News, context, and analysis—centered on the Kurds, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. Tracking cross-border politics and what to watch next. t.me/NatlContext
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According to a new survey by Iraq's Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies, Iran's favourability in Iraq continues to rise and has reached an all-time high of 57%, against 37% for the US.
The trend is more notable still. In early 2024, Iran was becoming deeply unpopular, with favourability at just 20% against 31% for the US, giving the US an 11-point lead. Iran's favourability began to climb after the Israel-Hezbollah war, the fall of Bashar al-Assad and later the Israel-Iran war, as Iraq's Shia population felt increasingly encircled and under threat. Much of the rise is therefore likely concentrated in the Shia south. This is the first survey conducted since the February 28 war.
This consolidation of Iran's favourability among Shias, part of a rising trajectory also captured by other surveys in 2025, has likely helped Shia armed factions resist disarmament despite mounting US pressure.
It is further evidence for an argument The National Context has made before: much of the commentary often fails to measure Iranian influence in Iraq properly.
Iranian statecraft was built under decades of sanctions and intelligence pressure, and it developed accordingly: strategic ambiguity, layered signalling, delayed response. Concealment and a passive posture are standing instruments of how Tehran operates when it is being watched. An analyst who reads a quiet period as decline is treating a deliberate tool of Iranian statecraft as evidence against it. Any serious measurement of influence therefore has to separate what Iran and its partners can do from what they currently choose to display. Visible activity is an output that responds to pressure, incentives and instruction. The underlying stock of influence, meaning parliamentary weight, institutional integration, social base and public attitudes, has to be measured on its own terms.
Assessments of Iran's regional position routinely group Iraq's pro-Iran factions with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Those are non-state actors whose value to Iran lies in armed disruption. The main pro-Iran factions in Iraq sit inside the state itself: in parliament, in ministries and on the public payroll through the Popular Mobilisation structures. Their obligations, exposure and utility are of a different kind.
That difference defines what Iraq is worth to Tehran. Iraq's value lies in remaining unsanctioned, solvent and internationally connected. A sanctioned, broken Iraq offers Iran very little. In this war, Iran's binding constraint is economic survival, and a functioning neighbour that indirectly provides trade and commercial depth matters more to it than an additional source of hard power, which Iran already supplies for itself and to which Iraqi factions could add little. The Iraqi factions contribute through the economic and social arena, including manpower and mobilisation through their social base.
This is why those who argue that Iran's influence has declined are measuring the wrong variable. Visible militia activity has fallen because Iraq's value to Iran under wartime sanctions and a Hormuz blockade depends on Iraq staying solvent, unsanctioned and connected, and because Iranian statecraft defaults to concealment under pressure. Every structural indicator, from a record parliamentary position to a documented recovery in Shia public opinion to the collapse of the only movement that ever genuinely eroded Iran's standing, shows an influence that is more consolidated, more institutionally embedded and more socially anchored than at any point since the ISIS era.
More: thenationalcontext.com/irans…
How to measure Iranian influence in Iraq - and whether it is declining
A growing body of commentary holds that Iranian influence in Iraq is in decline. The claim rests on visible changes in behaviour: fewer militia attacks, public distancing from Tehran, quiet acceptance of American demands. The conclusion does not follow from the evidence. It rests on a measurement error, and the error is compounded by three factors: the character of Iranian statecraft, a category mistake about what Iraq is within Iran's regional system, and a wartime economic environment in which restraint is the rational instruction.
The measurement problem: Iranian statecraft was built under decades of sanctions and intelligence pressure, and it developed accordingly: strategic ambiguity, layered signalling, delayed response. Concealment and passive posture are standing instruments of how Tehran operates when it is being watched. An analyst who reads a quiet period as decline is treating a deliberate tool of Iranian statecraft as evidence against it. Any serious measurement of influence therefore has to separate what Iran and its partners can do from what they currently choose to display. Visible activity is an output that responds to pressure, incentives and instruction. The underlying stock of influence, meaning parliamentary weight, institutional integration, social base and public attitudes, has to be measured on its own terms.
Iraq is a state asset, and the comparison to Hezbollah misleads: Assessments of Iran's regional position routinely group Iraq with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Those are non-state actors whose value to Iran lies in armed disruption. The main pro-Iran factions in Iraq sit inside the state itself: in parliament, in ministries, on the public payroll through the Popular Mobilisation structures. Their obligations, exposure and utility are of a different kind.
That difference defines what Iraq is worth to Tehran. Iraq's value lies in remaining unsanctioned, solvent and internationally connected. A sanctioned, broken Iraq offers Iran very little. In this war, Iran's binding constraint is economic survival, and a functioning neighbour that indirectly helps with trade and commercial depth which matters more to it than an additional source of hard power, which Iran already supplies for itself and which Iraqi factions could add little to. The contribution of the Iraqi factions runs through the economic and social arena, including manpower and mobilisation through their social base.
The wartime economy makes restraint the rational order: This is the context in which the current quiet has to be read. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has placed Iraq in an existential position: roughly 90 percent of state revenue comes from oil, and about 90 percent of that oil moved through Hormuz. The revenue base of the salary state has collapsed. On top of this, Washington holds a structural instrument dating to the post-invasion settlement: Iraq's oil revenue is held at the Federal Reserve, which gives the United States the capacity to strangle Iraqi state finance by administrative decision.
Under these conditions, restraint by the pro-Iran factions preserves the asset. Provoking sanctions or a financial cutoff would destroy the very thing that makes Iraq valuable to Iran. The observed quiet is what the protection of a strategic asset looks like under maximum coercion, and it is fully consistent with instructed discipline from Tehran.
The regional picture reinforces the logic on both sides. Iraq's western frontier is now exposed to a Sunni government in Damascus under Ahmad al-Sharaa. Turkey sits to the north and Saudi Arabia to the south. At the strategic level, Iran is the only ally Shia-led Iraq has left in the region, and Iraq is the last open flank Iran has left. Each side's dependence on the other has increased, and that mutual dependence raises the cost of any behaviour that would jeopardise Iraq's international standing and hence its own internal cohesion.
What the observable record actually shows: Once measurement shifts from visible activity to structural indicators, the record points in one direction.
The 2025 elections delivered the pro-Iran Shia coalition its strongest result since 2003. The Coordination Framework bloc won at least 170 of 329 seats, 52 percent of parliament, even with the Sadrist boycott. Candidates directly linked to Iran-aligned militias took over 80 seats across multiple lists, the highest figure on record, in an election where turnout rebounded by more than 10 points from the previous cycle.
Public attitudes have moved in the same direction. Gallup finds approval of Iran's leadership among Iraqi Shias rising from 17% in 2022 to 52% in 2025. Arab Barometer's Iraq survey, fielded between late September and early November 2025 and therefore a genuinely post-war observation, records favourable views of Iran rising from 34% to 44%, with positive assessments of Khamenei's regional policy rising from 37% to 48%. The war likely accelerated this shift: with 87% of Iraqis holding unfavourable views of Israel, the confrontation read as just to much of the Shia public, and Iran's survival of the war has been framed in Shia media as a form of victory. Figures post-February 2026 are not yet available, but the trajectory is unlikely to have reversed.
