Kurdish-led SDF announces dissolution after merging with Syria’s military

More than 40 members of the United States Congress have penned a letter to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling on him to push for the release of Sama Safi, a 20-year-old US citizen who has been detained by the Israeli military since June.

The legislators warned on Tuesday that the Palestinian American student’s health is deteriorating “under appalling conditions” in Israeli custody.
Abuse in Israeli jails
Israel has received about $25bn in US military aid since the start of the genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023.The leader of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which spearheaded the fight against the ISIL (ISIS) armed group in Syria, has announced the group’s dissolution as part of an integration plan agreed with President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government.

Speaking at the presidential palace in Damascus on Tuesday, Mazloum Abdi said the SDF has completed its merger with the Syrian military and will cease to operate as an independent force.
The Kurdish-led group once controlled a de facto autonomous zone in Syria’s northeast, but lost most of its territory to a government offensive in January. It then signed the merger deal, which also included recognising Kurdish cultural, civil and educational rights in Syria.

“Today we stand at a historic moment in which we turn an important page in Syria’s history and begin to open a new page titled peace, stability and reconstruction,” Abdi said in his address.

“We want this day to be the beginning of a true transition from the battlefields to the fields of construction and from the era of weapons to the era of peace,” he said.The SDF had “carried a heavy responsibility during one of the most difficult periods in Syria’s history”, he said. But circumstances had now changed, with the country entering a new phase of peace.

Therefore, “we announce the end of the mission of the Syrian Democratic Forces and ⁠announce with full responsibility its dissolution as an independent military force,” he said.
‘Hugely significant moment’
The SDF was once the main partner of the United States in Syria as it battled ISIL. But after the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, Washington formed close ties with the new government in Damascus, led by al-Sharaa.

Al Jazeera’s Heidi Pett, reporting from Damascus, called the SDF’s dissolution a “hugely significant moment for Syria”.

She said the SDF’s fortunes shifted with Washington’s backing of al-Sharaa’s government and that the integration process had taken more than seven months due to unresolved questions about the group’s heavy weapons and the future of the YPJ or the women fighters.

“The YPJ had argued that they should be integrated into the Ministry of Defence, that they are professional soldiers – they fought against ISIS and want to continue being soldiers,” she said. “But Damascus was only offering them the option of joining the Ministry of Interior as police officers. So these unresolved questions were part of the reason the dissolution wasn’t formally announced until now.”

Still, questions remain about how the p