After nearly 15 years of brutal civil war, Syria is being put back together. The new leadership in Damascus under Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former commander of the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, has brought much of the fractured country back under central control since toppling Bashar al-Assad in late 2024. On Monday, Washington removed Syria from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, opening another door to desperately needed investment and reconstruction.
But for the country to become truly whole again, one of America’s most important allies in the war against Islamic extremism must make an extraordinary sacrifice. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, who, for years, waged a bitter fight alongside the U.S. military to defeat ISIS, have been abandoned by Washington in favor of al-Sharaa. Now, Syria’s Kurds are surrendering the military power that safeguarded their freedom and autonomy under an integration agreement with Syria’s new leaders.
It is the ultimate leap of faith. Without America’s backing, the Kurds must trust that a new Syrian state led by a former jihadist will grant them the political, cultural and linguistic rights they spent more than a decade fighting to protect. When Syria’s civil war erupted in 2011, the Kurds living in the northeast seized the opportunity to finally carve out that which they’d never had—a space where they could live free of oppression.
What they created became an anomaly in the Middle East; a small, de facto autonomous region known as Rojava, with its own democratic political administration, public institutions and security forces. So, when the Islamic State began spreading like a virus through the Middle East and the Levant, the Kurdish militias proved to be the perfect partner for the United States in the quest to stop the extremists. Kurdish fighters became famous during the siege of Kobani in 2014, holding out as the jihadist group swallowed huge stretches of Syria and Iraq.
In 2015, they united several armed groups to form one Kurdish-led, multi-ethnic militia: the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). With American weapons, air power, intelligence and Special Forces support, they became the ground army Washington needed to defeat ISIS, but did not want to provide itself. After four years and countless bitter battles, the SDF captured the final sliver of Syrian territory held by ISIS, and declared an end to the caliphate.
But America’s alliance with the Kurds was not forever. That became brutally clear after al-Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham swept out of Idlib in late 2024 and brought down the Assad dynasty. With Assad finally gone, Washington saw an opportunity to stabilize Syria, and, in a matter of months, al-Sharaa underwent a scarcely imaginable transformation from sanctioned terrorist to internationally recognized president.
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