The Tishreen episode completes the picture, because it shows what genuine decline looks like when it happens. Between 2019 and 2021, mass protests produced a real legitimacy crisis: Fatah (coalition of Shia militias) fell from 48% in 2018 to 17 in 2021, and protest-aligned candidates entered parliament in numbers. That was a measurable, structural setback. By 2025 the Tishreen vote had collapsed entirely, its figures exposed as weak, divided and unable to deliver, while the militia-linked seat count reached its historical peak. The one documented episode of Iranian decline in Iraq has been reversed on every indicator that registered it.
The decline narrative measures the wrong variable. Visible militia activity has fallen because Iraq's value to Iran under wartime sanctions and a Hormuz blockade depends on Iraq staying solvent, unsanctioned and connected, and because Iranian statecraft defaults to concealment under pressure. Every structural indicator, from a record parliamentary position to a documented recovery in Shia public opinion to the collapse of the only movement that ever genuinely eroded Iran's standing, shows an influence that is more consolidated, more institutionally embedded and more socially anchored than at any point since the ISIS era.
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Turkish bases are thinning Kurdistan's border woodland, satellite data show, but far less than claimed
Videos of trucks carrying timber to Turkish military bases have sparked a major controversy in Iraq's Kurdistan Region in recent days, over whether Turkey is systematically cutting the region's border forests.
The issue has gone viral across Kurdish media. Rudaw, Kurdistan24 and opposition outlets each offer a different version of events, each fitting its own agenda.
To test the claims independently, The National Context analysed 25 years of satellite imagery covering every district of the Kurdistan Region. Satellite data is the most independent way to check what is happening on the ground. Here is what the findings show:
Woodland in areas of Turkish military activity, especially Amedi district in Duhok province, is being lost at about twice the rate of comparable woodland elsewhere. The loss is modest in scale, however, and concentrated where Turkey has built networks of new roads and outposts, including cleared hilltops consistent with helicopter landing sites.
Each year's loss is small. But it recurs every year and falls on the region's highest oak woodland, so the cumulative damage is significant enough to cause concern.
The long-term record shows no collapse of the region's forests. It does show a slow decline in the border belt relative to the rest of the region. The border belt is defined here as the woodland within 25 km of Turkey in Amedi, Zakho and Mergasur - all mapped. That pattern points to loss in specific patches.
Sentinel-2 satellite imagery shows where those patches are. Between 2017/18 and 2024/25, 5.6% of Amedi's woodland showed a marked drop in greenness, the highest share of any district. Zakho followed at 4.8% and Mergasur at 3.8%. Elsewhere the share was 2.8% in Akre, 2.5% in Soran, 2.1% in Penjwen on the Iranian border, 2.0% in Duhok and 1.7% in Pshdar, also on the Iranian border.
Several indicators contradict the opposition's allegation that the cutting is systematic and commercial, feeding furniture production inside Turkey:
Commercial logging usually spreads across any forest that trucks can reach. The border belt doesn't fit that pattern. If you split its woodland into 1 km squares, nearly 90% of the loss is packed into just one in ten squares, and about four in five squares show no loss at all.
Moreover, the loss follows the newly built roads. In the Metina mountains, a main target of Turkey's 2021 operation, 29% of woodland within 250 m of a new road showed a marked drop, against about 10% further away. The losses came in 2023 and 2024, the years a switchback road and then a ridge-crest road were built.
More importantly, the scale is limited. Across the border belt, about 36 km² of roughly 1,300 km² of woodland has shown a marked drop since 2017. About 20 km² of that is more than comparable woodland lost elsewhere, and 12 km² of the extra loss is in Amedi. That is 0.34% to 0.5% of the belt's woodland a year. By comparison, woodland in the region without Turkish military activity loses about 0.2% a year, Iran's Zagros oak forests about 0.16%, and forests worldwide about 0.25% - that is gross loss.
Also for context, other war zones have suffered far heavier losses. Syria's coastal forests lost 24% of their cover between 2010 and 2020, and western Syria 19% between 2010 and 2019. More than half of Afrin's forest cover was reported lost within about three years of Turkey's takeover. On Ukraine's front lines, 5% to 16% of forest was damaged in a single season.
The figures also strongly contradict any timber trade. Assume every affected hectare were dense, mature woodland at the top of published estimates, about 76 tonnes per hectare. The extra loss would then yield at most about 20,000 tonnes of wood a year, and all of the marked drop about 35,000 tonnes. Real yields are likely far lower. Moreover, most of this woodland is scrub oak, cut back repeatedly over generations. It is firewood grade and of little use to furniture makers.
Even the theoretical maximum would be about a 0.1% of Turkey's annual industrial wood harvest. Small-scale sales, such as surplus firewood sold in Sirnak or Hakkari or the felling of individual walnut and plane trees, cannot be ruled out, but a trade on the scale alleged can.
The full analysis, with the methodology and detailed results: thenationalcontext.com/turki…
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As US Troops Leave Iraq, America's Security Model in the Middle East Is Unravelling
The US-led coalition's military mission in Iraq formally ended on Wednesday, 30 September. The withdrawal comes as the rest of the US network in the region has sustained damage on a scale it has never faced before. Since the United States and Israel began striking Iran on 28 February, Iranian missiles and drones have damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan, according to the Pentagon's inspector general. Iran focused its fire on the systems that allow the bases to see and defend themselves.
As a regional guarantee, the American security model in the Middle East is effectively over and highly unlikely to return in its old form. The Economist reached a similar conclusion last week, arguing that decades of American hegemony over the region are coming to an end.
If the American guarantee is ending, the question is who shapes what comes next. The Economist expects the post-American region to be shaped by three non-Arab powers: Turkey, Iran and Israel.
Yet the three differ in important ways that offer clues to what the next stage might look like: thenationalcontext.com/as-us…
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On Kurdish urban settlement in Iraq and Syria:
As we have noted before, demographics are one of the key differences between Iraqi and Syrian Kurds and a main reason their models have diverged so sharply.
Urban settlements are one of the clearest examples. Cities shape how wars are fought, drive intellectual production and productivity, and form the foundation of any viable entity.
Syria has only three Kurdish-linked cities with populations over 100,000, and two of them are highly mixed despite their large Kurdish populations. Afrin is the only solidly Kurdish city of that size, while Qamishli and Hasakah are mixed.
Iraq, by contrast, has at least nine solidly Kurdish-majority cities over 100,000, plus two mixed ones.
The gap widens further down the scale. Extending the count to towns of 50,000 to 100,000 adds only six in Syria, while Iraq has more than 26 towns over 50,000, most of them solidly Kurdish.
As we argued in a previous piece, this helps explain why the governing models in Syria and Iraq have diverged so clearly, and not only with regard to the Kurds: thenationalcontext.com/why-s…
Even the Syrian towns we have classed as Kurdish-majority sit within mixed surroundings. In Derik (al-Malikiyah) and Girkê Legê (al-Muabbada), Kurds likely make up over 70 percent of the population, yet both towns have a sizeable Arab presence, particularly in the surrounding countryside. This pattern holds across most Kurdish-majority areas in Syria. In Iraq, the Kurdish areas are too demographically consolidated for a Syrian-style model to apply.
Urban settlements matter on several levels. Economically, they underpin the viability of any region. Intellectually, larger cities generate more output and perhaps a population more ready to sustain a polity. Militarily, alongside topography, they make war far more difficult and costly, so the larger the cities, the weaker a central government's incentive to launch a military campaign.
