Syria’s 13-year civil war ended abruptly in December, when rebels belonging to the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham swept south from their bastions in the northwest of the country, precipitating the fall of the government of President Bashar al-Assad. In a matter of weeks, a regime that had lasted six decades came to an end. HTS, helmed by the pragmatic Ahmed al-Shara, leads the interim Syrian government and is poised to head a transitional government that will be unveiled in the spring. It remains uncertain how Shara will unite a diverse and fractious country, whether he will rein in hard-line elements of HTS, and whether he will win the support of other Syrian communities should he move in a more moderate and inclusive direction.
Among the uncertainties facing Syria is the future of U.S. involvement in the country. Since 2014, Washington has backed a de facto autonomous government in northeastern Syria formed principally, but not exclusively, of ethnic Kurdish factions. This coalition, under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces, took advantage of the chaos unleashed by Syria’s civil war to carve out an enclave along the border with Turkey. The SDF fought off Assad’s troops, Turkey and Turkish-backed militias, al-Qaeda-linked groups, and, notably, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. U.S. forces worked closely with the SDF in chasing ISIS from its last redoubts in Syria. The United States maintains around 2,000 troops as well as contractors in roughly a dozen operating posts and small bases in eastern Syria to back ongoing SDF efforts to stamp out ISIS and deter Turkish attacks.
Despite this support, ISIS remains doggedly active in Syria. With the demise of the Assad regime, however, the United States can choose to work with a likely more influential and effective partner in the battle against the remnants of ISIS: the new Syrian government in Damascus. Greater collaboration, either direct or indirect, with this fledgling government could bolster regional security, help conclude the ongoing fighting in eastern Syria, and allow the United States to devote fewer resources to the country. President Donald Trump has long bemoaned American entanglements in overseas conflicts, especially in the Middle East. Partnering with the new transitional government in Damascus would let the United States leave Syria on its own terms.
THE WRONG TOOL
Many American officials and analysts see the autonomous administration in the northeast of Syria as a reliable partner in ensuring what Washington hopes is the “enduring defeat” of ISIS in the country. But the SDF, the Kurdish administration’s military wing, has failed to stamp out the Islamist terrorist group. Six years after the SDF captured the last ISIS stronghold in Syria, ISIS fighters still operate in central and eastern Syria. The SDF’s actions have bred resentment among local Arab communities. Tightly controlled by the People’s Defense Units, a Kurdish militia known as the YPG, the SDF has committed extrajudicial killings and conducted extrajudicial arrests of Arab civilians; extorted Arabs who were trying to get information about or secure the release of detained relatives; press ganged young Arabs into its ranks; twisted the education system to accord with the political agenda of the YPG; and recruited many non-Syrian Kurdish fighters. These actions have driven some of the locals into the arms of ISIS. To be sure, these excesses pale in comparison with those of the Assad regime, but they cause substantial friction with Arab communities particularly in areas where the YPG leads SDF forces.
The SDF is also hampered by ongoing hostility between Turkey and the YPG. The YPG launches occasional attacks against Turkish positions in Syria and in Turkey, reinforcing the long-standing Turkish view that the YPG is a terrorist group. In turn, Turkish military forces and Turkish-backed Syrian militias aggressively harass the YPG in northern Syria. This strife diverts SDF attention and resources away from the fight against ISIS farther south.
The SDF’s actions have bred resentment among Arab communities.
In late February, a key Kurdish leader called for a cease-fire with Turkey. Abdallah Ocalan, the head of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK—a Kurdish militant group affiliated with the YPG that has long fought the Turkish state—called for fighters loyal to him to lay down their weapons and stop waging war against Turkey. YPG leaders rejected Ocalan’s call, insisting that it did not apply to their group. Turkey for its part is not ready to change its policy and tolerate an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria in which the YPG plays a significant role. U.S. administrations since that of President Barack Obama have tried to both support the Syrian YPG militia in the fight against ISIS and accommodate Ankara’s grievances and its desire to strike against YPG commanders, fighters, and the Syrian Kurdish communities where they live. The U.S. military umbrella covering the YPG from Turkish attack in eastern Syria has ensured that the YPG fighters and the autonomous administration they established reject any compromise with Turkey or the new government in Damascus. The umbrella creates a status quo that gives ISIS more room to operate and is tantamount to a forever war.
To maintain the partnership with the SDF, the Trump administration will need to support Kurdish groups in their future battles with Turkey. Between 2023 and 2024, the Biden administration quietly doubled the number of American troops in eastern Syria to around 2,000, in part so U.S. troops could extend patrols west along the Turkish border as far as important towns, such as Kobani, that are not in areas of ISIS activity and instead face Turkish pressure. In December, as Syrian rebels toppled the Assad regime, Turkish-allied militias and Turkish drones assaulted Kurdish positions near Kobani. With 2,000 soldiers already deployed, Trump won’t need to deploy more American soldiers to serve as a tripwire against a Turkish ground invasion, but he will need to back the Kurds with further funding. The SDF depends on Washington to pay for salaries, equipment, and training. That need will become all the more acute now that Turkey is freer to focus on the YPG. With Assad, its foe in Damascus, now vanquished, Ankara will turn its attention more to the YPG-led autonomous administration on its southern border.
