The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces confirmed on Friday that its forces had entered the city of Deir ez-Zor, administered by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Albu Kamal border crossing with Iraq — used by Iran-backed Shiite militias funneling men and weapons to their units in Syria — also fell under its control. The US-backed umbrella group said in a statement Friday that the Deir ez-Zor Military Council, staffed by mainly Arab forces, had moved into the city and into other areas lying on the western banks of the Euphrates River in order to protect its people from Turkish-backed Sunni militants who have been at war against the SDF as well as from the Islamic State.
The SDF took control over the city after Syrian government forces and Iran-backed fighters pulled out of the city, Reuters reported.
The moves are also likely aimed at giving the Syrian Kurds leverage over other actors in the conflict. They came as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the al-Qaeda offshoot that aligned with Turkey-backed groups in the so-called Syrian National Army, pressed its lightning offensive, now in its ninth day, against Syrian regime forces closing in on the country’s third largest city, Homs. The militant group has already captured Aleppo and Hama. The fall of Homs would bring HTS closer to its stated goal of overthrowing Assad’s regime.
The astonishing success of the group has created a vacuum in eastern Syria that the Kurds are rapidly filling in a replay of the pattern established at the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011, when regime forces retreated from Kurdish-majority areas to fight Sunni opposition rebels elsewhere.
The Kurds have since maintained tactical ties to the regime but failed to persuade Assad to give them any political rights. The regime remained obdurate even as Aleppo was falling to HTS, a Syrian Kurdish official speaking on condition of anonymity said.
With Assad’s fate increasingly in doubt, the SDF commander-in-chief, Mazlum Kobane, told a news conference on Friday that his forces had “channels of communication with HTS,” particularly in order to protect tens of thousands of ethnic Kurds in Aleppo’s Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyah neighborhoods. The SDF and HTS are the strongest actors in areas outside the regime control and despite the latter’s links to Turkey have not come to blows so far.
The public messaging from Syrian Kurdish officials is that the HTS and its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, are more independent of Ankara than the array of Sunni factions making up the SNA and less anti-Kurdish. As such, the SDF could work constructively with them as the new order in Syria takes shape.
“The SDF could even serve as a much-needed moderating influence on HTS’ behavior,” Meghan Bodette, director of research at the Kurdish Peace Institute in Washington, wrote in a policy brief.
Privately, however, some SDF officials air alarm at the prospect of HTS running the country, with one official describing Jolani as a “second Baghdadi” in background comments to Al-Monitor. The official was referring to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader who founded the jihadis’ so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq and was killed in 2019 in a US raid on his hideout in northwestern Syria. The SDF is determinedly secular in its outlook, espousing the ideology of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned founder of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who promotes gender equality and respect for ethnic and religious minorities.
One of the main reasons for their jitters is the relationship between HTS and Turkey. Fraught as it has been, there is little doubt that Turkey authorized and may have even helped plan the HTS offensive that was launched on Nov. 27. Turkey’s twin objectives were to “punish” Assad for refusing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s offer to make peace on the one hand and squeezing the Kurds on the other, the SDF officials said. Turkey denies any involvement in the offensive.
Erdogan on Friday voiced concern about what he said were “terrorist groups” among the opposition militants, without naming them, and aired concern about their advance against Assad. HTS is designated as a terrorist group by the United States, Turkey, Russia and the United Nations.
The Kurds have already lost ground even as they gained territory elsewhere. The SNA seized control of the strategic town of Tell Rifaat last week pushing tens thousands of Kurds displaced from Afrin following a Turkish assault in 2018. At least 85,000 Kurds fled camps in Shahba and Tell Rifaat into the Kurdish-controlled areas.
Turkish authorities charge that a low-intensity Kurdish insurgency led by the so-called Afrin Liberation Forces, a pro-PKK outfit targeting Turkish-backed Sunni forces in Afrin, was run out of the area.
Iran’s attempts to provide weapons to the regime via Iraq were thwarted by coalition airstrikes on a Shiite militia convoy on Dec. 1 near Albu Kamal, SDF sources said.
Kobane said SNA militias continue to threaten Manbij, an Arab-majority city that was seized by the Kurds from ISIS in 2016 in a bid to join Kurdish territories east of the Euphrates with Afrin. Turkey launched its first ground invasion of Syria soon afterward to disrupt that plan and has long demanded that the SDF withdraw from Manbij.
Much of Syria’s oil and water is in the Kurdish-controlled zone and should the HTS overthrow the regime, it could provide the SDF with leverage. Yet it’s a double-edged sword. Turkey may yet launch another military operation against the Syrian Kurds and is unlikely to encourage cooperation between the SDF and the HTS in the medium term, particularly if its ongoing effort to get Ocalan to order the PKK to call off its 42-year armed campaign against Ankara proves fruitless. For now, an estimated 900 US special operations forces stationed in the Kurdish-controlled zone offer the best guarantee against a Turkish ground invasion.
Correction: Dec. 6, 2024. A previous version of this article mistakenly said opposition factions had already launched an operation to take Manbij.