This is one reason such a campaign is much harder to contemplate in Iraq. In Syria, the SDF-led administration sought to hold on to Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor partly because it needed a larger population and greater geographic depth to be viable as a region. Once those areas were lost and it was pushed back to a small pocket in Hasakah province, its viability fell sharply, especially as the province's two largest cities, Hasakah and Qamishli, are highly mixed and unlikely to be dominated by any single group.
Kurdish-majority and mixed cities of over 100,000 in Iraq and Syria: thenationalcontext.com/porta…
More on how demographics doomed a Kurdish national project in Syria:
thenationalcontext.com/the-d…
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As the U.S. exit from Iraq concluded, the 30 September deadline for integrating Iraq's Shia militias into the security forces slipped, and a new roadmap has taken its place.
The deadline was initially had been presented as firm. In August the State Administration Coalition, the governing alliance of Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties, warned that armed activity outside official institutions after 30 September could be dealt with under the anti-terrorism law.
The retreat began in the second half of August and coincided with the visit of Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran's parliament, who arrived in Baghdad on 19 August for three days. According to Iraqi reporting based on three sources, he urged leaders of the Coordination Framework, the ruling alliance of Shia parties, to leave the weapons with the factions or deposit them with the PMF, where they would remain available in an emergency. He accepted exclusive state control in principle while arguing that current conditions did not allow it.
On 21 August, while Ghalibaf was still in Baghdad, the prime minister's spokesman, Haidar al-Aboudi, was quoted saying that 30 September concerned the American withdrawal and was not the final date for faction weapons. The next day Deputy Speaker Adnan Fayhan said the weapons would be stored in PMF warehouses, and on 23 August National Security Adviser Qasim al-Araji described weapons control as a gradual process beginning after the coalition left. Reports at the time described a proposal under which factions would declare their weapons and premises to the government and freeze their activity for two years in place of a handover.
The language shifted with it. On 9 September, Ali al-Asadi, political chief of Harakat al-Nujaba, said the understanding with Framework negotiators had moved from confining weapons to the state to regulating them, and described 30 September as the start of talks that could last months.
The clearest outline of the new roadmap was set out on 22 September by Haidar al-Fouadi, political chief of former prime minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani's coalition. It has five stages: announce the agreement alongside the withdrawal; hold a 90-day period in which the factions stop attacks, with assurances against U.S. strikes on them; begin a gradual weapons handover; end the factions' independent armed existence, admitting their members as individuals into the PMF and other official bodies; and complete the process by 30 June 2027, after which independent armed groups would be unlawful. Fouadi described this as the basis for a future agreement, with negotiations continuing.
Beyond that outline, the mechanics remain contested. One account describes a new PMF directorate receiving weapons under government supervision from January 2027, with protection from prosecution and access to electoral politics for factions that commit to ending independent armed activity. Another places the handover of strategic weapons, meaning ballistic missiles, rockets and one-way attack drones, from March 2027, with faction brigades entering the PMF as units. The difference matters: admitting members as individuals would break faction command structures, while admitting brigades would carry those structures into the PMF intact.
The PMF route allows the language of state control to be met at little cost to the factions. The storage compromise reported in August described depots registered with the government and open to surprise inspections, but managed in practice jointly by the factions and the PMF, whose chief of staff, Abu Fadak al-Mohammadawi, comes from Kataib Hezbollah. Moving weapons into PMF warehouses can therefore change their legal custodian while leaving practical control with the same networks.
The PMF legislation adds a further layer. On 29 September, the cabinet approved a PMF bill for referral to parliament, reviving legislation Washington had opposed. Reported revisions removed a PMF staff college and the Muhandis General Company, the PMF's commercial arm, from the draft, which suggests the text was adjusted under American pressure. Negotiators are also reported to be close to giving the PMF chairman the rank of a minister without portfolio, and a separate Framework proposal would create a dedicated PMF drone formation to receive faction weapons. If passed without breaking faction command, these measures would give the factions' capabilities official status, funding and legal cover.
More: thenationalcontext.com/iraqs…
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Iraq’s Armed Factions Win the U.S. Withdrawal and Keep Their Weapons for Now
The end of the U.S. presence in Iraq today is a major symbolic victory for Iraq's Shia militias, which have spent months on the defensive during the Iran war.
The withdrawal traces back to January 2020. Days after the U.S. killed Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran's Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy head of the PMF, Iraq's parliament voted to expel U.S. forces.
The vote was carried overwhelmingly by Shia MPs. Most Kurdish and Sunni MPs boycotted the session.
The negotiations that followed produced the September 2024 agreement setting out the U.S. withdrawal, which was completed today.
For months, 30 September was also presented as the deadline for resolving the future of the Shia armed groups and their weapons.
That deadline has now passed. Negotiations over the militias' future have been pushed to 30 June 2027, almost a year away, with Washington's agreement.
Beyond the extra time, the meaning of "disarmament" keeps getting softer. The talk has moved from dismantling the groups to regulating, reorganising and integrating them, mainly into the PMF.
The factions have secured the U.S. exit and kept their weapons for now. What happens after June 2027 remains open. More: thenationalcontext.com/iraqs…
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As US Troops Leave Iraq, America's Security Model in the Middle East Is Unravelling
The US-led coalition's military mission in Iraq formally ends on Wednesday, 30 September, and Iraqi officials said on Monday that the last US combat and logistics personnel had already left. For the first time since the war against ISIS began in 2014, the US has no bases in either Iraq or Syria. More importantly, the exit coincides with a set of conditions that together make this moment unprecedented.
The withdrawal comes as the network of bases, sensors and air defences that sustains the entire US mission in the Middle East has suffered damage on a scale and breadth it has never faced before.
Since the US and Israel began striking Iran on 28 February, Iran has systematically hit hundreds of buildings along with key radar, satellite terminals and early-warning assets. These strikes have partially blinded US bases and put some of them out of action, while sustained interceptions have drained the missile stocks that protect them. Independent estimates put the US Patriot interceptor inventory at about 800 at the end of July, down from roughly 2,330 before the war, and THAAD at about 250, down from 452.
This combination has no precedent since 1945. American bases were attacked in Korea and Vietnam, but only inside the country at war, and the regional rear that supplied the fighting stayed intact.
The Korea and Vietnam comparisons that are often invoked in fact show how different this moment is. In neither war did the US see its entire regional security architecture come under systematic attack, or its air defence stocks drawn down to this degree.
Other metrics show how much the industrial base that sustained those wars has shrunk. US industrial production was 45% of global output during the Korean War and 35% during the Vietnam War, against just 15% in 2024. Its share of global crude steel production, a key proxy for the capacity to build ships, vehicles and munitions, was 46% during the Korean War and 26% during the Vietnam War, against just 4.4% in 2025. Its share of global electricity production, a measure of the energy base that underpins wartime production, was 35% in 1950 and 31% during the Vietnam War, against just 14% in 2025. And US GDP on a PPP basis, a broad measure of the resources a state can mobilise, was 27.3% of the global total in 1950 and 22% during the Vietnam War, against 14.6% in 2025.
The weight of these trends, together with the US exit and the strain on its entire regional military architecture, has led The Economist to call the moment unprecedented in the last century and to argue that decades of American hegemony over the region are about to end.
