On Aug. 25, at the People’s Palace in Damascus, Mazloum Abdi announced the dissolution of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which he had commanded for a decade. Speaking first in Arabic and then in Kurdish, he said the force had joined the Syrian army and would no longer operate independently. 15 days earlier, Turkey’s parliament had passed a framework law for the disarmament of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. The group has long been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, which have waged a brutal campaign against it for decades. Two armed organizations that Ankara had long treated as part of the same security problem stood down within a fortnight.

This is not just a security victory for Turkey. It is also a domestic political victory for its president. Under the prevailing interpretation of Turkey’s constitution, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can run for re-election only if the constitution changes or parliament votes to renew both presidential and parliamentary elections during his current term. Article 116 requires 360 of parliament’s 600 members to support renewal. The governing parties fall short of that threshold. And the liberal Kurdish-aligned Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party’s 56 deputies could supply the missing votes.

“Snow has fallen on the mountains you dreamed of.”

We opened our December 2024 War on the Rocks article with this Turkish saying, as Bashar al Assad’s fall appeared to give Ankara much of what it wanted in Syria, though not without new risks. Above all, Assad’s fall seemed to remove the Kurdish threat to Turkey’s position in Syria. Turkey is now stronger: Ties with the new al Sharaa government in Damascus are closer, and its regional position has improved. Yet the forces that produced this advantage remain fragile.

In 2024, we correctly saw the growing interconnection among international, regional, and domestic factors. We did not predict, however, how quickly these pressures would align or how decisively they would change the balance. Between spring 2025 and August 2026, they reinforced one another because Ankara treated the Turkish and Syrian Kurdish files as a single security problem. That convergence produced no treaty, independent guarantor, or constitutional protection. What emerged is a settlement of arms, not yet a settlement of the Kurdish question, and it remains vulnerable to the political and strategic volatility that made it possible.

The Arithmetic of a Third Term

The crackdown on Turkey’s opposition and the opening to Kurdish politics belong to the same strategy. In May, an appeals court annulled the leadership contest of the Republican People’s Party — Turkey’s storied but long-troubled main opposition party — and restored a former leader against the wishes of party voters. Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul’s popular and politically talented mayor, has been imprisoned and on trial since March. In July, the party split, with 91 deputies leaving. These blows weakened the main partner with which the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party might have built an alternative majority. Repression made outreach more useful to Erdoğan and refusal more costly for Kurdish politicians.

The Kurdish question has long been the opposition’s “kryptonite.” The Republican People’s Party risks accusations of negotiating with terrorists when it courts Kurdish support, but it cannot assemble a governing coalition when it retreats from Kurdish demands. The pressure of 2026 turned that dilemma into dependence by weakening the party and narrowing the opposition’s path to power.

Earlier attempts at peace raised the popularity of the pro-Kurdish party while costing the government nationalist support, just as Erdoğan needed a parliamentary majority to create an executive presidency. Negotiations threatened the constitutional project they were supposed to advance, so the government chose the ballot box. Erdoğan once again needs Kurdish votes for a constitutional goal, but a weaker and divided opposition has reversed the incentive. The Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party can now help his project without becoming the center of a rival coalition.

Still, Erdoğan has kept his distance. Kurdish votes may help him, but owning the process could expose him to nationalist anger. This matters because Erdoğan still depends on the Nationalist Movement Party: Its chairman, Devlet Bahçeli, can open the political space for negotiations, but Erdoğan’s personal ownership of Kurdish concessions could strain the coalition and alienate the nationalist voters sustaining it. Legislation gives the concessions state authority without making the president their personal guarantor, leaving him room to retreat if the political cost rises. That distance also hides a policy divide. June polling showed that 68 percent of Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party voters opposed a continued Turkish military presence in Syria, compared with 38.2 percent nationally. But they could still come to an agreement — not one based on a shared vision for the country and its people, but on immediate political interests.

