Syria's president names Mazloum Abdi a presidential adviser after the SDF dissolves

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa issued Decree No. 164 on Thursday appointing Mustafa Khalil Abdi, known as Mazloum Abdi, as an adviser to the presidency. State news agency SANA published the decree. The appointment came three days after Abdi announced that the Syrian Democratic Forces had dissolved as an independent military force.

Abdi led the Kurdish-led SDF for more than a decade. The force fought the Islamic State with U.S. support and held a large belt of northern and eastern Syria, including oil fields and the cities of Raqqa and Hasakah. He and Sharaa spent those years on opposite sides of the civil war.

The advisory post is smaller than the job Sharaa offered in January, when he proposed making Abdi deputy defence minister and nominating him as governor of Hasakah. Sipan Hamo, a former People's Protection Units commander, was already named deputy defence minister for the eastern region earlier this year. Ilham Ahmed of the Syrian Democratic Council is expected to take a parliamentary seat.

How the integration arrived

Sharaa and Abdi first agreed in March 2025 to fold the SDF into the central government. That timetable slipped. In January 2026 government forces pushed into the northeast, taking Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. A U.S. and French-mediated roadmap, later endorsed by Turkey, then set terms for merging fighters and civilian offices into state institutions.

On Tuesday Abdi stood at the People's Palace in Damascus and said the force was dissolving after those terms were met. He called it the start of a phase of peace and participation in building a new Syria. Tens of thousands of fighters are supposed to enter army brigades. The status of the SDF's female units has not been settled in public.

The education ministry published a separate decision authorising Kurdish-language instruction in public and private schools. That step matters in Hasakah and adjoining districts, where Kurdish has been taught in local schools for years outside the old national curriculum.

What the title does and does not give

A presidential adviser sits near the head of state without a ministry, a budget line or a command. Abdi keeps a formal channel into the palace. He does not keep the autonomous administration that collected oil revenue and ran courts and police across a third of the country.

For Damascus the decree is a public receipt that the northeast is now part of the state. For Kurdish parties it is a test of whether language rights, local councils and security jobs survive the merger. For Washington, which armed and advised the SDF against Islamic State, the question is whether residual U.S. troops and the campaign against sleeper cells still have a local partner with a chain of command.

Turkey watched the SDF as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers' Party. Ankara endorsed the January roadmap. Abdi's new title will be read in Ankara as either proof that the force is finished or as a warning that its commander still has a desk in the capital.

Unfinished pieces

Oil fields in Deir ez-Zor and Hasakah funded the old administration. Who books that revenue now is a fiscal question as much as a political one. Customs posts on the Iraqi and Turkish borders, grain silos and the civil registry are the same kind of problem: they worked under SDF letterhead and now need a ministry stamp.

Sharaa came to power after a rebel coalition ousted Bashar al-Assad in late 2024. His government is Islamist-led and has spent 2025 and 2026 trying to convert battlefield gains into a single army and a single tax base. Putting Abdi on the payroll is cheaper than another campaign in the northeast. It also leaves the former commander inside the system if the merger stalls.

The decree is one page. The work of moving payrolls, weapons inventories and school books will take longer than the week between the dissolution speech and the appointment.