Sharaa names Mazloum Abdi presidential adviser after the SDF dissolves

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa appointed Mazloum Abdi, the former commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces, as an adviser to the presidency in Decree No. 164. The state news agency SANA carried the text, which names him as Mustafa Khalil Abdi. The decree followed, by a few days, Abdi's announcement that the SDF would dissolve and that its fighters and civilian offices would move into state structures.

Abdi led the Kurdish-headed coalition that fought Islamic State with U.S. air power and held a belt of northern and eastern Syria through the civil war. He and Sharaa spent those years on opposite sides. After Bashar al-Assad fell in late 2024 to a rebel coalition headed by Sharaa, Damascus demanded that SDF territory and institutions come under the central state. A March 2025 integration outline stalled. In January 2026, government forces pushed into Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. A U.S.- and French-mediated roadmap, later endorsed by Turkey, then set the terms for a merger.

A smaller chair than the one offered in January

In January, Sharaa floated Abdi as deputy defence minister and as a possible governor of Hasakah. The role he received this week is narrower: adviser to the presidency. It still puts the most visible Kurdish commander inside the palace rather than across a front line. Sipan Hamo, former commander of the People's Protection Units, was earlier named deputy defence minister for the eastern region. Ilham Ahmed of the Syrian Democratic Council is reported to be headed for parliament. Hind Kabawat, the social affairs minister, publicly congratulated Ahmed.

The education ministry, in the same stretch of days, authorised Kurdish-language instruction in public and private schools. That decision matters on the ground in a way a palace title does not. Parents in Qamishli and Hasakah can now ask a state school for a language that the old government treated as a security problem.

Abdi said the country had entered a new phase defined by peace and the building of a new Syria. He wanted the day to mark a shift from battlefields to construction. Thomas Barrack, the U.S. envoy for Syria, used the phrase one army, one government, one state. Ibrahim Olabi, Syria's permanent representative to the United Nations, called the process national integration based on equality among citizens rather than sectarian quotas.

What is still unsettled

Female fighters from the SDF have not been given a clear place in the national army. Command lists, ranks and pay for tens of thousands of men and women remain to be written. Oil and gas fields in the northeast, which funded the Autonomous Administration, now sit inside a state that needs revenue and has competing claimants. Turkey will watch whether YPG commanders who stay in uniform keep any operational autonomy. The United States will watch whether Islamic State detention camps stay guarded as the SDF brand disappears.

The United States removed Syria from its state sponsors of terrorism list on 24 August, according to contemporaneous reporting, opening a path for banks and trade. Sharaa paid for coffee with a Visa card in Damascus two days later, a staged proof that card networks were back. Those gestures sit beside the Abdi decree. Together they tell a story of a government trying to look finished. The decree itself is a personnel order. The test is whether the units that answered to Abdi last month answer to the defence ministry next month, and whether the Kurdish street accepts an adviser where it once had a commander.