Context: The flag carries the visit’s symbolic weight. Its raising in Damascus means the Kurdistan flag has now been raised officially in all four capitals governing sizeable Kurdish populations. Iraq came first, where the 2005 constitution recognised the Kurdistan Region and the flag flies as its official banner. It was then displayed officially in Ankara in 2015 and flown publicly in Turkey two years later. It was raised in Tehran in 2021 when Barzani arrived for President Ebrahim Raisi’s inauguration. Damascus was the remaining capital, and the circle has closed a century after the partition of the Ottoman Empire left sizeable Kurdish populations divided across three new states, with Iran governing the fourth part.
The visit also arrives at a specific point in the Syrian state’s handling of the SDF. Since the January fighting, Damascus has recovered roughly 80% of the territory the SDF held, compressing the question into a far smaller, Kurdish-populated strip along the border. That campaign pushed the SDF into a framework it signed under pressure, and the framework’s central term is structural: no regions and no federal entities, a unitary state secured on paper. What remains is implementation, which Damascus is pursuing through gradual containment and gradual absorption inside the agreement.
More at the link