Syrian foreign minister says Rojava integration won’t be rushed

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani on Thursday said that talks with Kurdish-led forces are proceeding but integrating the northeast (Rojava) into federal structures will not be rushed.

"In the past 45 days, we, as the Syrian government, have had five meetings with the SDF [Syrian Democratic Forces] to find some mechanisms for implementing the agreement," Shaibani said at Chatham House during his visit to the United Kingdom.

The Kurdish-led SDF are the de facto armed forces of Rojava. In March, SDF chief Mazloum Abdi and Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa signed an agreement to integrate all of Rojava’s civil and military institutions into the federal government. Talks on implementing the deal stalled in the summer over disagreements about how to incorporate the Kurdish-led forces into the Syrian army, but have since resumed.

"We seek to integrate all components into a unified Syria through dialogue and understanding,” Shaibani said.

“Syria is a mosaic and it has a diversity that distinguishes each region with its own specific characteristics. This is among the things we cannot give up or accept in any form of division,” he added.

The foreign minister stated that over the past 10 to 15 years, there has been a "special situation" in Rojava, which has been governed by an autonomous Kurdish-led administration, and that reintegration of these areas must "rely on understanding and dialogue, rather than being rushed" in order to avoid problems.

The SDF has been the main ally of the US-led global coalition against the Islamic State (ISIS) on the ground in Syria over the past decade.

Shaibani said that the March integration agreement was welcomed by Turkey and "there is US support for the implementation of the agreement."

One obstacle has been disagreements over Rojava’s calls for decentralization, which Damascus fears could be a push for separatism.

"We want a broad and democratic decentralization system that takes into account the situation of Syrian society," Hassan Ali, co-chair of the public relations office of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), the political wing of the SDF, said last week.

Salih Muslim, a senior member of Rojava’s Kurdish ruling Democratic Union Party (PYD), said on Wednesday that there would be no integration into the Syrian state institutions without democratization.

"Now there is assimilation and there is integration. We want to integrate into Syria on the basis of democracy,” he said in an interview with Ronahi TV, a media outlet affiliated with the Kurdish administration in Rojava.

Regarding the discussions with the Syrian administration, Muslim said talks would continue upon interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s return to Damascus, with a comprehensive meeting expected in the coming weeks involving the SDF, US officials, and coalition representatives. Sharaa was in Washington this week where he met US President Donald Trump.