What was the US role?
Any betrayal of the Kurds could only happen when the United States is weak and befuddled. Nothing is completely clear in the first hours, but early reports are worse than bad. See below.
After a promising start toward a democratic, inclusive Syria, al-Sharaaa (whose nom de guerre was al-Jolani when he appeared on lists of terrorists) apparently has broken a pact signed just he day before and betrayed Rojava. The situation is still fluid, but reports of heavy fighting and Syrian atrocities do not bode well.
Fourteen years ago, ISIS was on the march and had nearly defeated the last city between it and the welcoming Turkish border. The indigenous population of Kurds, Christians, Turkmen and Arabs united and — with the help of US air support — defeated them, expelling them from Raqqa and imprisoning tens of thousands.
Now ISIS prisons have been breached, ISIS patches appear on Syrian soldiers uniforms, and the heart of the Kurdish area — Hasakah — has apparently been invaded contrary to al-Sharaa’s and US assurances. (Some reports have Turkey as the primary recruitment center for ISIS.)
The combined Syrian and Turkish action has led to a call for mobilization of Kurds across the region — in Turkey and Iraq particularly — and may signal a wider conflict.
Only days ago, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the government of the new Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa (who assumed office following the ouster of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024), signed a historic agreement to fully integrate the SDF into state structures.
This cooperation followed months of tension and recent military clashes, culminating in a comprehensive ceasefire deal announced on January 18, 2026.
The Deal
The agreement was supposed to mark the transition of the SDF from a semi-independent entity to a partner integrated within the Syrian state. Among the points agreed to were:
- Military Integration: Individual SDF members and security personnel to be integrated into the Syrian Ministry of Defense (army) and Ministry of Interior on an individual basis, rather than as separate Kurdish units.
- Territorial Handover: The SDF agreed to hand over military and administrative control of the
Raqqa and
Deir ez-Zor provinces to the central government. This includes vital infrastructure such as oil and gas fields, the Euphrates Dam, and border crossings.
- Kurdish Rights and Recognition: In an overture to the Kurdish population, President al-Sharaa issued a decree (Decree No. 13 of 2026) that:
- Recognizes Kurdish as a national language.
- Grants Syrian citizenship to stateless Kurds.
- Declares Nowruz (Kurdish New Year) a paid national holiday.
- Administrative Transition: While Hasakah province remains the Kurdish heartland, its civilian administration will be handed back to Damascus. The government was also to take over the management of prisons and camps housing thousands of Islamic State (IS) detainees.
- Political Representation: The deal includes provisions for SDF leaders to fill senior civilian and military posts within the central government to ensure national partnership.
That deal is apparently no longer operational, considering the attack on Hasakah Governate and the Syrian government’s release of ISIS militants from prisons once controlled by the SDF.
The scene is chaotic and grotesque. A sequence of tweets should display that. (Not in order by time.)
Pro-Turkish militias (formerly part of the Syrian National Army) now integrated into Syrian government forces have been accused of including former ISIS members or maintaining "ISIS-minded" ideologies. The SDF has explicitly accused Turkey of coordinating drone strikes and ground attacks to coincide with ISIS prison breaks, such as the January 2026 Shaddadi prison breach, in an effort to collapse Kurdish-led security structures.
The fear is that this is genocide. The US under Trump may not be able or willing to stop it, particularly if Putin is on the other side.
It may well be that a weak and feckless and incompetent Trump administration has allowed the resurgence of ISIS. Or worse.
