From the American guarantee to Israeli protection, the experiences of the SDF and Hikmat al-Hijri reveal a predicament deeper than the fate of two local forces: the crisis of a state that has yet to make belonging to it safer than seeking a foreign protector.
Alaa Alkhatib
26/08/2026
Published on SYRIAWISE
At the very moment Mazloum Abdi was announcing the dissolution of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the end of their existence as an independent military force, Hikmat al-Hijri was moving in almost the opposite direction. He raised the ceiling of his rhetoric to an unprecedented level, declaring that the Druze are “an inseparable part of the State of Israel,” while simultaneously speaking of Suwayda’s sovereign rights and self-determination.
The two developments may appear unrelated. Placed side by side, however, they expose one of the most dangerous dilemmas facing the new Syria: the fear of the center drives Syrian communities to seek external protection, while the center then cites those foreign relationships as proof that still greater force and centralization are necessary. It is a self-reinforcing cycle, one capable of reproducing the causes of conflict even after its military forms have receded.
The SDF: When an External Guarantee Reaches Its Limits
The SDF possessed advantages enjoyed by almost no other Syrian local force: tens of thousands of fighters, administrative and security institutions, extensive territory, oil and agricultural resources, and a direct military relationship with the United States. It served as the principal ground partner of the international coalition against ISIS and, in return, received support that enabled it to construct a quasi-autonomous model of governance.
Yet a relationship between a global power and a local ally does not imply identical objectives. Washington needed the SDF in the war against ISIS; the SDF leadership sought to turn that partnership into a political guarantee of a permanent and distinct place within the future Syrian state. When circumstances changed, the gap between those objectives became apparent.
On 25 August 2026, Mazloum Abdi announced the dissolution of the SDF following the integration of its forces into the Syrian army. This does not mean the end of the Kurdish question, nor does it invalidate Kurdish political, cultural, and administrative demands. It does, however, offer a difficult lesson to ignore: even a force possessing territory, weapons, resources, and an American alliance could not transform external support into a permanent guarantee for an independent military and political entity.
Suwayda Is Not Another SDF
It is easy to argue that al-Hijri is now repeating the SDF’s experience, merely substituting Israel for the United States. That interpretation, however, is incomplete. Suwayda did not arrive at its present condition simply because a religious leader suddenly chose to throw himself into Israel’s arms.
Al-Hijri’s rise, and the shift in public sentiment inside Suwayda, cannot be understood without returning to the July 2025 massacre and the widespread killings and abuses committed against Druze civilians by forces associated with Syria’s interim authorities and by tribal fighters. Those events left a deep wound. For those who saw relatives or people from their towns killed, “trust in the state” ceased to be an abstract constitutional question and became a question of personal and collective security.
Here, the primary responsibility lies with the authorities in Damascus. A government that claims a monopoly over arms and sovereignty cannot treat the protection of citizens and accountability for abuses as secondary matters. The events in Suwayda handed al-Hijri his strongest political asset: fear. He could now argue that the danger he had warned of was no longer hypothetical, while voices more willing to seek an accommodation with Damascus lost ground.
Between the Hammer and the Anvil: The Crisis of Representation
Acknowledging the interim authorities’ responsibility for creating the environment that strengthened al-Hijri does not absolve him of responsibility for what he does with that environment. A wounded society that lost confidence in the center found itself facing a religious leadership increasingly monopolizing the right to speak in its name and tying its security and future to a gamble dependent on a regional power with interests of its own.
Paradoxically, reducing Suwayda to “al-Hijri, weapons, Israel, and separatism” may also serve Damascus. A pluralistic Druze society—with civil and local forces, multiple religious authorities, and currents demanding citizenship, decentralization, and constitutional guarantees—forces the authorities to confront the harder question: what kind of state do they intend to build? An Israeli-backed separatist leader turns the debate into an easier binary: the Syrian state or a separatist project?
But al-Hijri does not represent the Druze, and the Druze are not al-Hijri. Suwayda, with its long and recent history, its competing leaderships and religious authorities, and its protest movements throughout the years of the Syrian uprising, is too large and too diverse to be reduced to a single sheikh al-aql, however much his popularity has expanded under the pressure of fear. His rise to a near-monopoly over political leadership should be read as a product of exceptional circumstances, not as a permanent mandate from a homogeneous community.
This is part of a broader Syrian crisis. The authorities in Damascus do not represent all Syrians, nor should Arab Sunnis be reduced to the current government. The SDF leadership does not encompass Syria’s diverse Kurdish community. Once these reductions are accepted, politics ceases to be competition among citizens and political projects and becomes bargaining among “components,” each supposedly represented by an appointed leader. The irony is that these leaders need one another: Damascus’s hard line strengthens al-Hijri’s narrative, while al-Hijri’s rhetoric allows Damascus to present centralization as the defense of national unity.
The task, therefore, is to return politics to Syrians themselves: a Druze citizen must be able to disagree with al-Hijri, a Kurdish citizen with the SDF, and a Sunni citizen with the authorities in Damascus without such disagreement being treated as betrayal of one’s community.
Israel: Protecting Suwayda, or Protecting the Suwayda Card?
Al-Hijri’s wager is not based on fantasy alone. Israel has demonstrated a willingness to use military force when it believed the Druze were under threat, and it has direct interests in southern Syria: keeping heavy forces away from its borders, preventing the return of Iran and Hezbollah, limiting Turkish military influence, and preserving leverage over future security arrangements. The presence of an influential Druze community inside Israel also gives the Suwayda question a domestic Israeli dimension.