In this swamp of Kurdish and Turkish hostilities, it is easy to forget the reason the United States became involved in this part of Syria in the first place: to defeat ISIS. It was never the American goal to deploy forces in eastern Syria to defend a fledgling Syrian Kurdish enclave led by a previously obscure Kurdish militia. Embracing that objective now would represent significant mission creep. Because of its identity and the way it operates, the SDF has rankled both the local communities and the Turkish government. In the conventional war against ISIS, the SDF was a useful tool to aid in the recovery of territory seized by the presumptuous so-called caliphate. In the war for hearts and minds of Arab communities in eastern Syria—from which ISIS still recruits—the SDF is decidedly the wrong tool.
THE ROAD THROUGH DAMASCUS
Instead of relying on the SDF, the United States can turn to the new government in Damascus to help eradicate ISIS. On its face, this may seem like an odd suggestion. The United States considers HTS, the militia that toppled Assad and now leads the Syrian government, a terrorist group. And yet such recognition has not stopped Washington from working closely with the YPG, which is affiliated with the PKK, a group that the United States also designates a terrorist organization.
To be sure, HTS’s militancy and violent ideology should not be downplayed. When I was U.S. ambassador to Syria, I spearheaded the U.S. effort in autumn 2012 to designate Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda-linked group from which HTS would eventually emerge, a foreign terrorist organization. We had to close the embassy in Damascus in February 2012 because of a credible threat from the group. Jabhat al-Nusra later crushed and absorbed the Free Syrian Army, the anti-Assad rebel coalition that the State Department and CIA had backed in northern Syria, and it harassed minority Christians and Alawites during the early years of the civil war. Shara led the group through various name changes and evolutions until, in 2017, it became HTS. Many in Washington doubt the new incarnation of the group has truly eschewed terrorism or abandoned an intolerant and rigid ideological worldview.
But Shara insists otherwise. Jabhat al-Nusra and then HTS spent years trying to distance themselves from Islamist terrorist groups. Shara split from ISIS in 2014 and then his fighters engaged in bloody battles against the group, eventually expelling it from northwestern Syria. He also broke publicly with al-Qaeda in 2016, and his forces fought against an al-Qaeda-affiliated group called Hurras al-Din in northwest Syria. Neither Jabhat al-Nusra nor HTS launched terrorist attacks after their splits with ISIS and al-Qaeda; they stomped out any attempt by these groups to reestablish a presence in northwestern Syria. Their actions over the past eight years make it harder to justify keeping HTS on the official list of foreign terrorist organizations. HTS has also tried to soften its public image. Starting in 2022, without renouncing its goal of establishing an Islamic government in Syria, it began restoring Christian homes and agricultural land seized by Islamist militants during the worst of the civil war in northwestern Syria. Christian leaders in Idlib told me in September 2023 that nearly all properties had been returned.
This track record suggests that HTS, rather than the SDF, is more likely to undercut ISIS’s appeal among certain communities and ultimately contain ISIS. Shara has beaten al-Qaeda and ISIS in northern Syria. The territories he has controlled in the last decade have been free from ISIS activity. Whereas the SDF is hemmed in by Turkey, the HTS-led government enjoys growing regional support, including from Turkey. Perhaps most important, Shara could more easily gain support among those Arab communities in eastern and northeastern Syria from which ISIS draws its recruits.
Syria’s transitional government will need to take Arab fighting groups now under the YPG’s direct command and place them under the emerging defense ministry in Damascus. In parallel, the government of Damascus will have to find a formula whereby it will assume governance responsibilities in eastern Syria’s Arab communities, relieving the SDF of its responsibilities there. These actions will no doubt displease the SDF, but they will help Syria and its regional partners finally vanquish ISIS.
The Trump administration needs to open a channel with the HTS-led government to discuss future efforts against ISIS. The conversation must include subjects such as how local Arab militias now under the SDF umbrella would join the Damascus government’s campaign against ISIS, the deployment of soldiers from the Damascus government to areas where ISIS still operates, and timelines for these measures. The two sides could also discuss how Syria and the United States might share intelligence; U.S. intelligence already helped Shara thwart an ISIS attack in Damascus in January. The discussion must also address the hardest issue: the future of the al-Hol and Roj camps where around 40,000 people connected to ISIS are still held in SDF custody. Shara brooked no political challenge from more conservative Islamist elements, and his administration in northwest Syria operated a small-scale deradicalization program there. The scale of the challenge at al-Hol, however, far exceeds what Shara has handled before.
