CONCEPT – SYRIAN DEMOCRATIC FORCES (SDF)

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 CONCEPT – SYRIAN DEMOCRATIC FORCES (SDF)

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• A coalition of fighters : The Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, is a coalition of Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Syriac Christian fighters, but is completely dominated by its Kurdish element, which is a powerful and well organized militia known as the Popular Defense Units, YPG, with an all-female branch called the Women’s Defense Units, or YPJ. These organizations, in turn, are Syrian front groups for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK. The other militias involved in the Syrian Democratic Forces are either long-standing PKK allies or proxies, such as the armed wing of the Syriac Union Party, or more recent allies drawn from the Sunni Arab tribal landscape in this part of Syria and from the remains of small Sunni Arab rebel groups crushed by the so-called Islamic State.
• American support : The coalition as a whole receives American air support for operations against Islamic State, as did the YPG/J before it. That started in the Battle of Kobane that began in autumn 2014, which was enormously successful — the first major battlefield defeat inflicted on Islamic State. It provided the template for US-PKK cooperation. In addition, the Pentagon picked out a number of these little Arab groups that work under the SDF umbrella as favored recipients of arms and support. It terms them, collectively, the Syrian Arab Coalition, though no one else seems to use that name.
• The core strategy : The idea was to use SDF as an incubator to breed Sunni Arab militias able to take over where Kurdish territory ends and push deep into Islamic State’s heartland, which is in the Sunni Arab tribal region that connects Syria with Iraq. Relying on the Kurds in that region would create resentment among other Syrian and regional allies, and it would risk pushing locals into the arms of the jihadis. The Kurds have many priorities, chief among them to try to secure their population, to keep Turkey out of Syria and to link the Kurdish enclaves in Kobane and Efrin, which are separated by territory held by Islamic State and rival Turkey-backed Sunni Arab rebels north of Aleppo. In those battles in northwestern Syria, the SDF fighters seem to have received some level of Russian support, but they do not enjoy any U.S. backing – though they like to pretend they do, in order to sell their war on Turkey’s allies as part of the “War on Terror.”
• Against the IS : What mattered more in Washington is that the SDF is doing a splendid job against Islamic State in Kurdish territory and on the fringes of it, where no one else was up for the job. In this way, the SDF established itself as an irreplaceable local ground troop component of the international coalition led by the U.S. Air Force. Seeing no other option, and very happy with results so far, U.S. policymakers decided to ignore Turkish and Sunni Arab rebel complaints – a mutually beneficial relationship.
• The political side : For the Americans working on these issues, it’s a convenient way of adding another degree of separation between them and the PKK, which is officially sanctioned as a terrorist group in the United States. Since the PKK is not threatening attacks on the United States and has emerged as its most important ally in the struggle against Islamic State in Syria, one would think that the logical response would be to declassify the group or find some more permanent way of circumventing legal obstacles. But the terror listing was originally done to appease Turkey, which is a far more important U.S. ally. 
• Other part : The other main element of the SDF is a loose network of Syrian leftists and other secular activists, most of them connected in one way or another to Haytham Manna, a Europe-based human rights activist from the Deraa Governorate in southern Syria. These groups—particularly Manna himself—are well versed in regional Syria diplomacy, with useful links to all sides, including the opposition, European states, U.N. diplomats, parts of the Arab League, Egypt, Russia and so on. 

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