New Syria government does not want conflict with Kurds, Al-Sharaa says

Syria’s new government is open to negotiation with the country’s Kurdish population and does not want conflict with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the de-facto leader of Syria has said.

Speaking in an interview with the Turkish channel A Haber on Thursday, Syria’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa – commonly known as Abu Muhammad al-Jolani – reiterated that the SDF was the only armed group in the country to have not agreed to surrender its weapons to the new Syrian defence ministry, amid the interim government’s ongoing efforts to integrate all armed factions under a single command structure.

He assured that he would commit time to negotiations with the Kurdish-led militias in the coming days and weeks, stating that “our goal is to find a middle ground”, as well as acknowledging that “the Kurdish people in that region did not even have citizenship rights in the past. Many injustices were committed in the past, especially during Bashar al-Assad’s former regime”.

Since the fall of the late Assad regime on 8 December, the new Syrian authorities led by the former rebel group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham has managed to persuade all other former opposition factions to come under the command of the defence ministry, but the SDF’s refusal to do so has exacerbated tensions between Damascus and the ‘autonomous’ Kurdish-held region in north-east Syria.

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Rejecting the demand to integrate into the armed forces and to surrender their weapons, the SDF and its leader Mazloum Abdi have instead proposed that they be allowed to form their own autonomous Kurdish military bloc – an offer that Syria’s new defence minister Murhaf Abu Qasra has refused.

That stalemate has heightened the risk of an armed confrontation between the two, amid already-existing clashes between the SDF and Turkish-backed militants in the north of the country, threatening to boil over and foster even greater instability at a time when the new interim government in Damascus is attempting to further consolidate its rule.

Assuring that Kurds would be equal citizens in the new Syria, al-Sharaa said that his administration has already conveyed the government’s conditions to the SDF in recent talks. “Kurdish citizens who have left their homes and gone to other countries must return to their lands and homes,” he said of those conditions. “Secondly, all weapons must be in the hands of the state. If anyone, regardless of who they are, possesses weapons without the state’s approval, things will spiral out of control.”

The new Syrian leader also accused the SDF of using its detention of captured Daesh fighters and their families in camps as a tactic of securing legitimacy for its aims of autonomy, saying that “sometimes they [Kurdish militias] threaten us, and at other times, they engage in blackmail”.

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