In the end, we have hardly honored our moral debt. We are abandoning those without whom the Islamic State group (IS) would not have been defeated in 2017. IS represented the most toxic form of Islamist jihadism. The group frightened Americans and Europeans alike, and was on the verge of reshaping the face of the Middle East. Without the Kurds – and, more specifically, the Syrian Kurds – IS would have wrought even more devastation, likely for a longer period.
The Kurds had Western support, especially from the United States. That support has now been withdrawn as Washington deserts its former allies. The twists and turns of the brutal civil war that ravaged Syria from 2011 to 2024 allowed the Kurdish minority – three million out of a population of 23 million – to carve out an autonomous region in the northeast of the country. The Kurds called it “Rojava.” The “agreement” that the new leader in Damascus, Ahmed al-Sharaa, imposed on Friday, January 30, on the leaders of the Syrian Kurdish party marks the end of the Rojava experiment. It lasted 12 years, without threatening anyone.
We hear the realist school arguments, the familiar refrain of raison d’État. One must support the person who dealt the final blow to the kleptocratic tyranny of the Assad family at the helm of Syria; one must reunify a nation traumatized by internal wars, largely fueled from abroad; one must rebuild the Syrian state. The region’s stability is at stake; this is a Syrian matter. Damascus’s sovereignty must be respected; supporting any particular minority would amount to a form of neocolonialism condemned by all Arab states. But is this just any minority?
Kobani, autumn 2014: This small, predominantly Kurdish Syrian city, on the border with Turkey, was besieged by IS fighters in their 4x4s. At the time, nothing seemed able to stop the men of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. They had created the beginnings of a “caliphate” straddling Iraq and Syria. Success followed success, their black flag slung over their shoulders, drawing thousands of European Muslims to their ranks.
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