Wise after the fact

The battle over who gets to define what happens in northeast Syria has been in full swing since government forces attacked Kurdish-majority neighbourhoods in Aleppo city in late December. Attacked by government forces? That’s framing! Wasn’t it the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that escalated first with snipers and suicide drones, followed by what some described as Syria’s 9/11: a drone strike on the Aleppo governorate building that left a hole in a concrete slab? That, too, is framing. Here, responsibility is shifted away from the SDF while the limited mandate of the Sharaa government is obscured by omitting that it is a transitional government. There is no reporting without framing. What matters is remaining open to critical reasoning and plural interpretation so essential for the reconciliation Syria needs. 

There follow three points where dominant narratives do not withstand scrutiny. They are, obviously, open to debate.

Much of the circulating narrative presents the 10 March agreement as a missed opportunity by the SDF. In this account, the agreement laid out a clear path toward integration, but the SDF rejected reasonable offers from Damascus, failed to meet the agreed deadline at the end of 2025, and thereby triggered the subsequent escalation. This reading, however, reduces the agreement to a narrow question of military integration, often concealed behind technical language of security sector reform. At the same time, it treats the negotiating position of the government in Damascus as self-evidently legitimate, pragmatic, and pursued in good faith.

This version does not withstand scrutiny. Several core provisions of the 10 March agreement were violated by the transitional government itself. Most notably, Point 3, which calls for a nationwide ceasefire, was breached during the large-scale violence by government forces against the Druze in July 2025. Point 1, which guarantees the rights of all Syrians to representation and participation in the political process and state institutions, is also hard to square with the highly centralised, top-down process dominated by an elite around President al-Sharaa. The March 2025 Constitutional Declaration is a case in point, in both its formation and provisions.

Momentum on military and security integration cannot be generated in isolation. In any negotiation setting, progress depends on credible movement on representation, participation and the rule of law. In contrast, the fourteen-point agreement issued on 18 January further entrenched a model of state formation driven by unilateral presidential decrees, without binding commitments to anchor political rights in a new constitution. The sequencing and specifics of the January 30 agreement will need to be negotiated in what has been a largely performative process in the past.

Underlying much of the dominant narrative is an unquestioned but misplaced assumption: that Syria already possesses a fully legitimate state authority entitled to assert sovereignty over actors labelled as “non-state.” The reality is that Syria remains in a transitional phase in which the contours of the state itself are contested, most visibly in the absence of a permanent constitution. Treating sovereignty as settled mistakes power for legitimacy. State-building, by definition, requires sovereignty to be jointly constituted.

Official statements, media coverage, and lobbying commentary are saturated with references to “integration into the new Syrian state.” In formal international law, Syria retains statehood. Analytically and politically, however, the state itself is under construction. At a basic definitional level, a state is a durable set of institutions that successfully claims a monopoly over legitimate violence, extracts resources, administers territory, and enjoys both internal and external recognition. What exists in Syria is a proto-state: an authority that exercises partial territorial control, performs limited governance functions, and lacks full sovereignty due to fragmented territory, competing armed actors both within and beyond its ranks, weak institutions, external dependencies and reliance on coercion. 

President Ahmad al-Sharaa has so far approached this moment as one of proto-state consolidation, not genuine state-building. Within this logic, a strong central authority is treated as the starting point. In the absence of inclusive and demonstrable consent, and without established mechanisms such as a genuinely inclusive transitional government body, the tools available to achieve consolidation are necessarily agreements with the elite and brute force. Genuine state-building, which in Syria’s case inevitably intersects with questions of nation-building and identity follows a different logic altogether. There, a strong central authority results from a social contract arising from political participation, representation and consent. 

Calling the existing power apparatus a “state” is, in effect, a claim to legitimacy. This explains why many purveyors of the current narrative use “state” and "government" interchangeably, as if they were synonymous. Coercive consolidation is thereby legitimised before any political settlement has taken place, and any form of dissent is recast as “anti-state”.

Tragically, this logic is not new. Bashar al-Assad perfected it by framing his regime as the guardian of the Syrian state, deliberately blurring the line between state and government. Louis XIV was more candid when he declared: L’État, c’est moi.

Once government forces crossed the Euphrates and the SDF – and with it the Autonomous Administration – collapsed amid major tribal defections, a wave of commentary portrayed the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) as an illegitimate and normatively flawed entity whose failure had been inevitable. There is no doubt that the AANES was never the democratic and human-rights beacon its supporters claimed. Nor was the SDF the inclusive, multi-ethnic alliance of its marketing. The reality includes authoritarianism, forced displacement and illegal detention. But, with minor variations, the same can be said of every de facto authority that has held territory in Syria over the past decade, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (remember the year-long anti-HTS protests in its Idlib fiefdom?) and, indeed, the new government in Damascus.  

Much of the sudden fixation on the SDF’s lack of Arab support is really about justifying a fait accompli. Some argue that the regime’s advance was not coercion but liberation. Certainly many Arab communities genuinely welcomed the government forces after years of perceived humiliation at being ruled by Kurds (including foreigners); but the argument is ultimately unconvincing. The offensive against the SDF cannot plausibly fall within the mandate of a transitional government as it will likely reshape the country’s political trajectory for generations. A transitional authority’s responsibility is to facilitate reunification after years of de facto partition, not to impose it by force. The same reasoning would justify a future offensive against Suwayda on the grounds that Sheikh al-Hajari had usurped state power and conspired with Israel. It could even justify a Russian “protective” intervention along the coast under the pretext that Alawites required safeguarding.

Damascus’ insistence that all armed groups must integrate before any political settlement can be reached is unreasonable. Kurdish forces have been in open conflict with large parts of the government’s current military and security apparatus for years and have understandable trust-issues. Attempts to bolster the delegitimisation of the AANES and SDF by emphasising Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) influence — and by arguing that equating Syrian Kurds with a PKK offshoot betrays non-aligned Kurds — are not without merit. But they do not negate two central realities: the long history of systemic discrimination suffered by Kurds in Syria at the hands of successive Arab nationalist governments; and the credible fear of atrocities by government forces. 

Military force should always be the last resort; and this applies especially to a transitional government tasked with rebuilding, and in many respects inventing, a nation and state.