A Partnership That Ended on Schedule

Washington began working with Kurdish-led forces in northeastern Syria in 2014, and the Syrian Democratic Forces became its principal local partner after its formation in 2015. This partnership had one stated purpose: defeating the Islamic State. But due to its connection to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, Turkey was deeply opposed to the partnership and launched successive military campaigns against Kurdish forces in northern Syria. Still, a decade of cooperation between Syria’s Kurds and Washington gave it a wider political meaning. The Syrian Democratic Forces’ battlefield record made the Kurdish-led system in northeastern Syria, which they call Rojava, an international cause. European supporters embraced its claims to local democracy and women’s participation, and the European Parliament was still pressing for Kurdish rights in February 2026. That support raised hopes about what the partnership might preserve, but it never became a security guarantee. When Washington judged the mission complete, American forces left Syria in April. On Aug. 24, the United States rescinded Syria’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, marking a further turn toward the new central government in Damascus.

Abdi had understood the limits of the partnership for years. In a January 2022 interview, he objected to Washington tying its commitment to the military defeat of the Islamic State and argued that American forces should remain until a political settlement was reached. His complaint revealed the problem: He wanted a counter-terrorism partnership to become a political guarantee. Abdullah Öcalan’s February 2025 appeal for disarmament then offered a path away from armed struggle that Abdi used to seek terms with Damascus. When fighting threatened northeastern Syria in January 2026, Öcalan urged Kurdish leaders to combine resistance with diplomacy and keep the integration agreement alive.

Many Kurds experienced the American withdrawal as abandonment, and for good reason. But Washington’s departure narrowed their choices without making those choices for them. With Öcalan pushing a political course, Abdi exchanged an exposed military position for an uncertain role inside Syrian institutions. Kurdish politics in Syria moved from defending territory under an American umbrella to bargaining over local authority, constitutional rights, and representation in Damascus. The United States had never promised to preserve Kurdish autonomy, but its presence had allowed the Syrian Democratic Forces to negotiate as if such a promise existed. Nothing comparable remained after the troops left.

Syria reinforced the difference. From 2013 to 2015, Syrian Kurdish forces gained standing in Washington and European capitals through their fight against the Islamic State. Kurdish actors in Turkey believed that success strengthened their hand, while the siege of Kobani in September 2014 brought the Syrian war into Turkish politics and deepened mistrust. Syria then expanded Kurdish options. The American withdrawal and dissolution of the Syrian Democratic Forces have now narrowed them.

A Window That Closed

In December 2024, we expected regional disorder to raise the strategic value of Kurdish actors. The war with Iran partly confirmed that judgment. After American and Israeli strikes began in early 2026, Iranian Kurdish armed groups based in Iraq offered Washington something Iran’s exiled opposition lacked: organized networks spanning Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. The groups attracted American interest as a possible ground component against Tehran, but that interest never became the sustained backing needed to produce political leverage.

The Trump administration discussed operations in western Iran with Iranian Kurdish groups and asked Iraqi Kurdish leaders to help them cross the border. Kurdish leaders in Iraq resisted. They feared Iranian retaliation and did not want to enter a ground war. Turkish officials also contacted Kurdish leaders and reportedly pressured U.S. officials to discourage an intervention. By March 7, Trump was telling Kurdish forces to stay out, and Iran’s foreign minister later credited Ankara with helping prevent a new front. The episode showed that Kurdish strategic value had risen. It also showed how quickly Kurdish caution and Turkish diplomacy could limit it.

Military change narrowed the opportunity further. Guerrilla forces once used terrain, concealment, and time to outlast stronger states. Drones, surveillance, and precision weapons have weakened that model. Turkey spent a decade using those tools against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Iraq and Syria, limiting its ability to hide and regroup. Ankara also acted to prevent foreign interest in Kurdish forces from becoming a lasting relationship or fostering a Rojava-like entity in Iranian Kurdistan. Its engagement with Öcalan and its pressure on the Syrian file narrowed that possibility before another crisis could widen it.

Seen in hindsight, Öcalan and Erdoğan’s coalition partner, Devlet Bahçeli, had already recognized that the same shift was occurring. Öcalan declared that armed struggle had run its course, while Bahçeli offered an olive branch to Kurds in Turkey and beyond. Their initiatives came from different positions but together opened a political channel at a moment of strategic pressure.

