The decree makes Kurdish a national language that can be taught in public schools in areas where the minority community is heavily present.

Sharaa also made the Kurdish new year Nowruz, which falls on March 21, an official holiday.

The decree grants nationality to Kurds, as 20 percent of them had been stripped of it under a controversial 1962 census.

"Syrian Kurdish citizens are an essential and integral part of the Syrian people, and their cultural and linguistic identity is an inseparable part of the diverse and unified Syrian national identity," the decree said.

The Kurdish minority suffered decades of marginalisation and oppression under previous rulers in Syria.

Kurdish forces took control of swathes of Syria's oil-rich north and northeast during the country's civil war and the fight against the Islamic State group over the past decade.

Sharaa's army said on Friday it was fighting Kurdish forces in the north after having driven them out of Aleppo city last week.

The fighting came as progress to implement a deal in March to fold a Kurdish de facto autonomous administration in the north into the state had stalled.