If the American security guarantee is ending, the question is who shapes what follows. The Economist expects the post-American region to be shaped by three non-Arab powers: Turkey, Iran and Israel.
The Iran war, however, has shown that strategic depth, the ability to produce weapons at scale and an indigenous defence industry have mattered more than many expected. Israel has little geographic depth of its own and has long compensated through the US, relying on American basing, early warning, air defence and resupply. As that model unravels, Israel stands to lose more than either Turkey or Iran. Both have far greater geographic depth and larger capacity to mass-produce cheap weapons, though Iran's industrial base has been under sustained attack since February and Turkey still depends on imported engines and key components. Israel is likely to retain its qualitative edge for years to come and to remain the region's leading strike and intelligence power, one Washington calls a "model ally". That edge may count for less in an era of cheap drones produced at a scale that can overwhelm advanced but expensive systems. Israel has shown it can innovate and adapt, but so have Iran and Turkey, and in a contest of volume the side with depth and mass holds the advantage.
As this analysis explores, the likely result is a layered and more crowded order: thenationalcontext.com/as-us…
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On 21 September, the KRG held a ceremony in Erbil to mark the completion of the decades-long effort to unify its Peshmerga forces, 11 days after the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs announced that the process had concluded.
Under the new structure, the 80 Forces of the KDP and the 70 Forces of the PUK formally cease to exist. Their personnel now sit in two Regional Commands under the ministry, organised into 11 divisions, two Support Forces Commands and a separate commando formation.
Regional Command 1 is led by Lieutenant General Najat Ali Salih, former commander of the KDP's 80 Forces. Regional Command 2 is led by Lieutenant General Omar Salih Hassan, former commander of the PUK's 70 Forces. Each party chose its own commander, and Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani formalised both appointments by decree. The two commands have also kept the insignia of the forces they replaced. Each emblem retains its party-era design, with the old force name replaced by "Regional Command 1" or "Regional Command 2". Neither command has been given a new institutional identity.
The divisions are split along the same line. Regional Command 1 holds the six odd-numbered divisions (1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11), all drawn from the 80 Forces, while Regional Command 2 holds the five even-numbered divisions (2, 4, 6, 8 and 10), drawn from the 70 Forces. On paper, the combined force totals 37 brigades and more than 100 battalions.
Heavy weapons are divided in the same way. Much of the Peshmerga's artillery, armour, air defence and combat engineering capacity sits in two Support Forces Commands that stand apart from the divisions. The 1st Support Forces Command comes from the KDP and the 2nd from the PUK, and each is aligned with its party's Regional Command. The PUK side also retains its commando forces as a separate formation outside the 11 numbered divisions, in effect a special division. As a result, infantry, heavy weapons and special forces are all organised along the line that divided the two party armies before the reform.
For more detail, see the interactive map of the two Regional Commands below: thenationalcontext.com/peshm…
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Israel faces a strategic paradox in Syria: the more it escalates to constrain Turkish military influence, the more important Turkey becomes to Damascus. Here is why.
Walla, an Israeli news site with close ties to the security establishment, quoted an Israeli security official this month: "Moderate Sunni states, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are working around the clock to draw Sharaa closer to them...Al-Sharaa will not be so quick to hand territory over to Erdogan, nor will he necessarily allow him to take control of military bases in Syria. Therefore, to some extent, the recent Israeli strike in Syria helped Ahmed al-Sharaa."
This misreads the position of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former rebel commander who now leads Syria.
Saudi Arabia is not on a par with Turkey in Syria. Al-Sharaa's central ambition is a strong army, and among the regional powers Damascus can work with, only Turkey has the industrial breadth and military capacity to help build one. Saudi Arabia can bring money and political backing, but its struggle to contain the Houthis in Yemen shows how far it is from matching Turkey's influence and reach.
Israel judges Turkish influence largely by bases and troops on the ground. Ankara is aiming for something more lasting: to become the ecosystem the Syrian army operates within. That starts with officer education and training, which are already under way, and extends to the systems the new army is built around, from software and radars to the architecture linking its forces, followed by ammunition, sustainment and refurbishment. Each layer turns a single sale into a continuing relationship.
Israel's objection goes beyond Turkey. It wants Syria too weak to challenge its uncontested advantage in the air and on the ground, and after Bashar al-Assad fell in December 2024, the Israeli military said its strikes had destroyed up to 80 per cent of the Syrian army's capabilities. Al-Sharaa wants the opposite: a unified state with an army strong enough to make Syria a regional power. Turkey shares that goal for its own reasons. It has a border of roughly 900 kilometres with Syria, it wants a strong neighbour as a buffer against Israel, and it wants a central government able to prevent the Kurdish national project in the north-east from reviving. On Syria's recovery, Damascus and Ankara are on the same side.
Three trends are converging to make Turkey Syria's most practical partner. The first is global rearmament. Only a handful of countries can equip an army across every service, and most are out of reach. Russia's output is absorbed by the war in Ukraine. China is Washington's main rival while Syria is trying to rebuild relations with the West. The United States keeps its arms embargo on Syria and has warned even close allies of delivery delays of up to five years as the Iran war drains its stocks. Europe is rearming for itself, and South Korea's order books are full for years.
The second is Turkey's industrial maturity. Its defence industry now produces most of what Syria would need from rifles and armoured vehicles to drones, radars, air defence, tanks and warships, which is what makes the ecosystem model possible. Syria would be its largest test, and Turkey could come to hold the place in the Syrian military that the Soviet Union once did.
The third is Washington's posture. The United States withdrew its last troops from Syria in April. With rivalries with China and Russia and a war with Iran to manage, it has little appetite for a confrontation with a NATO ally over Syria's army. Washington's latest national security and defence strategies explicitly call for burden-sharing by regional partners, and the security strategy names Turkey among the countries whose support could help stabilise Syria.
The relationship is already visible. Syrian cadets are studying at Turkish military academies, and Syrian units joined Turkey's EFES-2026 exercise in May, their first abroad. BMC Amazon and Otokar Cobra armoured vehicles appear regularly with Syrian defence and interior ministry forces, alongside rifles from Turkish makers such as Sarsilmaz and Kalekalip. No other country is known to have openly supplied significant new equipment since December 2024, apart from possible Russian spare parts for the Soviet-era arsenal.
Tension between Damascus and Ankara remains. Al-Sharaa wants autonomy and has cultivated Saudi Arabia, other Gulf states and Russia to avoid depending on any one patron, which is the instinct the Israeli official is counting on. But Israeli pressure is forcing him to recalibrate. Both governments are Sunni-led with broadly shared regional aspirations, and al-Sharaa knows Syria cannot replace Turkey as the larger power. What Syria can realistically aim for is an important place within a Turkish-centred security system.
The likely result is a cycle. Each Israeli strike reduces Syria's alternatives and strengthens the case for relying on Turkey, and each step towards closer cooperation gives Israel a reason to strike again. Damascus and Ankara may respond by making their cooperation less visible, relying on training, software and supply chains that are harder to target than bases. Israel's pressure would then, ironically, leave Turkish influence more deeply embedded and longer-lasting. The rivalry is therefore likely to intensify, and Turkey's position in Syria is likely to grow with it.
