Syria’s Sharaa declares Kurdish a national language, recognizes Nowruz

Interim Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa issued a surprise decree on Friday granting the country’s oppressed Kurdish minority long-denied rights.

The decree affirms that “Syrian Kurdish citizens are an integral and authentic part of the Syrian people, and that their cultural and linguistic identity is an inseparable component of Syria’s unified and diverse national identity,” Syria’s state-run SANA news agency reported.

Citing the provisions of Syria’s transitional constitutional declaration that was unilaterally drafted by the government last year, the decree commits the state to protecting the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Kurds. Most critically, it declares the Kurdish language a national language that can be taught in state-run and private schools in areas where the Kurds constitute a significant percentage of the population. The decree also states that March 21, marking the Kurdish new year, or “Nowruz,” will now be a national holiday throughout Syria.

The concessions go well beyond any made by Turkey, home to the region’s largest minority, or by Iran that also has a large and restive Kurdish population. Iraq is the sole country where the Kurds’ federal status is constitutionally guaranteed. But they fall well short of Kurdish demands for autonomy and for the removal of “Arab” from Syria’s official name, “The Syrian Arab Republic.”

The decree was issued just hours before a crucial meeting between the United States’ Syria envoy, Tom Barrack, and the commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, Mazlum Kobane, in Erbil, as first reported by Al-Monitor. Barrack is widely expected to get Kobane to agree to a withdrawal of his forces from all territory lying west of the Euphrates River, a key Syrian and Turkish government demand.

But even before the meeting kicked off, Kobane announced via X that the SDF would be pulling back its forces at 7.00 a.m. local time from "the current contact lines east of Aleppo--areas that have been under attack for the past two days--and redeploy them to areas east of the Euphrates." The climbdown will have significantly reduced the risk of further conflict, analysts say. 

The meeting comes against the backdrop of threats by Syria’s interim government to attack towns in the north and east held by the SDF, having ousted Kurdish fighters from two Kurdish-majority neighborhoods in Aleppo last week. Any further conflagration would likely blow up the March 10 agreement signed last year between Kobane and Sharaa. The accord set the parameters for the integration of the civilian and military arms of the Kurdish-led autonomous administration, which controls the northern and eastern third of Syria.

Sharaa’s move will likely have caught the SDF off guard in an effort to woo Syria's Kurds away from their current leadership.

The Kurds who are thought to make up a tenth of Syria's population were treated like second-class citizens under more than five decades of Baathist rule. Hundreds of thousands of people in the community were denied identity papers and not permitted to open businesses or own land.