The Syrian government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa ordered its forces to lay siege to three largely Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo, the second-largest city in Syria, Jan. 6-11. They seized control of two of them, Ashrafiyah and Sheikh Maqsoud, driving out the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, before declaring a ceasefire.
Since the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous dictatorship in late 2024, al-Sharaa’s new government has sought to extend its control over the entire country, with support from government-allied forces who killed hundreds of Alawites and Druze over the last year, and from the Turkish rulers.
Over the six days of fighting in Aleppo, 82 people were killed and scores wounded. Electricity and water were cut off by the army, as was the entry of food and medical supplies. The Khaled Fajr Hospital in Sheikh Maqsoud was shelled. An estimated 160,000 people were forced to evacuate the city in the dead of winter, finding shelter in mosques, churches and people’s homes.
The assault on Aleppo followed efforts by al-Sharaa’s government to force the SDF to implement an agreement made last year to integrate its fighters, estimated at between 50,000 to 90,000 soldiers, into the country’s armed forces. The government in Damascus says they must join as individuals, claiming this will help “unify” Syria, and demanded a Dec. 31, 2025, deadline. But the SDF insists it will only join the state military as a block with its own command structure firmly in place.
Washington, which had been an ally of the SDF in the fight against Islamic State in Syria, is urging the SDF to go along with the Syrian government’s demands. To advance their own political and military interests, the U.S. rulers are seeking to advance relations with al-Sharaa.
The SDF controls the oil-rich northeast area of the country, carved out in the course of the Kurds’ struggle for national rights. Kurds are an oppressed nationality of some 30 million in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey and have fought for decades for a homeland.
Thousands of Kurds demonstrated against the assault on Aleppo in the city of Qamishli, in the SDF-controlled area Jan. 8.
Turkey Defense Minister Yasar Güler said Ankara supports al-Sharaa’s plan to force the SDF fighters to submit to Syrian armed forces command. It offered military support for the assault on Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo. The Turkish rulers view any advance made by Kurds in Syria as a blow to their own efforts to suppress the fight for Kurdish national rights inside Turkey.
The Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the government arm of the SDF, called the assault “an act of treachery and a major crime committed by an authority that claims to represent the state yet kills its citizens and violates their dignity.”
In Iraq the Kurdistan Regional Government of Prime Minister Masrour Barzani denounced the siege of Aleppo as “ethnic cleansing.” Videos of the siege on Rudaw news show a Kurdish woman fighter being thrown off a building.
SDF Commander-In-Chief Mazloum Abdi said the ceasefire would “ensure the evacuation of the dead, the wounded, trapped civilians, and fighters” to safer SDF-controlled areas. Some of the fighters though were being transferred to Syrian detention centers, a Syrian security official said.
Last year President Donald Trump’s administration lifted U.S. sanctions on Syria and removed the terrorist designation from Tahrir al-Sham, the group al-Sharaa led when Assad was overthrown. The U.S. rulers have a decadeslong record of opposing the Kurds’ fight for national rights. In 2017 when Kurds voted for independence in a referendum in Iraq, Washington stood aside when the Turkish, Iraqi and Iranian governments took steps to prevent its implementation.
The Trump administration is trying to strengthen relations with the governments of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others in the Middle East to establish stability for the U.S. capitalist rulers and advance their plunder of resources and peoples of the region.