More details:
thenationalcontext.com/syria…
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Peshmerga Unification Codifies the KDP-PUK Military Divide
The Kurdistan Region formally declared the decades-long unification of its Peshmerga forces complete on Monday.
The resulting military, however, has an extraordinarily unusual structure, with an arrangement that has no clear parallel in any other army in the world, and it may make a single Kurdish army harder to build.
Under the new structure, the 80 Forces of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the 70 Forces of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) formally cease to exist. Their personnel now sit in two Regional Commands under the ministry, organised into 11 divisions, two support forces commands and a separate commando formation that acts as PUK's sixth division.
The new military structure keeps the KDP and PUK hierarchies largely intact, gives each sweeping control over appointments and spending, and makes a single army for the region harder to build. The new structure is unique in the world in giving a regional command authorities so broad that it can even appoint its own division commanders and other key officers, as well as having its own broader budget sub-account and more.
That distinction matters because a “single line of accounting” was one of the central benchmarks of the American-backed reform process. The 2022 US-KRG memorandum required the partisan military structures to be absorbed under MoPA by September 2026, while American financial support was designed to decline over the four-year period. The public ceremony came on September 21, exactly four years after the 2022 memorandum was renewed and nine days before the international coalition’s remaining military mission in Iraq is scheduled to end on September 30.
The political timing also extends beyond the coalition deadline. Baghdad is simultaneously pursuing a much larger campaign to bring weapons held by armed factions under state authority, and several Iraqi factions have specifically demanded that the Peshmerga be included in any law applying that principle to armed organisations. Iraq’s president has rejected that equivalence, arguing that the Peshmerga is a constitutionally recognised force and therefore falls outside the militia-disarmament process.
More details of the new Peshmerga structure and the KDP-PUK divide: thenationalcontext.com/peshm…
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How Syria Could Become Turkey’s Biggest Defence Experiment
Israel’s fixation on Turkey’s physical military presence in Syria may be missing Ankara’s more consequential objective: to become the principal architecture of the new Syrian military ecosystem.
Turkey increasingly presents itself as a “defence ecosystem” rather than simply a supplier of weapons, offering everything from design and manufacturing to subsystems, software, ammunition, maintenance and sustainment.
Elements of this model are already visible elsewhere. In Somalia, Turkey has spent years training national forces and has committed under a ten-year agreement to build, train and equip the Somali navy. In Azerbaijan, years of Turkish training and joint exercises have produced unusually deep interoperability across land and air forces.
Syria would be a much larger test. It has a larger population and historically maintained substantial land forces, air defence, aviation and naval capabilities, much of which now has to be rebuilt simultaneously. If Turkey becomes central to that process across multiple services and technologies, Syria could become the first major test of Ankara’s transition from arms exporter to exporter of military ecosystems.
That creates a central tension. Al-Sharaa wants to build an independent Syrian power centre while limiting the leverage of any foreign patron. Turkey, meanwhile, wants to expand its regional influence and increasingly presents its defence industry as an integrated system that can be exported abroad.
Yet the international arms market leaves Syria with fewer realistic alternatives than it would have had a decade ago. The two ambitions may therefore be more compatible than they initially appear. Syria needs an anchor for rebuilding military power while preserving political autonomy. Turkey needs a state large and important enough to demonstrate that its defence model can extend beyond individual weapons sales and limited partnerships. Syria may provide both.
thenationalcontext.com/syria…
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Iranian Kurdish Armed Attacks Decline After May–July Surge, with Pro-PKK Groups Dominating Activity
Attacks by Iranian Kurdish groups inside Iran have declined after a sudden increase that ran from late May, following the Iran war ceasefire, through July. Several attacks were recorded in August and September, but they have been considerably less lethal, with the pattern shifting away from larger armed clashes towards smaller, more targeted attacks.
More importantly, of around 27 recorded incidents, pro-PKK/PJAK-linked Iranian Kurdish groups account for at least 63%, compared with just 11% attributed to other Kurdish groups, while around 26% remain disputed or unresolved. Among incidents where the perpetrator can be identified, pro-PKK/PJAK-linked groups account for around 85%.
Their dominance of the armed campaign is therefore clear. The trajectory since July, however, points towards declining intensity and changing tactics: fewer multi-fatality confrontations, more targeted killings, and, particularly in September, a growing share of incidents in which the perpetrator cannot be identified.
The full interactive map here: thenationalcontext.com/porta…
Two things are worth noting. First, the attacks have declined since late July as Iran restarted serious diplomatic talks with Iraq and the KRG aimed at having the Iranian Kurdish groups expelled from the Kurdistan Region entirely, to a third, non-neighbouring country, as we have reported here: thenationalcontext.com/why-w…
Second, PJAK's dominance comes amid the peace process, as it has expanded its presence along the Sulaimani area's borders with Iran and much of the armed activity has concentrated on this geography. More on PJAK's expanded presence: thenationalcontext.com/pkk-i…
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What Syria, Iraq and Turkey reveal about the scale of the global energy shock
• Syria saw its biggest protests since the fall of Assad this week, driven by the rapid rise in energy prices and its direct effect on daily life. The sequence is a useful illustration of how the crisis works: fuel prices rise, freight costs follow, bread and transport become more expensive, basic services and inflation come under pressure, and people take to the streets.
• Since the Iran war began on 28 February, diesel has more than doubled in Syria and 95-octane petrol has risen by around 86%.
• The same week in Iraq, farmers and factory owners in the southern city of Muthanna took tractors, combine harvesters and heavy equipment onto the roads in protest after diesel for their sectors rose from 400 to 1,250 dinars per litre.
• Even in Turkey, a much larger economy with deeper state capacity, petrol rose from 57.19 to 80.31 lira per litre between 24 February and 17 September, an increase of 40%, alongside a 66% rise in diesel, despite active state intervention to soften the increases.
• The comparison matters because these three are the advantaged cases. They are neighbours, they hold their own oil or sit close to the source, and the crisis has reached daily life in all of them anyway. For countries with neither of those advantages, the disruption will be deeper as seen in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
• There is little modern precedent for this combination.
The full analysis:
thenationalcontext.com/what-…
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Why Syria’s Political Geography Looks Nothing Like Iraq’s
Comparisons between Syria and Iraq usually assume both face the same problem: a weak central state trying to hold together a population split among large ethnic and religious communities. Their demographic and geographic structures are quite different, and those differences explain why federalism, communal power-sharing and territorial autonomy took hold in Iraq, and why the bargaining position of Syria's minorities is much weaker.
Iraq rests on three large political-demographic blocs. Shi’a Arabs and smaller Shi’a-aligned communities account for roughly 56 to 58 percent of the population, Sunni Arabs and associated Sunni communities for around 22 to 24 percent, and Kurds for roughly 18 percent. These figures are inferences.
Syria has a Sunni Arab core makes up around 75% of the population, with smaller Sunni communities such as Turkmen and Circassians counted politically within it. The rest are much smaller: Kurds and Alawites at around 10% each, Druze at 3%, Christians at 2%. No single minority reaches beyond a tenth of the country.
All of this shapes what coalitions are possible. In Iraq, the Shi’a majority is large enough to lead national politics and small enough that the other two blocs remain unavoidable. Syria’s remaining 25% cannot function the same way. Its components sit in separate corners of the country so their political priorities diverge, which leaves Damascus free to settle with each community separately: one arrangement with Kurdish actors, another with Druze leaders, a third understanding with coastal notables.
