General Mazloum Abdi asked President Ahmad al-Sharaa for something he cannot give. Al-Sharaa cannot parcel out the “new Syria” among its components. Genuine decentralization for Kurdish areas would immediately raise parallel claims by the Alawites of the coast and the Druze of Suwayda. Without a strong central authority, the Syrian arena cannot be closed to regional players. A cohesive Syria is essential for regional stability, and essential to prevent Iran’s return. This is how the international engineer of destinies thinks. The solution is not the dismantling of Syria. The solution lies in doing justice to the Kurds under the roof of a fair state. The Kurdish relationship with the map is painful and long, extending far beyond the Syrian stage.
The Kurd fears the map. He did not participate in drawing it, nor was he consulted about his aspirations. He sees its borders as barriers rather than bridges, walls that separate members of the same family. His dreams overflow its boundaries only to collide with them. He is, after all, a minority within it — and maps are rarely indulgent toward minorities.
The map, in turn, fears the Kurd. It senses his unease, suspects that he was forced onto the train and is waiting for the right moment to jump off. It accuses him of opening suspicious windows onto dubious alliances.
The Kurd fears the map because he is different within its domain—and maps are not accustomed to recognizing the right to difference. A map sleeps peacefully only when it rests on sameness. It prefers a uniform attire: that its inhabitants drink from the same spring, speak the same language, and avoid adventures that disturb its sleep.
The map fears groups marked by a different color, a different culture and folklore. It fears secret dreams swelling behind closed curtains; resentments passed down to children and grandchildren; memories of crushed uprisings and forbidden weddings.
Yet it would be unjust to blame the maps. They were not drawn with the ink of their peoples, nor even with the ink of their majorities. They were drawn by the powerful, according to their interests. The small do not sit at the tables of the great. And what fault do today’s maps bear if the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) nullified the promise made to the Kurds by the Treaty of Sèvres (1920)?
Thus, against their will, the Kurds were scattered as minorities across Türkiye, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. In the absence of open political systems confident in their legitimacy, integration becomes difficult and recognition of the right to difference even more so.
Nearly two decades ago, I traveled to conduct an interview with Masoud Barzani, President of the Kurdistan Region. I found him seated beside two flags: the Iraqi flag and the regional flag. This is no simple image in this part of the world. The region itself would not have come into being through constitutional means had Iran and its allies inside Iraq not made the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime their overriding priority.
What struck me then was that the man seated between two flags had been born in the Republic of Mahabad, the Kurdish state declared on Iranian soil in 1946 and denied the chance to celebrate its first anniversary. Iranian forces executed Mahabad’s leader, Qazi Muhammad, on charges of treason, while its military commander, Mullah Mustafa Barzani, managed to escape on his epic journey to the Soviet Union.
I left the regional headquarters wondering what message this scene conveyed to Kurds in Syria, Türkiye, and Iran, who had repeatedly endured forced campaigns of Arabization, Turkification, and Persianization. From long experience, Masoud Barzani understood that Iraqi Kurds had seized a historic opportunity and secured a region that reassured them. He also understood that this experience could not be transplanted onto other maps. For that reason, he advised several Kurdish delegations to focus instead on improving the living conditions of Kurds within their existing borders. His advice to adopt a realistic approach was also directed at General Mazloum Abdi and his colleagues when the Syrian map entered a phase of profound upheaval.
There is no denying the magnitude or duration of the injustice suffered by the Kurds. Yet realism compels the acknowledgment that the solution to their plight does not lie in dismantling existing maps to facilitate geographic and demographic continuity. In the Middle East, the dismantling of maps gives birth to long, unending wars.
Nor can the sacrifices of Syrian Kurds in the fight against ISIS be denied. The Syrian Democratic Forces were forged in the roar of that confrontation and under full American sponsorship. Yet those forces did not play the decisive role in toppling Bashar al-Assad’s regime that would entitle them to a share comparable to that obtained by Iraqi Kurds, whose role had been a necessary gateway to the fall of Saddam Hussein.
The transformation that Syria underwent was vast, greater than the ability of its Kurds to capitalize on it to secure their aspirations, or even a substantial part of them. General Abdi should have reflected at length on the image of President Ahmad al-Sharaa shaking hands with President Donald Trump, and on Washington’s decision to abolish all the effects of the Caesar Act. He should have weighed carefully al-Sharaa’s declaration that the new Syria would pose no threat to any of its neighbors, signaling Syria’s withdrawal from the military dimension of the conflict with Israel. He should also have confronted the reality that al-Sharaa’s Syria symbolizes the dismantling of the so-called Axis of Resistance and represents a guarantee of Iran and Hezbollah’s exclusion from the Syrian map. Above all, he should have recognized that a stable Syria is a regional and international necessity — one that takes precedence over alliances with the Kurds imposed by particular circumstances.
Victory over the SDF is one thing; victory over the Kurds is another. The first can be addressed by granting Kurds their full rights as citizens and respecting their distinctiveness. The second lays the groundwork only for further tragedies. Only a just Syria can break the cycle of the fearful Kurd and the frightening Kurd.
