Many Kurdish people will be feeling betrayed by the US after the Syrian army, backed by the US and armed by Turkey, launched an offensive against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in early January. The SDF has long been hailed as the west’s most effective partner against the Islamic State (IS) terrorist organisation.

Kobani, a city famous as the site of heroic Kurdish resistance against IS in 2014, is under siege with its water and electricity supplies cut off. And Elham Ahmad, a senior Kurdish official, claims the Syrian army has already executed hundreds of captured Kurdish fighters and civilians. She has characterised the actions of the state as a “war of extermination” against the Kurds.

Kurdish fighters of the all-female Women Protection Units (YPJ) stand in formation. Kurdishstruggle / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA© The Conversation UK

Abandoning the Kurds in favour of an anti-Iranian government in Syria, could embolden al-Sharaa to forcibly subordinate Druze, Alawite, Assyrian and other minority groups. This would reproduce a centralised state sustained by repression, like Saddam Hussein’s Ba'athist Iraq, and risks renewed civil war.

US abandons Syria’s Kurds, risking regional turmoil and an IS resurgence

Internationally, the danger of abandoning the Kurds is the return of IS terrorism to cities in the west. Reports suggest many IS detainees escaped from detention camps as SDF forces guarding them came under attack. And videos released by the SDF show what it claimed were IS members being broken out of a prison by armed “Damascus factions”.

Believe this is the second time this happened ?

Last time it was to get the US troops home for Xmas?

Realpolitik is tough.

The Kurds have the great misfortune that nobody wants them to form their own state. They are being "tolerated" at best.

The US administration has a short memory. For the most part, it was the Kurds that got rid of the IS.

15 hours ago, Jim Blue said:

Believe this is the second time this happened ?

Last time it was to get the US troops home for Xmas?

The realvreason is the same. As Trump 1.0 did, Trump 2.0 is helping his pal Erdogan.

Dreams of autonomy are over for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed militia that helped to defeat Islamic State. It took just two weeks for SDF control to unravel, as the government exploited local anger over Kurdish rule in Arab-majority Raqqa and Deir al-Zour. And the SDF’s power is restricted to its strongholds in the northeast and “enclaves” in Kurdish-dominated cities.

Perhaps President Sharaa is now showing his true colours, said Tanya Goudsouzian in Le Monde Diplomatique (Paris). His campaign against the Kurds belies his promise to respect all Syria’s ethnic minorities. “Despite his clipped beard and British suits”, his troops’ actions “seem more in line with their roots in the terrorist group HTS than those of a new nation committed to democratic oversight and governance”.

Even if Sharaa’s promises are well-intentioned, it’s not clear that he’s got full control over “his patchwork army”, said Christian Vooren in Die Zeit (Hamburg). His forces committed massacres against the Alawites on the coast in March, and there was violence in the Druze-majority Suweida province in the south last summer.

Syria’s Kurds: abandoned by their US ally