The central difference between the two cases lies in the relationship among six things: demographic weight, territorial concentration, urban centres, institutions, economic geography and the capacity to form political counterweights. On nearly all of them, Iraq’s principal communities function as relatively complete political-geographic units, each holding substantial demographic weight, territorial depth and important cities, with two of the three able to combine and constrain the largest when their interests overlap. Syria holds one much larger demographic core alongside several smaller minorities whose territories are more fragmented, whose urban bases are weaker and whose political interests diverge. Even taken together, they form no geographically coherent counterweight to the Sunni Arab-centred majority. That is why the Iraqi model is a poor template for reading Syria: both states are diverse, and the structure of that diversity, along with the bargaining structure it produces, is fundamentally different.
More details: thenationalcontext.com/why-s…
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This is the most detailed and cross-verified demographic map of Hasakah Governorate in northeast Syria.
As the integration deal between Damascus and the Kurdish-led, now-defunct SDF moves forward and the debate over the region's future continues, demographics remain a key battleground in that debate.
The map draws on multiple sources, including detailed research by the European Center for Kurdish Studies, and goes further by cross-verifying the data against video footage and open-source information on many towns and villages across Hasakah.
The full interactive map: thenationalcontext.com/porta…
An earlier report explored how demographics doomed the Kurdish national project in Syria: thenationalcontext.com/the-d…
A separate report on Hasakah's rural areas examines a contradiction facing Syria's Kurds. At the national level they are seen as peripheral to the centre, yet in Hasakah the Kurds are more concentrated in urban areas, while much of the periphery around those urban centres is Arab. The report explains why this is a key weakness for the kind of project Syrian Kurds have envisioned: thenationalcontext.com/syria…
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Iraq’s 75% Oil Rebound in August Cost $2 Billion in Discounts
Iraq’s State Organisation for Marketing of Oil exported 73,687,617 barrels of crude in August 2026, averaging 2,377,020 barrels per day across 59 loadings. That is a rise of about 75% from July, when SOMO Director General Ali al-Shatari recorded roughly 42 million barrels, and more than four times the monthly average of May and June.
Nearly 95% of the oil was exported through southern terminals and passed through the Strait of Hormuz. However, the oil is being sold at discounts of $25–30 per barrel to buyers in India and China due to the risks associated with Hormuz, representing an estimated $1.74 billion to $2.09 billion in revenue given up in a single month.
The full data, including tables covering all 59 cargoes and their details, is available here: thenationalcontext.com/iraqs…
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Iraq's oil exports are recovering through the Strait of Hormuz, and Baghdad's position on militia weapons has softened over the same weeks. The two files are connected.
• Exports averaged 2.34m bpd in August, up from 1.35m in July. The oil minister claimed around 3m in early September, though the ministry's own breakdown gave 2.18m but the direction matters more than the exact figure.
• The main reason for the recovery is Iranian permission. On 22 August Tehran granted passage to additional Iraqi tankers after repeated requests from Baghdad. Almost all Iraqi crude still leaves from Basra and still has to cross Hormuz.
• That permission followed two Iranian visits to Baghdad, Qaani on 10 August and Qalibaf on 20 August. According to reports, in both instance the Hormuz and factional weapons are discussed in the same meetings.
• More notably, Baghdad's language then changed. Iraqi prime minister's security advisor, Qasem al-Araji said 30 September - which supposed to be the deadline for the militia disarmament - is in fact a date to start talks rather than ending them. Nouri al-Maliki rejected the word disarmament, saying the process is more re-organising and containing the weapons. A Framework source now describes the option as organising or freezing weapons.
• That is close to what Qalibaf reportedly proposed in Baghdad two weeks earlier: freeze the heavy weapons, slow the process down, settle it politically.
• The two files connect through the economy, which is where American pressure has the most impact. Oil is about 90% of Iraq's state revenue, it is held at the New York Fed, and it pays the public salaries that hold the political order together. Rising revenue eases the pressure Baghdad was under.
• 30 September matters for a second reason. It is the date the US-led coalition leaves, and the American presence was the factions' main justification for keeping independent weapons. That makes it a natural point to restructure them.
• The factions are also widening the agenda. They want any national discussion of weapons to cover the Peshmerga, federal control of Kurdistan's borders and crossings, and the Iranian Kurdish opposition groups.
• The Peshmerga demand is largely a bargaining tool. The real objective is the Iran-facing border on the Kurdistan side and the Iranian Kurdish armed groups based there, which Tehran has been pressing Baghdad since May to expel from Iraq altogether.
thenationalcontext.com/iraq-…
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The PKK-aligned movement has spent the past eighteen months restructuring its media network around audiences and languages rather than around the armed struggle.
The movement's own internal discussion in June 2026 of a new period for the Ozgur Basin, the "free press" tradition the movement's outlets claim, called for media to reorganise around "democratic politics, with separate news, women's, youth and cultural press structures".
The latest step came in August 2026, when Yazidi media and political structures in Sinjar held the first conference of a new Ezidxan Press Union, with the Yazidi women's movement TAJE, the YBS-YJS militias and Jineoloji groups taking part. It follows a cluster of launches in May: Nûçe TV, a Kurdish-language political news channel, began broadcasting from Germany on 15 May, Kurdish Language Day, with bureaus in Diyarbakir, Qamishli and Sulaimani; KurdFM, a diaspora radio station in Kurmanji, Sorani and Kirmancki, started the same day through the Kurdish federation FED-GEL; and Zagros 24, an Iran-focused channel in Kurdish and Persian, formally launched on 30 May, less than three weeks after the Sweden-based Aryen TV ended its broadcasts on 11 May.
These changes sit on top of a longer sequence. Medya News, the movement's English-language outlet, closed on 30 June 2025, stating that the changing political circumstances of the Kurdish movement as a whole required Kurdish journalism to be reimagined; The Amargi, an English-language platform based in Leipzig and aimed at journalists, academics and policy circles, launched on 20 September 2025. ANHA in northeast Syria and RojNews in Iraqi Kurdistan both dropped their Turkish services on 30 September 2025 to concentrate on regional languages. Denge Gel, the movement's European radio station, shut down, with its coordinator saying the peace process had opened a new period in which old methods would no longer work and the movement's press had to rebuild itself. Azadiya Welat, the Kurdish-language newspaper, resumed publication in January 2026 after a ten-year gap, picking up where the paper Xwebun stopped. Kurd Archive launched in April 2025 to digitise the broadcast inheritance of MED TV, Medya TV and Roj TV, the satellite channels Turkey pressured off European platforms between 1995 and 2013.
A full interactive guide to the pro-PKK media ecosystem and the changes made over the past two years: thenationalcontext.com/the-p…
And an earlier report on how the PKK's new media map is the blueprint for its political map amid the peace process: thenationalcontext.com/pkk-m…
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Two of the earliest pieces on The National Context, published in February and March 2025, explained why the PKK-Turkey peace process was set in motion by the regional realignment that followed October 7, and set out a broader grand-strategic model around it.
