Sharaa names Mazloum Abdi a presidential adviser three days after the SDF dissolved

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa signed Decree No. 164 appointing Mustafa Khalil Abdi, known throughout the war as Mazloum Abdi, as an adviser to the presidency. State news agency SANA carried the text on Thursday evening. France 24 and Reuters confirmed the wording on Friday. The decree says Abdi will work under the powers listed in the instrument itself. Those powers have not been published in full.

The appointment landed three days after Abdi stood in the People's Palace in Damascus and said the Syrian Democratic Forces would no longer operate as a separate army. On 25 August he announced that SDF units and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria had been folded into state institutions. Fighters were already moving into regular brigades. Oil fields, border crossings, Qamishli airport and most of the land the SDF once held had already passed to Damascus after a January offensive into Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor.

Abdi spent more than a decade commanding the US-backed force that broke Islamic State in the north-east. Sharaa spent those same years on the other side of the war, first as a rebel commander and then as the head of the coalition that removed Bashar al-Assad in late 2024. The two men signed a March 2025 integration agreement that promised citizenship, political participation and constitutional rights for Kurds, and state control of crossings, airports and energy fields. The year-end deadline slipped. Government columns then took the cities that had anchored the SDF's civilian project.

The advisory title is smaller than the package discussed in January. At that point Sharaa offered Abdi the deputy defence ministry and a nomination as governor of Hasakah, a route meant to restore state control over the provincial capital without another fight. Neither post appears in Decree 164. Other Kurdish commanders have already taken state jobs. Sipan Hamo, a former People's Protection Units officer, was named deputy defence minister for the eastern region earlier this year. Ilham Ahmed, co-chair of foreign affairs for the Syrian Democratic Council, is reported to be heading for a parliamentary seat. Hind Kabawat, the social affairs minister, publicly congratulated her on Wednesday.

The education ministry issued a separate decision the same week. Kurdish will be taught three times a week in public and private schools in Kurdish-majority areas. The National carried that order alongside the Abdi decree. Language in state classrooms has been a standing Kurdish demand since the 2011 uprising. Putting it on the official timetable is cheaper than sharing oil revenue or keeping a parallel army, and it is easier to reverse.

Female fighters remain an open file. Reuters noted that integration of the SDF's women's units has not been settled. Damascus's new security services have their own rules on mixed units and on command. How those rules apply to women who fought Islamic State under the YPJ banner will show whether the merger is administrative or political.

The United States trained, paid and armed the SDF for years because it was the ground force against Islamic State. Washington still holds a residual presence in the north-east and still watches the prisons that hold IS cadres. A presidential adviser with Abdi's history can talk to those officers without a formal ministry. He can also be dropped without a cabinet fight. That is the logic of the lesser title.

Shafaq News dated the decree to 27 August and used Abdi's legal name, Mustafa Khalil Abdi. Hawar News, the Kurdish outlet, said his duties would follow the decree and that the files assigned to him would become clearer later. No Syrian official has listed those files in public. Oil, detainees, the remaining border with Iraq and the status of Arab-majority towns that sat inside the old Autonomous Administration are the obvious candidates.

The March 2025 text still matters because it is the only signed paper both men have. It promised that north-eastern civil institutions would enter the state. It did not say that the man who built those institutions would sit in the palace as an adviser with an unpublished brief. That gap is now the story. Abdi dissolved the force that made him indispensable. Sharaa gave him a room in the presidency rather than a command. Whether the room has a map of the oil fields on the wall is the next fact that will tell readers if the war in the north-east is over or only renamed.