DAMASCUS: Kurdish fighters withdrew Friday from two neighborhoods of Syria’s Aleppo city, a local official and state media said, part of a broader push to integrate Kurdish-led institutions into the new Syrian state.

Nouri Sheikho, a senior member of the local council in Aleppo’s majority Kurdish neighborhoods of Ashrafiya and Sheikh Maksoud, told AFP that “more than 500 fighters” left the northern city. Sheikho said the force was headed to other areas of Syria’s northeast, under the control of an autonomous Kurdish-led administration. Last month, the Kurdish administration struck a deal to integrate into state institutions, with the new leadership seeking to unify the country following the December overthrow of longtime president Bashar Al-Assad after more than 13 years of civil war.

Under an agreement reached earlier this month between the Ashrafiya and Sheikh Maksoud council and a presidential committee, Kurdish fighters were to pull out from both districts, bringing them under the administrative control of the Damascus authorities. Official news agency SANA said that a convoy of fighters from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) “left the Sheikh Maksoud and Ashrafiya neighborhoods... under the supervision of the defense ministry”.

It published a video showing vehicles carrying armed fighters in military fatigues. Kurdish fighters controlled the two neighborhoods of Aleppo for years. They had also extended their presence to neighboring areas before being pushed back late last year by forces aligned with Turkey.

The fighting with the Turkish-backed forces coincided with the lightning offensive, spearheaded by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), that led to Assad’s fall. On Thursday, under the same agreement that stipulated the fighters’ withdrawal from Ashrafiya and Sheikh Maksoud, the Kurdish and national authorities carried out a prisoner exchange.

According to Sheikho, “146 civilians and fighters were released by the Damascus government” in exchange for “97 people” held by the Kurdish-led authorities. The autonomous Kurdish-led administration controls large areas of Syria’s northeast, and its affiliate SDF played a key role in the territorial defeat of the Islamic State group in Syria in 2019.

Despite the March agreement to integrate the Kurdish institutions into the national ones, the regional administration has sharply criticized the new government announced on Saturday by interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa. “Any government that does not reflect the country’s diversity and plurality cannot ensure proper governance of Syria,” it said in a statement, adding that “as a result” the autonomous administration was not “bound by the implementation or enforcement of decisions made by this government”.

Dominated by Sharaa’s allies, the 23-members cabinet only includes one Kurdish member who is not from the territory under the control of the autonomous administration. — AFP