A day before Syrian leader Ahmad Al Shara signed a deal with a Kurdish warlord to end hostilities in the resource-rich eastern part of the country this week, he was facing a political disaster.
Forces led by his Hayat Tahrir Al Sham group were overrunning parts of the Alawite heartland, mounting indiscriminate killings and drawing international condemnation, days after clashing in Damascus with members of the Druze sect, another minority fearful of the possibility of what HTS rule will bring.
The man who had vowed to unify Syria and wants international sanctions to be lifted on him and his government was faced with the prospect of indefinite multi-front internal warfare with ethnic and religious minorities, members of which could marshal external support.
Turkish-backed militias allied with HTS have been fighting a war of attrition for the past three months with the Kurdish-ruled east. The area is controlled by secular, US-backed militias as well-equipped as Mr Al Shara’s HTS.
On the Syrian coast, militias and other auxiliaries aligned with HTS were condemned by the US as “Islamist terrorists" who massacred Alawites over the past week in a campaign to disarm former regime loyalists in the sect's heartland. The UN said entire families had been wiped out in the attacks. But another front has been threatening to open with the Druze on the outskirts of the capital.
On Monday, Mr Al Shara sat at the same table with his bitter rival Mazloum Abdi, head of the powerful and mostly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Suddenly the focus shifted from the coast, where residents and activists say civilian killings have been continuing, deep into the east of the country and its centre of oil, gas, commodities and electricity production. The two men signed a briefly worded agreement at the presidential palace in Damascus to bring the east under the control of the new authorities. How that will be implemented is yet to be negotiated and there is no guarantee the process will succeed.
Nevertheless, it was the most significant political development in Syria since HTS led an 11-day offensive from the north of the country, which resulted in the end of the five-decade rule of the Assad regime. HTS, founded and commanded by Mr Al Shara, is formerly linked to Al Qaeda.
The principles of the agreement were discussed at a regional security meeting in Amman, which was attended by senior officials from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq. However, a concern raised by Syrian intelligence chief Anas Khattab at the meeting was claims of recent infiltration in the east by Iran-backed Shiite militia from Iraq, a Jordanian source told The National.
“Al Shara did not want the Kurds to start aligning with Iran. The debacle his men committed in combating the Alawite insurgency forced an acceleration of the deal,” the source said, adding that Arab countries helped calm Turkey's doubts.
According to the text of the deal, which the Syrian presidency published online, the SDF and Syrian government have agreed to integrate all civil and military institutions in north-eastern Syria into the state as a whole by the end of the year, including “border crossings, the airport, and oil and gasfields”.
HTS has taken over the seat of power in Damascus but large parts of the east, the population of which is mixed between Arabs and Kurds, remain under SDF control. The group is an amalgamation of mostly Kurdish militias created by Washington in 2015. The SDF and its forerunners were aligned with Bashar Al Assad during the civil war and maintained channels of communication with Iran and Russia.
These Kurdish groups, which later became the SDF, helped the Assad regime crush a peaceful protest movement in 2011, and later capture rebel-held eastern parts of Aleppo city along with other areas. Their remaining ally since the regime was overthrown has been the US. The SDF has been the ground component in the US's fight against ISIS in Syria.
However, US-backed Kurdish territorial acquisitions have contributed to ethnic violence with Arabs, who comprise the overwhelming majority of the population of the country. After Mr Al Assad's fall, several thousand Arab militia deserted the SDF and joined the Turkish-backed offensive on SDF-held areas. These regions account for all of Syria’s oil production. Over the past decade, the SDF has sold oil to the former regime, and to areas controlled by HTS and rebel groups allied with Turkey in north-western Syria. Syria officially produced about 400,000 barrels of oil per day in 2010, the year before the outbreak of a pro-democracy revolt.
By the end of 2011 the revolt had become an armed struggle and Syria was embroiled in civil war. The country fragmented into Russian, Iranian, Turkish and US zones of influence. Only the US and Turkish zones remain, along with a newly carved Israeli zone near the Golan Heights.
Atlantic Council fellow Omer Ozkizilcik said the deal is aligned with Ankara’s interest partly because once the pro-Turkish government in Damascus controls the oilfields, “the SDF will lose an important source of economic revenue”.
However, the main factor behind the deal was US pressure on Turkey, the most powerful ally of Mr Al Shara, and on Mr Abdi, regional and western officials say.
An official in the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria told The National that two factors forced the hand of Mr Abdi into the deal that buries his goal of autonomy and resource-sharing with Damascus. One was “unrelenting” US pressure and changing dynamics within Mr Abdi’s Kurdish constituency. The official said the deal was essentially hatched in Ankara, where US and Turkish officials have been meeting for months to discuss the future of the east of Syria. The increasing likelihood that US President Donald Trump will pull out American forces from Syria has added to the pressure on Mr Abdi.
At the same time, pressure from the most extreme of his own men not to compromise with Mr Al Shara has vanished. This group is comprised of fighters belonging to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a Turkish Marxist-Leninist militant group that has been fighting Ankara for four decades.
Since the downfall of Mr Al Assad in December, overthrown by HTS-led forces, the PKK and other Kurdish components of Mr Abdi’s forces have been taking a hammering by the Turkish air force in the east, although they lost little ground to the Turkish-backed offensive by the Arab militias aligned with Mr Al Shara. Last month, imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan called on his group to abandon its weapons and dissolve, in a move that upended its core ideology of armed struggle. It represented a new approach by Ocalan to end the PKK-Turkey conflict, although many Kurds saw it as surrender.
“Ocalan freed Abdi from pressure of the most ardent opponents of compromising with Al Shara, who got himself mired in conflict with other minorities and cannot afford it if they started uniting against him,” the Kurdish official said. “Abdi looked at all of this and knew there cannot be better timing to strike an agreement, with the Americans becoming more unreliable under Trump.”
However, the official pointed out a lack of mechanism in the main themes of the vaguely worded deal, the de facto share of power for the Kurds and the integration of the SDF in the official structures commanded by Mr Al Shara. “The negotiations on these issues will not be easy,” he said. "There is no autonomy, but will there be decentralisation and ministerial positions for SDF Kurds? What will happen to Abdi?"
Additional reporting by Lizzie Porter in Istanbul
