A View from Damascus: Rain, Power, and the End of the SDF

What the collapse of Kurdish control looks like from inside Syria’s capital

A view from Rukn al-Din, a Kurdish suburb in Damascus - Tam Hussein

It had not rained like this in Damascus for nearly a year. On 17 January, I woke to the sky breaking open and the city soaking. In London, that kind of drizzle dampens spirits. Here, people rejoiced. Rain is seen as a sign of God’s benevolence, and mosques still perform the istisqa prayer to ask for it. Many Damascenes read the downpour as a good omen, especially as news spread that Arab tribes who had once supported the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had gone over to the Syrian government.

By noon, minarets in , the city’s Kurdish quarter, rang out with takbirat — chants magnifying and praising God, usually reserved for Eid. I was at the barber’s when a teenager, cigarette in hand and sliders on his feet, came in and told us: “The SDF has surrendered.” The men in the shop congratulated one another. Something decisive had happened. Finally, they said, the country would be unified.

What had begun as a limited government operation to expel SDF units linked to the PKK from Aleppo’s Sheikh Maqsoud district had morphed into a strategic sweep across their northeastern territory. According to insiders, the collapse was largely accidental and unplanned. When the SDF retreated, government forces were taken by surprise and simply kept pushing. Momentum carried them forward. Within days, Damascus had retaken Deir al-Zor, Raqqa, the Tabqa dam and, more importantly, the oil and gas fields that had underpinned Kurdish autonomy.

It was the energy question people talked about first. Petrol prices might fall. Power cuts might ease, especially with Ramadan approaching. People were freezing — I was freezing — huddling around diesel stoves, waiting for electricity to come on intermittently a few times a day. Life in Damascus felt like walking around permanently cold, and those oil fields were seen as the key to continuous electricity.

Government troops moving into dozens of towns and villages abandoned by the SDF marked the most dramatic territorial reversal since the war’s early years. It was not all jubilation. Allegations of human rights abuses emerged on both sides, including videos circulating online that purported to show government forces mutilating or humiliating the much-celebrated SDF women fighters or snipers. Interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa framed the moment as “a victory for all Syrians of all backgrounds”, presenting it as the end of division and the return of national unity. SDF commander Mazloum Abdi said the withdrawal was intended “to stop the bloodshed”, a tacit acknowledgement that his forces had been outmanoeuvred.

This felt like the end of Abdi’s SDF. The political terms were as stark as the military outcome. Fighters are to be absorbed into the Syrian army as individuals, not as a unified force, effectively dissolving the organisation as an independent military actor and ending Kurdish armed autonomy. The effects were immediate. The Syrian pound stabilised and the run on the dollar slowed. For a moment, the grumbling about everything — from sectarianism to cheap Turkish imports killing local manufacturing — fell quiet. The great man, it seemed, could do no wrong.

Sharaa had outmanoeuvred the SDF and pulled the rug from beneath Abdi. He announced citizenship and language rights for Kurdish Syrians, freedoms denied under Assad. State media eagerly broadcast his invocation of Saladin, calling Kurds “sons of Saladin” and equal partners in Syria’s future. In Rukn al-Din, these gestures were welcomed. The SDF’s claim to be an inclusive party of all factions and sects, not just Kurds, suddenly appeared unnecessary on the streets of Damascus.

In the northeast, however, unease lingered. Reports emerged of Kurdish families fleeing towards Qamishli, fearing that autonomy won through blood and sacrifice might quietly disappear under central rule. On the Turkish border, footage showed Kurds attempting to cross into Syria to support their Syrian-Kurdish compatriots.