The SDF Organization: From Dominance to a Bitter Fate

A decade after its formation, the hours of collapse of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) organization have come to resemble, almost strikingly, the collapse of the armed forces of the Assad regime and its allied Iranian militias in the face of the Deterrence of Aggression Forces in December 2024. This was followed by the rapid and unhindered advance of Syrian forces in northern Syria, beginning in the eastern countryside of Aleppo along the international highway, reaching the Iraqi border, and culminating in the meeting of the liberators in Raqqa, where freedom was resurrected and the Ö-;-calanist project came to its end.
At that moment of truth, the dream of “self-rule, federalism, separatism, and autonomous administration in Western Kurdistan,” on Syrian soil, evaporated, just as the Assad system itself did, forever.

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party: A Creation of Assad
This striking similarity is no coincidence. It is only natural that outcomes mirror the events of January 17–18. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), from which several parties and organizations later emerged, including the Democratic -union- Party (PYD), the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), was founded through the -dir-ect initiative and support of Hafez al-Assad. It was formally adopted by the national leadership of the Baath Party at the time and managed by Syrian intelligence as one of its instruments in its long-standing conflict with neighboring Turkey.
The regime provided the PKK with funding, weapons, and training camps in Syria and Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley.
Eventually Hafez al-Assad died, his bloody and despised authoritarian regime collapsed, and the Baath Party fell. It was natural that the regime’s tools should collapse as well, although some continued to resist until the very end. In 1998, Assad bowed to Turkish pressure and signed the Adana Agreement, which allowed Turkey to pursue PKK fighters inside Syria. He shut down PKK camps, banned the party’s activities, and forced its leader, Abdullah Ö-;-calan, to leave Syria—steps that later led to his arrest in Nairobi. However, Syrian intelligence still played a role by leaking information about Ö-;-calan.

Yet the party remained loyal to its former masters. It stood against the Syrian revolution and, at the regime’s request, filled the security and military vacuum left behind in Aleppo in 2012. It played a major role in mobilization campaigns and in targeting Kurdish national figures and activists, including the martyr Mishaal Tammo.
It became an instrument of repression and coercion against Syrians of all affiliations, orientations, and backgrounds, including Kurds themselves. It prohibited support for the revolution of a people who had stood by the Kurdish cause, believed in full citizenship rights, and supported Kurdish political struggle, using the Syrian people’s money, livelihoods, sustenance, and labor provided by the Assad regime.

The Power of the Serpent and the Nest of Hornets
Just as the Assad regime collapsed within a few days without decisive´-or-major battles, SDF forces fled west and south of the Euphrates rapidly, within mere hours. The retreat began in Deir Hafir, piercing all supposed fortifications and defenses, leading to the liberation of cities, towns, and villages amid a humiliating and disgraceful rout of SDF forces.
The battle to liberate al-Ashrafiyah and Sheikh Maqsoud marked a decisive turning point in the history of this organization (SDF as well as the PKK). There, its fragility and cardboard strength were exposed. The defeat was a clear indicator of its inevitable fate, yet the organization’s arrogance and blindness prevented it from acknowledging the realities on the ground.
In February, 2025, Ö-;-calan called on the PKK to lay down its weapons from the prison where he is currently being held, as part of a deal with the Turkish government. After signing an agreement to do so on March 10, the organization systematically obstructed its implementation through futile rounds of negotiation. It imposed conditions that undermined sovereignty, terms no national authority could accept, while deliberately dispersing efforts through contradictory statements issued by its military and political leaders.
At the same time, it fabricated security incidents and targeted civilians, particularly in Aleppo, its cities and countryside, and later in areas west of the Euphrates into which it expanded after Assad’s fall. It acted like a snake raising its head intermittently to inject its venom into civilian communities, threatening to obstruct state reconstruction, supporting and backing armed insurgent movements in minority areas, supplying them with weapons, funding, and security expertise, and extending even to its relationship with Israel.
The new authority, through exclusionary policies and flawed security approaches to managing differences, as well as through contested frameworks such as the “constitutional declaration,” parliamentary elections, and the national dialogue, provided SDF–PKK with multiple factors that enabled its survival and continuity, despite widespread and legitimate Syrian reservations.
SDF consistently presented its fighters in provocative displays of force, training, and advanced weaponry, intended to intimidate and warn anyone considering confrontation. Its fighters resembled nests of hornets, capable of dispersing into public spaces to spread death and chaos.


A -function-al Organization and a Humiliating Redundancy
The Syrian Democratic Forces were established in 2015 after the international coalition decisively defeated ISIS. The People’s Protection Units (YPG), affiliated with the PKK, constituted the largest force within a coalition that included Syrian opposition factions such as the Raqqa Revolutionary Brigade, which supported ground operations.
The circumstances at the time allowed the PKK to develop political and organizational mechanisms in Syria’s Jazira region, which it controlled due to its relationship with the international coalition. Despite claiming, according to its founding declaration, that SDF’s mission was “to struggle for the establishment of a secular, democratic, and federal Syria,”
In reality, for the United States, SDF was nothing more than a tool of the international coalition to fight ISIS on the ground under American Central Command leadership. What later became known as SDF did not engage in any genuine armed confrontation with ISIS. Instead, it allowed the group to withdraw into the Syrian desert while sending coalition forces coordinates of alleged ISIS positions, often without evidence, resulting in near-total destruction of cities such as Raqqa.
Subsequently, its military and security forces assumed responsibility for managing prisons and detention centers, pursuing ISIS cells, and administering areas from which the terrorist organization had been expelled, areas seized primarily by the YPG and YPJ, the two core forces and decision-makers within SDF. But events have proven that SDF is, in fact, the Syrian branch of the PKK, which is internationally designated as a terrorist organization.
It is crucial to note that SDF failed catastrophically in both protecting and governing the region. Sporadic ISIS attacks were clear indicators of this failure, even as SDF claimed to be pursuing terrorists through sham security operations and false accusations, culminating in the targeting of a U.S. patrol near Palmyra. Washington came to fully realize that SDF was orchestrating these cells and was -dir-ectly complicit in their activities.
Since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, repeated U.S. statements, including from the White House, have emphasized state sovereignty over all territory and Syria’s unity. This position was consolidated through U.S. sponsorship of the March 10 agreement, which SDF initially accepted but later obstructed through noncompliance, contradictory leadership statements, and delays until the agreement’s deadline expired.
Thus, the end of SDF’s -function-al role was clearly expressed through multiple and consistent American statements: by the White House, Trump’s Special Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack, and other officials. Yet the SDF–PKK organization refused to acknowledge the end of its -function-: that of jailer, hired gun, and mercenary.
It had believed its own illusions about “Rojava” and “Western Kurdistan.” But when faced with the reality of a new government intent on uniting the country, its forces could not withstand even a few hours in defense of a fantasy that proved to be nothing more than a fleeting summer cloud.

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