But there is a fundamental difference between protecting Suwayda as a political and security card and protecting it as a permanent political entity. The former may require airstrikes, aid, support for local forces, and diplomatic pressure. The latter requires long-term military protection, food and energy, salaries, trade, investment, access to the outside world, and political guarantees. There is still insufficient evidence that Israel has decided to assume such a burden.
The problem becomes clearer on the map. Suwayda has no direct geographic connection to Israel. Any permanent land lifeline would have to cross parts of Hawran and Daraa, an environment with deep hostility toward Israel. Israel has raised the idea of a corridor toward Suwayda in negotiations with Damascus, while Damascus has rejected it as an infringement on Syrian sovereignty. But transforming an aid corridor into the lifeline of an independent entity raises very different questions: who would secure the route, and could Israel bear the cost of protecting tens of kilometers inside Syria year after year?
The relationship is also unequal: al-Hijri needs Israel far more than Israel needs him. If Israel can obtain from Damascus a demilitarized south, the removal of heavy forces and Iranian influence, and guarantees for the Druze, it may achieve most of its strategic objectives without assuming the burden of an independent entity. The central question therefore remains: is Israel prepared to protect Suwayda, or merely to protect the Suwayda card for as long as that card remains useful?
The Region and the Limits of the Project
An independent or semi-independent entity under Israeli protection would not be merely a Syrian-Israeli matter. Jordan, which borders Suwayda, has strong security reasons to oppose the transformation of southern Syria into an open arena of Israeli influence. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have an interest in stabilizing Syria and reintegrating it into the region, not in redrawing its map along sectarian lines. Turkey, meanwhile, would view acceptance of a political and security entity protected by a foreign state as a precedent directly affecting its position on the Kurdish question and Syria’s territorial unity.
Israeli will alone is therefore insufficient to make al-Hijri’s project viable. It would have to overcome a broad network of regional objections that, despite their owners’ many differences, converge on preventing Syria from fragmenting into externally protected enclaves.
The SDF and al-Hijri: A Similarity That Conceals a Difference
The SDF possessed resources, oil, broad territory, institutions, and a direct American alliance, yet ultimately ceased to exist as an independent military force. Suwayda is smaller, economically weaker, and has no independent external outlet. Al-Hijri, however, holds a different card: Israel is a neighboring state that considers southern Syria part of its immediate security environment, and it contains a Druze community capable of exerting pressure on its government.
Israeli protection may therefore be more willing to intervene militarily than the American protection once enjoyed by the SDF. That does not mean it is more willing to build a state. This is the difference between deterrence and sustainability: an air force can prevent an army from entering Suwayda, but it cannot by itself build an economy for the province.
Three Gambles, One Cycle of Fear
These are the gambles of political leaderships and forces, not of the communities they claim to represent. The SDF leadership gambled that the American partnership would guarantee it a permanent position. Al-Hijri is gambling that Israeli protection can become a guarantee of self-determination and perhaps independence. Ahmed al-Sharaa, meanwhile, is gambling that restoring the state’s monopoly over arms, sovereignty, and the political center will be enough to reunify Syria.
The Kurdish experience may have exposed the limits of the first gamble, and the coming years may expose the limits of the second. But the third is not guaranteed to succeed either. Recovering control over territory is not the same as rebuilding a state.
Here the cycle of fear closes: local communities fear the center and seek outside protection; the center sees their external ties as a threat to the state and becomes more rigid; that rigidity deepens local fears and strengthens dependence on foreign allies. Each side then uses the behavior of the other as proof that its own narrative was correct.
Responsibility Begins in Damascus
Distributing responsibility equally among all parties would be neither fair nor analytically accurate. The authority that claims to embody the state bears the greater responsibility because it controls institutions and coercive power and demands that everyone submit to its sovereignty. A state has the right to unify its military and sovereign institutions, but a monopoly over arms cannot substitute for a political compact.
A state that asks the Kurds to relinquish an American guarantee and the Druze to relinquish Israeli protection must offer a stronger guarantee than either: the rule of law. That means genuine accountability for the massacres and abuses on the coast, in Suwayda, and elsewhere; no protection for perpetrators; meaningful political representation; constitutional guarantees; broad local administration within the unity of the country; and security institutions that citizens experience as protectors rather than as the instruments of another community ruling over them.
Without this, the SDF can be dissolved as an organization and al-Hijri’s project can be contained, but the problem that produced both will remain.
Suwayda After the SDF
Perhaps the most dangerous conclusion Damascus could draw from the end of the SDF is that force alone worked. And perhaps the most dangerous conclusion al-Hijri could draw from Israeli intervention is that Israel will follow him all the way to the end. Both lessons may be wrong.
What happened to the SDF demonstrates the limits of an external guarantee; it does not prove that centralization is the answer. What happened in Suwayda demonstrates that Israel can intervene to protect its interests and the Druze under certain circumstances; it does not prove that Israel is prepared to assume responsibility for Suwayda’s future indefinitely.
Syria’s unity is not merely a matter of lines on a map, nor is sovereignty achieved simply by raising one flag over every institution. A unified state becomes viable when the people of Suwayda feel that Damascus is their capital rather than a threat; when Kurds feel that their rights do not require an American soldier to protect them; and when no Syrian needs a foreign power to protect them from their own state or fellow citizens.
The authorities may be able to defeat parallel projects one after another. But the real test for the new Syria is not how many forces Damascus can subdue. It is how many Syrians it can persuade that their future inside the state is safer and better than their future outside it.
That is precisely the difference between restoring the state and building one.
