Syria remains deeply divided after 15 years of conflict and faces a difficult path toward reintegration.
Dr. Amy Austin Holmes, an instructional associate professor at Texas A&M University’s Bush School DC, said efforts to reunify the country after years of war have raised significant concerns among communities that carved out their own systems of governance.
According to Holmes, when the Assad regime fell in December 2024, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the northeast controlled roughly one-third of Syria. They had held that territory after defeating the Islamic State, and then also prevented the Russian- and Iranian-backed Assad regime from regaining control of it. For over a decade, the SDF were a key partner force in the U.S.-led coalition to defeat ISIS. During the conflict, Kurdish leaders established a semi-autonomous region with its own courts, schools, universities and local security forces. Because many in the region want to preserve those institutions, reintegrating citizens into a unified Syrian state has been challenging.
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The Assad government had long been a brutal authoritarian regime, and Syrian Kurds were frequently targeted.
“The Kurdish language was banned by the Assad regime, and even in prior decades, hundreds of thousands of Syrian Kurds had been stripped of their citizenship,” she said. “The Kurdish minority in Syria took the lead in establishing a semi-autonomous region called the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, but Syrian Kurds have said they do not seek separation or independence.”
The region also adopted a co-chair system requiring each leadership position to be shared by a man and a woman.
“It was a way of bringing more women into the local government and promoting gender equality. Kurdish women famously took up arms and fought against the Islamic State,” Holmes said. “There were civilian women who also took on important leadership roles in this autonomous administration, so for many of the women in the Northeast, they don’t want to lose this new experience of being able to participate in their own government.”
Holmes said Kurds are increasingly worried about their future after the Syrian Democratic Forces announced its dissolution and integration into the national army.
“In post-conflict situations, you have the problem of many armed groups who fought in the war now needing to be reintegrated into society,” she said. “Armed groups that once fought each other now need to be merged. It’s a process called DDR — disarmament, demobilization and reintegration.”
During a trip to Syria over the summer, Holmes was able to observe how the integration process was playing out on the ground. It was not going smoothly, in her view.
“The Kurds established their own local police force, but officially, they have now been merged with the Arab-majority police force in Damascus and other parts of the country,” she said. “However, I witnessed how Kurds in the police were disarmed by Arabs, even though they’re part of the same integrated force. This is one indication that this integration is not working the way it’s supposed to.”
Holmes said the new Syrian government also opposes having women serve in the military, citing religious concerns.
“These are women who know how to fly drones and fight in frontline combat operations. Many were trained by the United States,” she said. “The Ministry of Defense in Damascus does not want them in the ministry because they are women. We spent a decade training them. It’s up in the air as to what will happen to them.”
Another point of tension is the government’s insistence on identifying the military by a single ethnic label, Holmes said.
“The Syrian Democratic Forces were historically led by Kurds, but evolved over time to include Arabs as well as Yezidis, Turkmen and Syriac-Assyrian Christians,” she said. “The new government in Damascus is insisting on using the same single ethnic identifier for its new military as the Assad regime used, referring to it as the ‘Syrian Arab Army’ although Syria consists of many non-Arabs.”
Holmes suggested the United States could pressure Syrian officials to ensure a more inclusive integration process.
“Arguably, the Syrian Democratic Forces are the best trained forces in all of Syria, because they were trained by the United States. But Ahmed al-Sharaa is minimizing and sidelining them from his army, while he’s including foreign, non-Syrian jihadists,” she said. “It raises many questions. Most importantly: is the new army going to be more under the influence of these jihadi extremist groups, while the more secular, moderate U.S.-trained Syrian Democratic Forces are being sidelined?”
