Both Damascus and Ankara have rejected calls for a Kurdish autonomous region in northeastern Syria.
Speculation has mounted in recent weeks that the United States plans to withdraw the bulk of its forces from Syria following a decade-long deployment.
It remains unclear how a reduction in U.S. forces would affect Washington’s allies in the region, especially the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which the United States has armed and supported since 2015.
Last month, The New York Times reported that the United States had begun reducing its forces in Syria from approximately 2,000 to 1,400 troops. Citing U.S. officials, it also reported that three out of eight U.S. bases in Syria were in the process of being shut down.
Soon afterward, the Defense Department confirmed the report.
“This deliberate and conditions-based process will bring the U.S. footprint in Syria down to less than a thousand U.S. forces in the coming months,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on April 18.
Since 2015, U.S. troops in northeastern Syria have worked alongside the SDF as part of an international coalition tasked with combating the ISIS terrorist group.
The U.S.-backed SDF now controls most of northeastern Syria, which is home to most of the country’s energy wealth and much of its best agricultural land.
Turkey, meanwhile, views the SDF as a terrorist group due to its close ties with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which for decades waged a violent insurgency against the Turkish state.
A longstanding NATO member, Turkey shares a 565-mile border with northern Syria, where it has frequently clashed with armed Kurdish groups.
SDF Hedges Its Bets
Last December, the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad collapsed in the face of a Turkey-backed rebel offensive led by Hezb Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a militant group with previous ties to Al-Qaeda that remains designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization.
Since then, Syria’s new interim president, HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, has called for the SDF—and other armed Syrian factions—to be merged into Syria’s state-run security apparatus.
“The new Syrian government wants to unify all the country’s various military and administrative entities,” Oytun Orhan, a Turkish Middle East expert, told The Epoch Times.
“A main challenge facing Damascus is the integration of the SDF into the state security apparatus and for SDF-held areas to be brought under state control,” added Orhan, who specializes in the Levant region at Ankara’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