The February piece argued that: "...The timing coincided with the one-year anniversary of the October 7 events and [the beginning of the breakdown of the previous Iran–Israel regional equilibrium]...The region has entered what might be termed a geopolitical "hungry gap" – borrowing from agricultural terminology describing the precarious interval between depleted old harvests and pending new crops. This metaphor aptly captures the current transition, as Iran's decline creates a power vacuum that Turkey, among other regional powers, appears positioned to fill, though the shape of the new regional "harvest" remains uncertain.": thenationalcontext.com/a-bol…
The March piece went further and built an actual grand-strategic model around the peace process. It situates the process within the transition to a more unstable multipolar order, as the world gradually re-entered an era of "survival of the fittest," identifies October 7 as a marker of that shift, and traces the subsequent weakening of Hezbollah and Iran and the collapse of Assad, and the resulting transformation of the strategic environment surrounding both Turkey and the Kurdish question. The piece argued that the process was about more than ending the PKK’s armed conflict with Turkey. It explored how Kurdish political incorporation could become an asset to Turkish regional power rather than simply a domestic concession, and why the Syrian Kurdish and SDF files were therefore likely to form an integral part of the same process.
In retrospect, the article was particularly prescient both in identifying the broader direction of the process and in treating the SDF-Syria track as structurally connected to the negotiations with Ocalan rather than as a separate issue: thenationalcontext.com/from-…
In a more recent article, published in July 2026, another important dimension of this framework in explained greater detail: the Israel layer. The piece examined how the changing Turkey-Israel relationship, the post-October 7 regional order, and the strategic position of Kurdish actors have interacted to shape Ankara’s calculations surrounding the peace process: thenationalcontext.com/the-t…
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New on the SDF-Damascus integration agreement:
• Yesterday and today, a sizable number of Damascus-linked Syrian Interior and Defence Ministry personnel entered Hasakah city in preparation for taking over the city's security affairs. We reported five days ago, citing reliable sources, that additional Damascus-appointed security personnel were set to enter Hasakah in the coming days.
• Based on this change on the ground, we are recolouring two areas within Hasakah and the Qamishli countryside to green, denoting Syrian government forces. The entire SDF pocket is now nominally under Damascus control, but outside these areas that control remains nominal, which is why we are keeping the rest yellow, where the SDF holds real power on the ground.
• Two indicators that security control of the city is being taken over: yesterday, a convoy of around 100 military police, a Defence Ministry force, was stationed in the northwest of the city, and today, some 300 to 350 personnel from the Special Tasks Forces were stationed on the eastern and east-northeastern edge of the city.
• Today's deployment is especially large because the role of the Special Tasks Forces is rapid intervention and dealing with exceptional security incidents, including serious disturbances, hostage situations and other sudden security threats. It is a strong sign that they are there in preparation for a further deployment of Syrian government forces into the city. According to a reliable source embedded with the deployed security force, the task forces are one of the first operational components of a phased takeover, providing an early high-readiness security capability while the rest of the state security institutions are deployed sequentially.
• In the coming days, civil police, road security, further military police and other security agencies are set to enter the city to take over their respective functions across it. These forces also include the integrated SDF-linked Asayish personnel, who will form part of the broader security structure under Damascus command. This is important because it shows that while the personnel are being absorbed, as Damascus has previously stated, the command sits with Damascus.
• Two other points are worth noting. The three key security appointments in Hasakah province have now been made, and all three are Damascus-appointed, with none coming from the SDF. This matters because the key goal is command.
• Marwan al-Ali was already appointed head of Internal Security in the province, which oversees and coordinates the Interior Ministry's security presence, including civilian policing, public security, criminal security operations and civilian checkpoints. Imad Fawaz al-Ayash has been appointed head of military police, which enforces military law and discipline, deals with violations by military personnel, carries out military arrests and maintains military order.
• This is significant because while three brigades in Hasakah province are populated by former SDF personnel, the discipline side is handled directly by Damascus, which means they will not function autonomously, and in cases of violation the Damascus-controlled military police structure may intervene.
• The third post went to Thaer Obeid al-Bilal, appointed head of military security, which broadly concerns the security of the military establishment itself: force protection, security oversight, vetting, counter-intelligence functions and the security of installations, although the precise formal remit of the reorganised Military Security structure has not been publicly detailed. Both his appointment and that of al-Ayash were publicly confirmed during the latest integration meetings.
• Today, importantly, the executive office of Hasakah province held its first meeting. We have reported on the appointments to the executive office, which is numerically dominated by SDF-linked figures. As we argued at the time, this executive office is more civilian-facing, and Damascus appears to have compromised by allowing the SDF a stronger civilian-facing role in the province while retaining tighter control over the coercive institutions. That is what is now happening on the ground.
• Aside from that, in the coming weeks more Interior Ministry personnel are expected to enter Qamishli as part of the deployment of Internal Security from Qamishli towards Derik/al-Malkiyah. Damascus-linked Internal Security forces are also expected to be deployed to the Semalka border crossing.
• This is significant because Semalka has already been administratively integrated under the Syrian central government, while the security side has been integrated only on paper, with almost all personnel on the ground being former SDF or Autonomous Administration-linked figures.
• It is now likely that Damascus will deploy its own forces and absorb some of the remaining SDF and Asayish personnel as part of this broader mixed force. The distinction matters, because absorption into a mixed force leaves these personnel without exclusive control of these areas.
• How extensive the deployment will be is unclear. In Qamishli, for instance, no final arrangement appears to have been reached, but the outcome is likely to be a mixed force of integrated SDF Asayish and Damascus-linked security.
• For now, we have changed the colour only of the Hasakah pocket and the triangle towards Qamishli, because the security environment there has already changed to a degree that warrants it. The rest are expected to follow.
More details and a more detailed interactive map: thenationalcontext.com/damas…
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Here is more on our report from five days ago that "Damascus-appointed security personnel are set to enter Hasakah in the coming days," with more context that also proved accurate on the education question:
On the latest SDF-Damascus integration agreement:
• As SDF commander Mazloum Abdi announced the formal dissolution of the SDF, new details are emerging about the final and more granular aspects of the agreement reached yesterday.
• The most notable is that Abdi finally caved and accepted moving to Damascus to become an adviser to Ahmed al-Sharaa. This is probably one of the more significant details.
• Abdi initially claimed he would remain in the area to stay with “my people” and floated the idea of forming a political party, but al-Sharaa has, according to reliable sources, insisted that he move to Damascus as part of the settlement. This is very important because one of al-Sharaa’s key goals has been breaking the geographic connection, and physically working in Damascus will make Abdi’s co-optation much smoother.
• The overall appointments are less significant than the initial rumours. Abdi was previously rumoured to become vice president, while Ilham Ahmed was expected to become a senior Foreign Ministry official. Ahmed is now set to become a member of parliament, while Abdi will be one of several advisers, with the extent of his authority unclear. This makes the appointments much more favourable to Damascus because, on the one hand, having them physically in Damascus helps break their territorial continuity, while on the other, their appointments avoid simply reassigning them to positions equivalent to their previous roles and thereby prevent the creation of parallel authority.
• However, there is an upside for Abdi and Ahmed. Being close to the centres of decision-making might help them become more well-versed in statecraft and broaden their strategic thinking. This has been one of the key weaknesses of Syrian Kurds, who have historically been concentrated in smaller rural areas and have therefore had less capacity for elite reproduction or for developing an intellectual ecosystem capable of rivalling the centre.
