In the north-east, integration is now being fought over school timetables and diesel prices
Kurdish-language instruction is set at three hours a week for the coming academic year, and the end of SDF-era fuel subsidies has left Hasakah dark. Both are testing what January’s decree was worth.
Drop Site News, reporting from Qamishli and Hasakah on 21 September with named interviewees, says that under the integration agreement Kurdish — the language of education across the north-east for the past decade — is to be taught three hours a week, plus one additional hour of geography, history or philosophy delivered in Kurdish, as a transitional settlement for the coming academic year with no final arrangement agreed. On 10 September hundreds of children gathered in Qamishli’s streets and schoolyards chanting in Kurdish and demanding constitutional recognition of the language; Drop Site photographed internal security forces at the protest. The AANES-aligned agency ANHA, a party to the dispute, listed students in Hasakah on 22 September rejecting the same three-classes-a-week decision. The convergence of an independent US outlet and the AANES wire on the identical figure is what makes it usable.
The measure to hold it against is Decree No. 13 of 16 January 2026, which granted citizenship to stateless Kurds, made Newroz a national holiday and recognised Kurdish as a “national language,” per the Middle East Council on Global Affairs. Eight months on, the classroom allocation is four hours. Alongside it, Damascus has ended SDF-era fuel subsidies. “People can’t afford the generator bills now, so they leave the lights off. What kind of government is this?” Musa Kiki, 65, of Hasakah told Drop Site. Kiki joined the first convoy of Kurdish returnees to Serêkaniyê, displaced since Turkey’s 2019 operation, and found his camera shop seized and strangers living in his house, who attacked him: “Honestly, I wish I had never tried to go back.” ANHA lists continuing protests in Qamishlo over diesel prices.
Assessment: Territory was settled in January; what is unsettled is whether integration means citizenship or administration. Curriculum hours and subsidy schedules are the instruments a central state actually governs with, and they are harder to protest than a troop deployment. Watch two things. Charles Lister’s newsletter — paywalled, preview only — has Hasakah’s governor preparing for Ministry of Defence military police to enter the provincial capital in the week now underway; that is unconfirmed and would change the register from bureaucratic to coercive. And Washington’s Caesar-repeal certifications require attestation that minority rights are upheld and that the SDF agreement is being implemented. Tom Barrack called January’s deal a commitment to “collective dignity of all Syrian communities.” Four hours a week is the first audit of that sentence.