The Predicament of Sub-State Actors: Why the SDF Cannot Return to Politics

Editor’s Note

The following essay was originally published in Arabic on the Syria TV website on 25 January 2026, one week before the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were forced to withdraw from large areas east of the Euphrates and subsequently agreed, in principle, to integrate into the Syrian state. These developments do not negate the analysis presented here; rather, they confirm its relevance and validate its insights.

The essay examines the structural and political dilemmas inherent in the dissolution of long-standing militia-based entities. The continued fragility of eastern Syria, including the potential for dissent or fragmentation within former SDF ranks, demonstrates that formal integration does not by itself resolve the deeper issues of legitimacy and post-militia order explored in this essay.

In the history of modern conflicts, we rarely encounter a militia that, after expanding, entrenching itself, and building its own economy, weaponry, administration, spheres of influence, and political narrative, has succeeded in voluntarily returning to the state—that is, in abolishing itself. A militia that remains for an extended period in a political vacuum ceases to be merely a de facto force; it evolves into a fully-fledged entity with its own interests, bureaucracy, networks of influence, and self-legitimizing narrative. Dissolving such an entity thus becomes akin to a form of deferred political suicide.

This, precisely, is the predicament in which the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) find themselves today in their relationship with the Syrian state, after deferred understandings began to falter and the language of military confrontation reasserted itself as an expression of a crisis far deeper than a dispute over security or administrative arrangements.

For roughly a decade, under direct U.S. air cover, a hybrid entity has emerged in eastern Syria: neither a state, nor a recognized region, nor merely a local administration. It controlled most of the country’s agricultural, oil, and water resources, yet lacked the attributes of sovereignty, did not possess broad national legitimacy, and could not, in strategic terms, sustain itself for a single hour without the American umbrella.

The implicit wager of this project was that, over time, it would evolve into a Syrian version of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq: extensive autonomy, indirect international recognition, and a permanent negotiating relationship with the central state. This wager, however, failed for deep structural reasons, foremost among them that the geography controlled by the SDF has an overwhelming Arab majority, and that the military force it commands was not the product of a local social contract, but rather of a moment of strategic vacuum and contingent external sponsorship.

In Iraq, the Kurdistan Region was founded on a long history of struggle, a cohesive national identity within a relatively demographically homogeneous geography, and complex international and post-Gulf War regional settlements. In Syria, by contrast, the SDF entity was born out of the civil war, an implicit alliance with the former Assad regime, and in areas where the Kurdish social base constituted no more than a significant minority within a vast Arab majority—making the problem from the outset one of political legitimacy rather than merely one of administration.

As the U.S. presence began to retreat—or, at least, to morph into a more ambiguous and less committed one—the deferred question has forcefully returned to the forefront: what does the SDF do with itself, and what becomes of this entity when its geopolitical function comes to an end?

In principle, the answer appears simple: integration into the new Syrian state, the handover of heavy weapons, the conversion of fighters into members of the national army, and entry into a political process that guarantees cultural and administrative rights within a fully unified Syria. Yet this theoretical “simplicity” runs up against a highly rigid psycho-political barrier: how can an entity that has lived for ten years as a de facto independent authority suddenly accept becoming merely a part of a higher authority?

The problem here does not concern only the Kurdish leadership within the SDF, but the nature of the entity itself: a fully developed military–security–economic apparatus around which networks of interests, privileges, and a war economy have formed, drawing in highly disparate actors—from remnants of the Assad regime, to elements of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), to local Arab forces that found in this temporary arrangement a lasting opportunity for influence and protection.

Then there is the more sensitive question: what about the tens of thousands of fighters who have no clear place in a militia-free Syria? And what about the ideological–organizational structure that does not view the Syrian state as its own state, but rather as a temporary negotiating entity or a historical adversary to be constrained rather than integrated into?

Here, precisely, a scene we have seen in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and Sudan is repeated: the militia that is asked to integrate does not negotiate the terms of integration, but the terms of its disguised survival. It seeks to enter the state without dissolving into it, to become part of the army without relinquishing its effective independence, and to transform into a formal institution without losing its own internal logic.

The longer such entities persist, the more tightly they cling to themselves—not because they are truly strong, but because they fear the moment when the simple and terrifying question will be asked: what necessity do you serve now?

The current confrontation between the Syrian army and the SDF is not, in essence, a military clash over points of influence, border crossings, or oil fields; rather, it is a clash between two logics: the logic of the state—however weak, fragmented, and burdened by the catastrophic legacy of the former regime—and the logic of a temporary entity that seeks to become permanent without possessing the political, social, or legal conditions for permanence.

The SDF understands that a full return to the state would, in practical terms, mean the end of the project it built over ten years, the end of an entire class of beneficiaries of the war economy and separate administration, and the end of the illusion of an equal partnership with the center. The Syrian state, for its part, understands that accepting a quasi-independent armed entity within it would mean opening the door to a disintegrative model that would not stop at the borders of eastern Syria.

Between these two perceptions, the political process falters and the language of force returns to the forefront—not because it resolves the problem, but because it postpones its full eruption.

The clear conclusion is that the SDF did not fail because it was not given sufficient opportunity, but because from the outset it was built on an equation fundamentally unfit to serve as the basis for a stable entity: authority without sovereignty, power without social consensus, and a project without an inclusive national horizon.

Thus, as in many experiences across the region, we discover once again that militias do not die easily, yet they also do not know how to live once their contingent political function has ended. And that the most difficult moment in the life of temporary entities is not the moment of their emergence, but the moment they are asked to return to what they once fled: the state.

Translated from Arabic by Muhannad Alhalool.