• The future of Hasakah province and the extent of integrated SDF personnel will likely be concentrated in the demographically Kurdish areas shown on this attached map, rather than across the current SDF pocket. According to reliable sources, additional Damascus-appointed security personnel are set to enter Hasakah in the coming days, and once uniforms and vehicle markings are unified, it will become more difficult to distinguish newly recruited personnel that Damascus can deploy in these mixed areas.
• On Kurdish in education and the broader language discussions, there is still no final agreement. Reports that Kurdish will become an official language appear to be misleading, confusing Kurdish becoming an officially recognised language of education with Kurdish becoming an official state language alongside Arabic, which would require constitutional changes. On education, there is still no final settlement, but there is agreement on a one-year transitional phase, during which a final arrangement is expected to be reached.
• Finally, one of the biggest unknowns is the long-term future of this agreement, and this is probably its most important unresolved aspect. The current agreements all address the integration of SDF personnel now, but do not say whether, for instance, in two years Damascus can recruit additional personnel into the currently SDF-populated brigades in Hasakah, whether it can replace Interior Ministry personnel integrated from the SDF, or whether, in three years, the governor of Hasakah must still be an SDF-linked figure or can be replaced. None of this has been addressed in the agreement. It is unclear whether there are undeclared clauses, but the absence of such guarantees in writing significantly weakens the long-term prospects of what the SDF is banking on: remaining as cohesive blocs within the security and civilian institutions.
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Also, more context on Damascus's strategic logic in making concessions on Hasakah's executive office in exchange for the gradual redeployment of Syrian Interior Ministry personnel into areas previously under exclusive SDF control:
On the SDF-Damascus integration process:
The Syrian government has announced a provisional executive office in Hasakah province with a roughly 6:4 ratio favouring SDF-linked appointees over Damascus appointees. This has provoked criticism from some Arab activists in Hasakah, but in Damascus's strategic calculus the arrangement is likely seen more favourably than the numbers suggest.
– For Damascus, the restoration of formal state institutions in Hasakah matters more at this stage than the composition of those institutions. Manning is not irrelevant, but it is secondary to re-establishing the structural hierarchy of governance itself, which is the larger objective. The provisional framing reinforces this. Damascus is likely aiming to shift the composition of the executive office in its favour once it builds greater coercive and administrative capacity on the ground. The implied sequence: restore institutions first, build enforcement capacity, then hold elections under more favourable conditions, allowing it to claim the outcome was determined by democratic process rather than appointment.
– That said, templates of vertical subordination and numerical representation should be applied cautiously to Syria's current context. In a post-Assad environment where state-building is still marred by weak institutions, the individuals who occupy positions often matter more than the formal architecture, because they can build patronage networks, entrench themselves, and accumulate informal power that outlasts any provisional arrangement. The manning question should not be dismissed as secondary to structure; both interact in ways specific to Syria's transitional conditions.
– Damascus has also made several pointed moves in the sub-district appointments that signal a deliberate effort to de-ethnicise the integration. Hasakah district itself has been left without an appointee, but SDF-linked personnel have been appointed as district managers for al-Malikiyah (Direk) and the Qamishli area, both of which contain territory split between government and SDF control. Simultaneously, Damascus has appointed government-linked Arab officials to sub-district governorships in areas like Cil Agha (Jawadiyah), which largely sits within the SDF pocket, creating mixed governance that frames integration around territoriality and personnel rather than ethnic partition. The likely intent is to increase interaction between government and SDF-linked officials and normalise integrated administration, but the SDF may read these appointments as confirmation that it has regained institutional standing in these areas, creating an incentive to consolidate further rather than allow itself to be absorbed.
The coercive trade
– The concessions on the executive office appear linked to a parallel, and arguably more consequential, development: the gradual redeployment of Syrian Interior Ministry personnel into areas previously under exclusive SDF control. Several checkpoints at the southern entrance of Hasakah city, formerly under SDF control, have recently been handed to Interior Ministry personnel. These are substantive transfers, not cosmetic. Interior Ministry personnel have also been observed in areas east and west of Hasakah city that they never entered during the January offensive, representing a new penetration of the SDF's territorial envelope.
– Furthermore, pro-government sources claim Interior Ministry personnel will also deploy inside Hasakah city itself f, not only at its perimeter checkpoints but the personnel would be Damascus-appoint locals from Hasakah city itself. At the entrance to Kobani city (not just the district area), a Syrian Interior Ministry checkpoint has also been established and staffed by government personnel, another notable milestone in the integration process.
– It remains unclear whether a similar deployment will extend to Qamishli, which is psychologically more significant for Kurds than Hasakah, even though Hasakah holds greater strategic weight: it sits deeper inside Syria, further from the Turkish border, and serves as the provincial capital and seat of local government.
– What appears to be unfolding is a deliberate trade: Damascus is conceding on the composition of civilian-facing institutions in exchange for incremental gains in coercive capacity, specifically policing, arrest powers, judiciary, and territorial presence. This explains why Damascus may have shown patience over incidents like the repeated attacks on the judicial palace signage by pro-SDF Kurdish elements as a protest against not including Kurdish. The government may have calculated that as its personnel gain ground, it will eventually be able to protect and enforce the restoration of the judicial palace on its own terms. The reactivation of the judicial palace appears postponed until Damascus has sufficient coercive presence in Hasakah city to sustain it.
Shadow structures and the fiscal lever
– The SDF, operating from a PKK organisational culture, is unlikely to treat the formal dismantling of its parallel institutions as a genuine surrender of power. Its probable strategy is to translate its institutional presence informally into a de facto autonomy sustained by shadow structures: maintaining parallel institutions beneath the formal apparatus, building patronage networks within the new governance structures to generate revenue, and retaining informal armed elements (operatives like those involved in the harassment campaigns and signage attacks) as instruments of pressure and territorial assertion.
– In fact, the SDF is using every available method to preserve its informal power, including methods that sit uncomfortably with its own ideology, such as aggressively pushing to privatise sectors where it can steer tenders to affiliated companies, retaining both revenue streams and institutional leverage.
– Each side is therefore reading the same arrangement through a different lens. Damascus sees the institutional appointments as the dismantling of a parallel structure and the beginning of fiscal absorption (payrolls now run through Damascus). The SDF reads its numerical advantage in the executive office as a foothold for consolidating power through the very institutions it has nominally conceded.
– For Damascus, this is also the least costly model of absorbing the SDF. A new US Senate draft bill conditions continued support on a "fair" integration of SDF into the Syrian military, but this does not pose a strategic threat to Ahmad al-Sharaa's position and the draft is not final. If compliance proves too costly, he may simply disregard it, since Turkey, not the US, provides the bulk of direct military assistance to Syria. The US holds greater leverage over sanctions and diplomatic normalisation, but Trump appears committed to his current approach on sanctions relief, making a reversal unlikely. Maintaining the appearance of fair integration is therefore useful for preserving US military assistance as a supplementary channel, but one that is politically important.
– Al-Sharaa also appears to recognise that limited power-sharing with Kurds in the northeast sets a precedent for managing the Druze question in Suwayda. The SDF arrangement is therefore not only about the Kurdish file but serves as a template for broader minority incorporation across Syria.
More and a detailed interactive map: thenationalcontext.com/how-s…
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