Syrian government forces It entered two northern towns on Saturday morning, with Kurdish-led commando fighters evacuating the area in an apparent move to avoid conflict.
Two soldiers were killed and others wounded in the latest clash, state media reported. The town of Deir Hafer changed hands earlier this month after deadly fighting broke out between government troops and the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. in the city of AleppoThe largest in Syria. It ended with the evacuation of Kurdish fighters from three neighborhoods captured by government forces.
An Associated Press reporter on Saturday saw government tanks, armored personnel carriers and other vehicles, including trucks with heavy machine guns on top, enter Deir Hafer after bulldozers cleared the roadblocks. There was no SDF presence on the edge of town.
The Syrian army said its forces were in full control of Deir Hafer, had captured the Jarrah air base in the east and were in the process of clearing mines and explosives. He also added that the troops would move towards the nearby town of Maskana, an AP reporter saw a military convoy coming a few hours later.
Ghaith Alsayed / AP 
The SDF said in a statement that under an agreement, Syrian forces were to enter Deir Hafer and Maskana after the withdrawal of Kurdish-led forces was completed. “Damascus violated the terms of the agreement and entered the villages before our fighters were fully withdrawn, creating a very dangerous situation that could have serious consequences,” the SDF said.
State news agency SANA reported that SDF fighters “violated the agreement” by targeting an army patrol near Maskana, leaving two soldiers dead and others wounded. SANA added that government forces continued to move eastward, reaching two towns in the northern province of Raqqa.
Over the past two days, more than 11,000 people left Deir Hafer and Maskana using side roads to reach government-controlled areas after the government announced an offensive to take the towns.
On Friday night, after government forces began pounding SDF positions in Deir Hafer, the main leader of the Kurdish-led fighters Mazloum Abdi He posted on X that his group would withdraw from the conflict zones in northern Syria. Abdi said SDF fighters would move east of the Euphrates River from 7am on Saturday.
The easing of tensions came after US military officials visited Deir Hafer on Friday and held talks with SDF officials in the area. The United States has good relations with both sides and has called for calm.
Ghaith Alsayed / AP 
Abdi was due to hold talks with US special envoy for Syria Tom Barrack in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil on Saturday.
The decision to withdraw the SDF from Deir Hafer was made after Syria Interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa He issued a decree on Friday to promote the rights of the Kurds, who made up about 10 percent of Syria’s 23 million people before the conflict began in 2011. In recent decades, Syria’s Kurds were marginalized and stripped of their cultural rights under the Baath Party, which lasted for six decades in Syria. The fall of Bashar Assad in December 2024.
Al-Sharaa’s decree recognized Kurdish as the national language, alongside Arabic, and made the Newroz festival, a traditional celebration of spring and renewal marked by the Kurds of the region, an official holiday.
The Kurdish-led authority in northeastern Syria said on Saturday that Kurdish rights should not be protected by “temporary decrees” but by mentioning them in the country’s constitution. In addition, a decree “does not constitute a real guarantee of the rights of the Syrian ethnic groups”.