Disorder raised Kurdish strategic value, but Turkey helped prevent that value from becoming durable leverage. By the time Bahçeli opened a political channel at home, Ankara had reduced the regional alternatives available to Kurdish actors. The regional pressure and the domestic arithmetic were beginning to reinforce one another.

The Last Authority of Abdullah Öcalan

Turkey’s limited amnesty turned this alignment into an outcome by tying the Turkish and Syrian tracks together. It takes effect only after the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and all affiliated organizations end their activities, dissolve, and surrender their weapons. Turkish security institutions must verify compliance before the National Security Council activates the law. By including affiliated organizations, parliament tied the fate of the Syrian Democratic Forces to the return of fighters from Turkey. The link entered law on Aug. 10, 15 days before Abdi announced the dissolution in Damascus.

The law defined compliance, but Öcalan’s intervention made that compressed schedule possible. His authority over commanders who had served with him in Syria before his expulsion in 1998 allowed him to move Kurdish leaders toward a common course after decades in prison. The political opening in Turkey and military integration in Syria could then move together. Yet this is also a weakness: His authority is personal, finite, and cannot pass automatically to a successor or an institution.

The law still excludes Öcalan from the arrangement he helped make possible. People serving life sentences for offenses committed before 2005 remain outside its scope, so his release remains a demand of the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party rather than a term of the settlement. His February 2025 appeal had already renounced separate nation-states, federations, administrative autonomy, and “culturalist solutions.” He narrowed the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s aims before the law gave him a personal or institutional stake in the result.

Öcalan also operated within limits set by Turkey’s influence over Damascus. Ankara shaped what President Ahmed al Sharaa would concede. Kurdish leaders gained positions inside the Syrian state and cultural rights, but they did not preserve the institutions through which they had governed. The agreement replaced a parallel Kurdish-led order with a struggle for influence inside a centralized state. Turkish power set its outer limits.

Yet neither Öcalan nor Abdi speaks for a single Kurdish constituency. The Kurdish National Council joined the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Democratic Union Party on a common platform only in April 2025, but the agreement did not place the council under Abdi’s command. Nor did dissolution erase divisions within the Syrian Democratic Forces: Arab tribal defections contributed to the January collapse, while the Women’s Protection Units resisted losing their separate status. The mixed reaction in the northeast showed that Abdi could dissolve a command without settling how these constituencies would be represented.

Northern Iraq also remains part of the process. Much of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s armed presence lies there, and the first symbolic disarmament near Sulaymaniyah brought together Turkish intelligence, the Kurdistan Regional Government, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party. Nechirvan Barzani also mediated between Abdi and Damascus. Verification therefore depends on cooperation from both Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. If either withdraws, Öcalan’s call and Ankara’s law may not establish whether disarmament has occurred.

These divisions do not change the main Kurdish demand. After withdrawing fighters in late 2013, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party sought constitutional rights that no government could reverse. In August 2026, it again called the framework only a first step toward constitutional protection. Ankara has also kept its old frame. Earlier legislation was called the Law to End Terror and Strengthen Social Integration. Today’s measure is the Law on Strengthening National Solidarity and Social Integration. Both laws integrate an armed movement without settling the constitutional status of Kurdish rights.

The comparison with 2015 shows why ripeness does not last. Domestic and external pressures can bring actors together and then pull them apart when the balance shifts. The present convergence is real, but it remains a favorable moment rather than an achievement that can survive the conditions that created it.

What the Settlements Still Lack

Turkey’s arrangement remains conditional. The law suspends sentences for probationary periods of 5–10 years and places investigations in abeyance, but only after the National Security Council publishes a verification finding, expected following its October meeting. Turkish security institutions decide whether disarmament has occurred, and the council decides when the benefits begin. The state is both a party to the process and its judge.

Syria made more visible concessions. Damascus granted citizenship to Kurds left stateless by the Baath regime, allowed Kurdish-language teaching, and promised senior state roles to Kurdish leaders, including Ilham Ahmed. These gains matter, especially when January might have ended in a wider war. Yet they also show the terms of the compromise: Damascus replaced collective autonomy with individual offices and rights granted from the center. No constitution yet makes those rights binding.