To help the Damascus government stabilize Syria and fight ISIS successfully, Washington will have to ease sanctions on Syria. Rebuilding Syria after the immense destruction of the long civil war could cost over $200 billion, according to World Bank estimates from 2021. Syrians will need both international assistance and private investment, and U.S. sanctions against foreigners who conduct business in Syria will impede the flows of capital and goods that the country desperately needs. Businessmen I met in Damascus in January insisted that the temporary waivers the Biden administration put in place that month in the areas of energy and humanitarian assistance are nowhere near adequate given the scale of rebuilding needed. If the Trump administration is reluctant to unwind all the myriad sanctions against Syria, it could at least start by instituting a renewable one-year waiver on sanctions that affect the financial, construction and engineering, health, education, transportation, and agricultural sectors. Such measures need not cost the U.S. Treasury; states in the region and other donors will provide Syria with assistance. But U.S. secondary sanctions should not block those donors and private investors from coming forward. Without such investment, Syria will stay flat on its back, unable to defeat ISIS, much as the weakened Assad government failed to do between 2017 and 2024.
HANDS OFF THE WHEEL
Pivoting away from the SDF to the new government in Damascus does not condemn Syrian Kurds to a dark future. The safety and prosperity of Kurdish communities depends not on foreign powers but on the Syrian government respecting their rights and those of all Syrian citizens. It remains unclear how genuinely willing HTS is to establish an inclusive democracy in Syria. But it is indisputable that Syrians living under the control of the new government generally enjoy more political and personal rights than they have since the Baath Party took power in 1963. In the second half of January, I spent ten days in Syria, including a week in Damascus. Freedom of expression was evident everywhere. In coffee shops, Syrians whom I didn’t know felt free to join political conversations and criticize the HTS-run government. Small demonstrations that popped up in the capital were left unmolested by the police. Christmas decorations adorned the Christian quarters of the old city, and church bells rang widely on Sunday. Christians in Damascus are nervous, but they acknowledged that their fears stemmed not from HTS’s conduct but from worries about its ideological background.
Trump is right to stay away from prescriptive formulas for Syria’s political evolution. On December 8, immediately after Assad fled Syria for Russia, Trump tweeted that Syria’s future is not a matter for the United States to dictate. Syrians need to prepare a new constitution, one that probably ends up accommodating some form of decentralization and federalism—features of a future state that SDF leaders and those of other minority Syrian groups are determined to secure. Drafting that constitution will necessarily take much time and require great patience. Only with a strong constitution can Syrians hold elections.
Washington can turn to the new government in Damascus to help eradicate ISIS.
It is important to remember, of course, that the staging of elections and the installation of quotas for minorities within a government are not by themselves backstops against authoritarianism. The experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq in the twenty-first century demonstrate how hard it is to resolve deeper problems of political culture. Elections in Syria will have a better chance of fostering genuine stability and good governance if the transitional government has already established rule of law and protected political and personal freedoms, including freedom of opinion and speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, and freedom from arbitrary arrest. Western states should focus on encouraging Damascus to treat Syrians as citizens of one country who all enjoy basic rights; external powers should not favor or seek to play the Kurds, Christians, Druze, Alawites, and Sunni Muslims off one another.
The United States must be willing to let the SDF down and encourage it to fold into the structures of the new Syria. Washington should insist that U.S. forces will not stay in Syria more than another two years as a transition in northeastern Syria proceeds. All SDF groups, Kurdish and Arab, should be able to integrate into the new Syrian army within that time frame. Washington should press Damascus, the SDF, and the autonomous administration to negotiate a transitional arrangement that covers security issues, the short-term future for the administrative structures established in the autonomous administration area, and the reintroduction of central government services, including border controls and the reopening of central government administrative offices that issue passports and register property transactions.
But Washington should not, and need not, get mired in the details. It should make a simple point to Damascus: if the new Syrian government tries to sideline the autonomous administration and impose a transition without Kurdish cooperation, it will spark new conflict, impede the fight against ISIS, and delay U.S. consideration of further sanctions relief. And Washington’s message to the SDF should also be simple: the fall of the Assad regime means that it is now time for hard compromises about future security and administrative arrangements in the territories the SDF controls—including the group’s gradual dissolution.
The United States should not press for a quota or specific government position for Syrian Kurds or any other group. HTS has rejected quotas assigned on ethnic or sectarian lines, labeling as a mistake the U.S.-backed ethnic and religious spoils system that took hold in neighboring Iraq 20 years ago. Public activism, reinforced by the rule of law and the protection of political and personal freedoms, is the only way Syria will build a genuine democracy. It will be slow and messy, and it will above all be an issue for Syrians to resolve. But it should not require an American hand on the wheel—or American boots on the ground.
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