In less than a month, Kurdish commander Mazloum Abdi saw the fiefdom of his Syrian Democratic Forces shrink from one third of Syria’s landmass to a north-eastern corner being handed over to the central government under a US-brokered deal.
If the agreement is completed, the SDF will be absorbed into the state, which is controlled by a sharply different ideological current. Mr Abdi and many of his subordinates were trained in northern Iraq by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), an organisation classified as terrorist group by Turkey, the US and the EU.
“Abdi’s dreams are gone. He is out of options. He is devastated,” a relative who grew up with him in the northern Syrian city of Kobani told The National.
The US established the SDF in 2015 as the ground component in the war against ISIS in Syria. However, the group has been supplanted by the government of President Ahmad Al Al Shara, a former Al Qaeda operative, who became friendly to Washington after ousting the regime of Bashar Al Assad in December 2024.
Mr Abdi recognises the SDF has become a casualty of “a larger project”, a relative said, pointing to the US push for better ties with Turkey and a peace deal between Syria and Israel, as well as the value of Damascus as bulwark against Iran.
Over the past three weeks, the SDF abandoned vast, Arab-populated territories acquired during the civil war, rather than resist a government offensive that started in the northern city of Aleppo and moved east. The SDF retreated to a mostly Kurdish pocket bordering Turkey and Iraq. Ankara is the main regional backer of Mr Al Shara and wants the SDF destroyed.
Some Kurds hope the January 30 deal will eventually bring about de facto decentralisation. However, it was reached after government forces started encircling Kurdish population centres and dismantling the SDF’s model of self-rule, which has been distinct in its incorporation of Arab-majority areas. Most of Syria’s farming, power and energy resources, which were under SDF control, have been restored to the central government, including 100,000 barrels per day of oil production.
A “social contract” that served as a founding document of the SDF’s rule is also in shambles. It envisaged a form of democracy with an emphasis on the rights of women and minorities, including recognition of Syriac, still spoken by some of Syria’s Christians, as an official language alongside Kurdish and Arabic.
Mr Abdi was one of several PKK operatives who returned from northern Iraq to Syria an uprising broke out against the Assad regime in 2011. Kurdish groups initially avoided direct confrontation with the regime, which withdrew many of its troops from Kurdish-majority areas. But critics accuse PKK-linked units of suppressing dissent and co-operating with the regime during this period.
According to the relative, Mr Abdi has learnt to overcome his animosity to the current government but will not be part of it. Other Kurdish sources said they expected the post of deputy defence minister, offered to the SDF under the current deal, to go to another Kurdish figure.
When Mr Abdi was growing up in Kobani, also known as Ain Al Arab, in the 1970s and 1980s, the city was ringed by security towers belonging to myriad intelligence branches that the Assad regime used to control Syria. It was rare to find a paved street in the impoverished city. Power cuts were rife and sewage ran in the streets, even after Mr Al Assad succeeded his father, Hafez Al Assad, in 2000. The only work available to many of Kobani’s Kurds was building portable rigs used to dig illegal water wells across Syria and even abroad. An old railway line separated Kobani from the much more developed Mursitpinar in Turkey.
Mr Abdi’s father, Khalil, was a doctor, and the family was relatively well off. Khalid Abdi admired Iraqi Kurdish leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani but became a supporter and friend of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan when he fled to Syria in the late 1970s. Ocalan stayed with a Kurdish pharmacist on the outskirts of Kobani for several months before moving to Damascus and becoming a surrogate of the regime. Mr Abdi, his relative said, became a PKK follower on ideological grounds, unlike many impoverished Kurds who were drawn to the group by the possibility of improving their living conditions. Ocalan called Mr Abdi “my adopted son”, the relative said.
At school, Mr Abdi earned high enough grades to study engineering at Aleppo University. He left Syria for the PKK training grounds in Iraq in the early 1990s. As he rose through the ranks, he “started to have misgivings, but once you become a military commander in a Stalinist organisation like the PKK, you cannot quit”. When he returned to Syria in 2011, his main task was preventing Kobani and other Kurdish population centres from falling out of regime control, the relative said.
According to the Kurdish sources, the US military chose Mr Abdi to lead the SDF in 2015 because he was seen as more focused than other operatives. He was also recommended by Iraqi Kurdish intelligence personnel.
A Kurdish source who met Mr Abdi at the end of last year said he “reads situations very carefully” and understands realities better than more ideological figures linked to the SDF, such as Ilham Ahmad. Ms Ahmad was also trained by the PKK in northern Iraq and acts as a political liaison for the SDF. Mr Abdi made his decision not to resist the government's advance after consulting Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani, son of Mullah Mustafa, the source said.
Historic rivalries between the PKK and Mr Barzani did not prevent Mr Abdi from taking the advice. Mr Barzani had supported Kurds who rose up against Mr Al Assad in 2011, and made a failed attempt to build a military counterweight to the PKK in Syria. He has called for the protection of Kurds in Syria's east, and their “dignity”, but did not condemn the government offensive.
“Abdi makes his assessments based on the military balance on the ground. Not on ideology, and not based on pressures by society,” the source said. “His problem is that the military support he has received from the Americans was ultimately not matched by political support.”
