The fall of the Assad regime and the ongoing negotiations between the new Damascus government—the Syrian Transitional Government (STG)—and the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES) have created a sense of optimism across the country. Many now hope that the hundreds of thousands of displaced people scattered across Syria and neighboring states may soon have a chance to return home.
That optimism has been especially strong regarding the occupied regions of Afrin, Ras al-Ayn, and Tal Abyad. These areas have been under the control of Turkish-backed Syrian National Army militias, many of which have recently been formally absorbed into Syria’s new Ministry of Defense as distinct military units.
But despite these administrative changes, conditions on the ground have remained largely the same. The Autonomous Administration has made the question of displaced persons a central topic in its talks with Damascus, yet the security situation—particularly in Afrin—remains poor. Real control continues to rest with the same militias long accused of extensive human rights abuses and war crimes, despite their nominal integration into the Syrian Army.
In some respects, the situation in Afrin has even deteriorated. In recent months, the Syrian Transitional Government has taken steps to “unify” governance across the territories it administers, including Afrin. One of the most significant of these steps has been the standardization of education and school curricula.
In practice, this “unification” has meant the cancellation of all Kurdish-language education in Afrin’s schools. This is especially striking given that Afrin was overwhelmingly Kurdish prior to 2018, when most of its population was displaced during Turkey’s military campaign and subsequent demographic engineering.
Before the occupation, under Autonomous Administration governance, Kurdish had become the official language of instruction in the region for the first time in Syrian history. After Turkey’s takeover, the Syrian Interim Government—then the Turkish-backed opposition authority—reduced Kurdish to a secondary language, ranked below both Arabic and Turkish. Now, with Damascus imposing a unified curriculum across the areas it controls, Kurdish-language instruction has effectively disappeared from Syrian schools outside the zones administered by the Autonomous Administration.
The Autonomous Administration and the Kurdish National Council (ENKS) both condemned the decision and called on Damascus to reverse it. ENKS described the move as “inconsistent with the principles of freedom, dignity, and justice proclaimed by the Syrian revolution.”
This latest step is likely to heighten existing fears among Syria’s minority communities—fears already sharpened by recent sectarian violence in Latakia and Suwayda—that the new government in Damascus may continue, or even intensify, exclusionary policies toward Syria’s diverse cultural, religious, and ethnic groups.