Kurdish-led SDF has dissolved, but has Syria really unified its military?

Tuesday’s announcement that the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces had dissolved , with its forces merging with the Syrian military, represents a boost for a government seeking to demonstrate that it has sole authority over the country.

And yet, analysts have told Al Jazeera, the finer details of military integration remain, indicating that the divisions that have beset Syria over almost 14 years of war, and then in the 20 months since the fall of the al-Assad regime, have not been totally eradicated.

The SDF, which emerged in 2015, has been based in the country’s northeast, where much of Syria’s historically marginalised Kurdish population lives.

Despite months of talks, the SDF had been unwilling to give up on the autonomy it had gained during Syria’s war, but on Tuesday the group’s leader Mazloum Abdi (also known as Mazloum Kobani) said that an “important page” had been turned in the country’s history.

“We want this day to be the beginning of a true transition from the battlefields to the fields of construction, and from the era of weapons to the era of peace,” Abdi said from the presidential palace in Damascus.

Initially, the SDF had held strong reservations over giving up its arms and coming under the command of Syria’s Ministry of Defence. But a government-led offensive into the northeast in January, in addition to good relations between the Syrian government and the United States – the SDF’s main backer – has shifted the balance of power.

Rob Geist Pinfold, a lecturer on security studies at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera that the SDF’s dissolution “is part of an ongoing trend of the SDF losing its leverage in Syria, simply because the US has signalled that [the SDF] no longer has protected status from the US”.

The SDF’s dissolution means that “the largest organised military force outside Damascus’s authority has ended its independent existence, allowing the state to begin the process of restoring a single military command and unified control over the border, airports, and strategic resources”, said Navvar Saban, a researcher in security and military affairs at the Arab Center for Contemporary Syrian Studies.