKK maintains an armed presence. As the Syrian state consolidates and rebuilds institutional capacity, confrontation will be unavoidable. Agreements designed merely to postpone conflict cannot hold under these conditions. An organization that has survived for decades by violently eliminating rival Kurdish movements lacks the political maturity to grasp Syria’s new reality. Recent statements by PKK-linked figures openly courting Israeli support only underscore this blindness.

The PKK’s internal worldview is fundamentally incapable of grasping the transformations unfolding across the region. Operating within an almost conspiratorial mental universe, PKK thinking failed to recognize the collapse of the proxy order itself. We are now entering a phase in which even Saudi Arabia and the UAE—states long accustomed to proxy competition—are confronting one another more directly, setting intermediaries aside. Across the Middle East, Assad’s regime—once a Russian proxy—along with the Iranian-backed proxy networks in Syria and Lebanon, and the various proxy formations in Iraq, are all eroded or collapsing. In such an environment, was it ever plausible for the SDF to survive as a proxy force—especially in a Syria where the regime was ultimately overturned by forces whose principal external backer was Turkey?

For forty-five years, the PKK has existed as an armed organization without ever clearly explaining why it took up arms in the first place. It has not only polluted the Kurdish human rights struggle but also served as Turkey’s most convenient excuse for democratic stagnation. After half a century without developing even a basic political language or vision, the PKK has nothing to offer Syrian Kurds. Beyond providing “rent-a-militancy” services to regional powers, it has no function.

Turkey, meanwhile, faces a historic opportunity to resolve its Kurdish question—an opening that has existed for over a year. Whether the PKK will seize it remains unclear. Öcalan has repeatedly urged PKK cadres in Syria to become part of this new framework. Yet the PKK fears disarmament more than it values armed struggle. This fear stems not only from political atrophy but from the comfort of living inside a self-contained “PKK world”—with its own language, theology, psychology, and conceptual universe. It is a world difficult to penetrate from the outside.

We are, in a strange way, back in 2014 in northern Syria—the moment when the PKK first embedded itself across the region. But history never repeats itself cleanly, and this time almost everything that once sustained that reality is gone. Bashar al-Assad is no longer the immovable center of gravity. Russia and Iran are no longer the guarantors of the old order. ISIS, the justification for everything, has disappeared. And the United States has quietly but decisively changed course. Meanwhile, in Turkey itself, a process aimed at ending the PKK’s armed struggle is already underway. Yet in Syria, the PKK behaves as if none of this matters—as if time has stood still. That insistence carries a dangerous implication: in a post-ISIS Syria, the PKK risks becoming the next organizing threat around which instability is once again defined. If history teaches us anything, it is that when armed movements refuse to adapt to new political realities, they are eventually recast not as solutions, but as problems.

For half a century, the PKK has not been an organization capable of even comprehending who and what the Kurds are, let alone grasping Turkey’s societal and political dynamics, the state itself, or Turkey’s geopolitical and alliance realities. Today, it is out of the question for any ordinary Kurd to understand the political language used by PKK, or for an average Kurd to make sense of the PKK’s discourse. In the Turkish context, the PKK’s Kemalist alienation is far—miles—ahead of the alienation that Turkish secularists feel toward Turkey.

Now, the integration of such a structure—suffering from this level of severe alienation pains—into Syria is being discussed. Of course, for a mindset that is not even at peace with organic and ordinary Kurdish identity itself, it is highly doubtful that it could enter into any genuine integration with the Syrians—who have been enduring heavy suffering since the years of the First World War—without first breaking free from the PKK worldview.

When the conversation turns to integration, the PKK is almost the last actor one should have in mind. From its very inception, the organization has defined itself not by coexistence but by exclusion—systematically and often violently eliminating Kurdish political movements that lay outside its control. Over decades, the PKK has shown little capacity to integrate with anyone who does not fully inhabit its ideological universe, submit to its rigid chain of command, or speak the political language it has crafted for itself. Integration, after all, requires pluralism and compromise; the PKK’s record suggests a preference for domination and conformity instead.

In Syria, stripped of the SDF camouflage, one scenario looms large: the PKK shedding embarrassment and reverting to its core identity. Damascus knows this organization well—but missteps are likely unless Turkey helps manage the process. At this stage, the only viable path is for the PKK in Syria to join the broader resolution process Öcalan himself has advocated in Turkey. The dissolution of the SDF must be followed by the dissolution of the PKK—not only for the sake of Kurds, Syria, and Turkey, but for the PKK itself.

If Damascus is prepared to recognize all legitimate Kurdish rights, it must not be allowed for the PKK—after exacting a half-century toll on Turkey’s Kurds—to impose the same cost on Syria.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/syria-after-assad-sdf-officially-dead-what-comes-next