A deal between Damascus and Syria's Kurds over their autonomous region in the country's north is "inevitable", a senior Kurdish military official said on Saturday, insisting that Kurdish forces should remain in the area. Marginalised for decades, Syria's minority Kurds carved out a de facto autonomous region across some 30 percent of the nation's territory after the devastating war broke out in 2011.

Kurdish forces, backed by a US-led coalition, spearheaded the fight in Syria against the Islamic State group after the jihadists seized large parts of the country and neighbouring Iraq in 2014. But Washington's shock December announcement that it would withdraw its troops from Syria pushed the Kurds to seek a new alliance with President Bashar al-Assad's regime, amid fears of a long-expected Turkish assault against Kurdish forces.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019