That gap matters because the Syrian state has not shown that it can protect minorities. Mob attacks and reprisals continue, perpetrators seldom face charges, and the new security services remain mostly Sunni. Minority recruits often fill administrative or unarmed roles. A government that cannot yet protect Alawites, Druze, and Christians cannot secure Kurdish rights through decrees alone.

The absence of an outside guarantor leaves both tracks vulnerable. Kurdish representatives sought third-party involvement during the previous Turkish peace talks, but Ankara rejected even the monitoring commission discussed at Dolmabahçe in 2015. Today, a vice president chairs the Turkish board, four working groups manage implementation, security bodies verify compliance, and a council chaired by the president makes the final decision. Damascus likewise controls its constitutional process and the implementation of its own decrees. Both settlements, therefore, ask the party granting rights to certify that it has honored them.

Syria’s constitutional process will decide whether the settlement lasts. It can turn appointments and decrees into rights that survive the interests behind them. American pressure for such protections will create friction with Ankara, which opposes a separate Kurdish armed command and territorial autonomy in Syria. Yet equal citizenship, Kurdish-language education, political participation, and elected local administration can fit within the unitary Syrian state that both Washington and Ankara support. The disagreement is real, but narrower than a dispute over autonomy.

Washington should define enforceable protections in institutional terms. Syria’s constitution should protect equal citizenship, Kurdish-language education, political participation, and elected local administration. Implementing laws should set deadlines, budgets, and avenues for appeal. Most broad American leverage has already been spent: Comprehensive sanctions ended in July 2025, Congress repealed the Caesar Act in December 2025, and Washington rescinded Syria’s terrorism designation in August 2026. Waiver authorities tied to that designation have also lost much of their value. What remains includes targeted sanctions, licenses for controlled exports, and American influence over the World Bank and donor financing. Projects that strengthen central ministries, the security sector, or state financial institutions should proceed in stages tied to public implementation benchmarks.

Reporting need not depend on Damascus. The Fiscal Year 2026 defense law already requires an unclassified presidential report every 180 days for four years on minority rights and implementation of the March 2025 agreement. The State Department should draw on U.N. human rights bodies, Syrian civil society, the Kurdish National Council, and Arab and Kurdish local representatives, and publish the evidence in an annex. Damascus may contribute, but it should not certify its own compliance.

The Turkish track offers outsiders less leverage. Washington cannot condition a domestic amnesty law, and visible American sponsorship could reinforce Ankara’s claim that Kurdish politics are directed from abroad. The safeguards must therefore be created inside Turkey: Parliament should publish verification criteria before benefits begin, provide judicial review, add cross-party and civil-society participation to monitoring, and issue regular implementation reports. Verification in northern Iraq should include authorities in both Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. The United States and European governments can press for these measures privately and support independent documentation, but they cannot substitute for a guarantor that Ankara refuses to accept.

Another Turkish saying holds that “with patience, the sour grape becomes sweet halva.” Patience helped produce the agreements now taking shape on both sides of the border, but political choices have not yet been secured through law. Domestic, regional, and international interests now point in the same direction. They have changed Turkey and Syria. Still, they have not yet produced peace. Until law and institutions can hold the settlement together when those interests shift, ripeness will remain a condition rather than an achievement.

Riccardo Gasco is a foreign policy program coordinator at the IstanPol Institute in Istanbul and a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Bologna. He has more than nine years of research and fieldwork experience in Turkey. His research focuses on Turkey’s foreign policy and its strategic relations with Europe. He has published on Turkish foreign policy, domestic politics, the Kurdish issue, Turkish-E.U. relations, the Middle East, and trans-Atlantic relations.

Samuele C. A. Abrami, Ph.D., is a researcher at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs. He was a Mercator-Istanbul Policy Center fellow. He holds a Ph.D. from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, where he lectures in the ASERI master’s program in Middle Eastern Studies. Besides Turkey’s policies, his research focuses on the Kurdish question and broader issues connecting European and greater Mediterranean (geo)political dynamics.

Image: kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons