In recent months, Tom Barrack has become a household name across Kurdistan, entering an infamous pantheon of American officials accused of turning their back on the Kurds at pivotal moments. By siding with Damascus and its military offensive to impose a centralized state in Syria, the Trump administration’s special envoy to Syria appeared to dash the dreams of many Kurds who wanted to preserve the autonomy that they had fought so hard to achieve.

As one Kurdish activist in northeast Syria told me, the Kurds have “not had a very good experience with Barrack.” They added, “We think he’s a big threat, not only to the Kurdish minority. He’s a big threat to different minorities that are trying to live in the Middle East.” 

Because of growing frustration with Washington, that perspective might put it lightly. After all, US forces in Syria recently declined to intervene to prevent Damascus’s aggression until it was too late. Since Bashar al-Assad’s government collapsed in December 2024, a former militant named Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was once on the US most-wanted list, has served as president. Earlier this year, al-Sharaa’s government dispatched armed forces into Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh, Kurdish-majority neighborhoods in Aleppo, and deadly battles ensued. 

In fact, Barrack, who simultaneously serves as ambassador to Turkey, personally delivered the coup de grâce to the long-term partnership by switching Washington’s allegiance to Damascus. On Jan. 20, Barrack took to X to announce that, in the Trump administration’s eyes, the “original purpose” of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) “as the primary anti-ISIS force on the ground has largely expired.” He went on, “Damascus is now both willing and positioned to take over security responsibilities.”

The about-face came as a blow to Kurds who had expected more from Washington. Many organized protests across Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, Europe, and the United States to give voice to their anger. The way they see it, the future of Rojava, the Kurdish name for northeast Syria, has been handed to al-Sharaa’s government in Damascus. 

“The Syrian regime attacked Rojava despite the Kurds being the biggest allies of the West and Rojava defeating Islamic State on behalf of the world,” Khalid Raza, a Kurdish painter, told me. “This was unfair to Rojava.” 

Kurds the world over “were frustrated and disappointed,” he said. “We all felt enough is enough. The situation made me feel like I needed to do something, even if it was something small. I wanted to fight back for our people, and obviously my most powerful weapon is painting.”

Watching events from his studio in Kirkuk, Raza grabbed his brushes and made a satirical version of the bald and wrinkled Barrack’s official portrait. He was angry that every force from Washington to Ankara had seemingly united against the Kurds, but a wry sense of humor shone through. “I decided to paint him as a turkey.”

Barrack, a 78-year-old Californian who became a billionaire investing in real estate and distressed assets as the head of Colony Capital, is a close friend of US President Donald Trump.  He would likely dispute Raza’s characterization and argue that his actions had the Kurds’ best interests at heart.

“The greatest opportunity for the Kurds in Syria right now lies in the post-Assad transition under the new government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa,” he wrote in the Jan. 20 social media post. “This moment offers a pathway to full integration into a unified Syrian state with citizenship rights, cultural protections, and political participation.”

In fact, some Kurds were heartened by the appearance of SDF commander Mazloum Abdi and Syrian Kurdish diplomat Ilham Ahmed at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February as part of the official Syrian delegation. Abdi and Ahmed met with top Western leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who emphasized the importance of implementing the Jan. 30 ceasefire agreement that put an end to the recent fighting.

The activist suggested that this direct engagement — which took place in Barrack’s absence — was a sign that other factions within the Trump administration were more sympathetic to the Kurdish position than the Syria envoy and had possibly managed to soften the ambassador’s hard line.

But for many, history provides a guide for how to assess such assurances. Erstwhile partners have abandoned the Kurds time and again, opting instead to follow the dictates of sovereign state interest. The vacuum they left behind provided time, space, and opportunity for oppressive governments to erode Kurdish political and cultural rights — and in some cases erase Kurdish populations through systematic violence.

“Tom Barrack doesn’t believe in decentralization, democracy, [or] minority rights.” – Kurdish activist

Though hardly the first to do so, the godfather of international friends who shattered Kurdish trust is the late Henry Kissinger. In 1972, then President Richard Nixon’s administration decided to support Mullah Mustafa Barzani’s war against Iraq’s Ba’athist government at the request of the Iranian Shah, but Gerald Ford’s administration ended military aid after Baghdad and Tehran settled their differences with the Algiers Accord in 1975. Kissinger did not reply to pleas from Barzani to reconsider. He later told a House committee that “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

Without US aid, Barzani’s uprising collapsed. Over the next two decades, Iraqi Kurds were subjected to a program of enforced demographic change known as Arabization, the Anfal genocide in which as many as 100,000 people were estimated to have been killed, and the Halabja chemical attack at the hands of Saddam Hussein.

Few betrayals rival that in terms of human cost, but for Kurds there is a throughline from that point to Washington’s refusal to back the 2017 independence referendum in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, greenlighting Turkish interventions in Syria’s Afrin and Sere Kaniye, and the recent collapse of Rojava. Kurds sacrifice themselves for Western interests and are dropped when priorities change.

“Tom Barrack doesn’t believe in decentralization, democracy, [or] minority rights,” the activist said. “He thinks that everything can be resolved by having trade deals, and I just can say that the approach he is trying to [take] in Syria will lead to a very bad situation — and very, very soon.”

Apart from his core responsibility for Turkey and Syria, Barrack oversees a sprawling, region-wide portfolio. Over the past year, he made several forays into Lebanese affairs in an effort to reduce the influence of political party and armed group Hezbollah. Whatever progress he has made behind the scenes, public provocations like telling a group of local journalists to “act civilized” and not be “animalistic” have gone down poorly.

In the immediate aftermath of the events in Syria, news broke that he would also be taking over the Trump administration’s Iraq portfolio from Mark Savaya. He spent little time getting to work, appearing in Baghdad and Erbil on Feb. 23 for discussions about Iraq’s difficult government formation process and to preside over an oil deal involving Chevron. For Iraqi Kurds, this may have far-reaching consequences.

Like Damascus, Baghdad has moved to centralize its authority and dilute the power of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in recent years. Barrack’s record of supporting Syria’s central government while sidelining Kurdish allies of longstanding is potentially problematic.

“What I understand and feel is [that] if Rojava fails, then Iraqi Kurdistan fails too,” Raza said. “I have never had a good feeling about the US. History told us this. The US is always leaving you when they don’t need you or not their priority.”

Raza is hardly alone. Iraqi Kurdish assessments of Barrack’s Jan. 20 post were blunt. “Every drop of blood shed is on your head you old man!,” wrote one prominent Erbil-based social media account. Another branded him as “Jihadist Tom.” Another called attention to Barrack’s inclusion in the Epstein files. Former Kurdish parliamentarian Ala Talabani wrote that “it is the Kurds’ misfortune that you are an international envoy over them.”

In contrast, their politicians are taking Barrack’s appointment as a matter of course — they have little other choice. Kurdistan is simply too vulnerable to lose whatever influence it has with Washington and it must deal with dynamics as they are rather than how they would like them to be. This supersedes public anger.

Prominent members of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) have already engaged extensively with Barrack, even before he took on the Iraq portfolio. They were eager to find a way to achieve a ceasefire in Syria and invited Barrack to Erbil for meetings with Abdi, Ahmed, and other Kurdish leaders, all the while encouraging every side to make a deal. From their perspective, the result was positive. Barrack “played a positive role during our discussions leading to the agreement,” a Kurdish foreign policy official told me on condition of anonymity to discuss this sensitive issue. 

That experience could help smooth relations moving forward and initial engagement between the KDP and the ambassador look good, with the latter characterizing his meeting with Masoud Barzani on Feb. 23 as “wonderful wisdom from a legendary leader.” (Barrack also met with the Iraqi Kurdistan-based Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.)

Wonderful wisdom or not,  the official acknowledged that the public takes a much darker view of the US official “because of his statements mainly on decentralization.”

Now Syrian Kurds will try to pick up the shattered pieces of Rojava and find a way forward with Damascus, while Iraqi Kurds will wonder what is in store for them under Barrack’s new broom. And once again, it is left up to ordinary Kurds to express publicly what their leaders know to be true. “The problem with Kurds is [we are] surrounded by enemies,” Raza said, “and we as Kurds don’t have any choice but to be allies to the West, even though we know we cannot fully trust them.”

Top photo: A Kurdish Yekineyen Anti-Terror (YAT) fighter uses an M16 during target practice in northeast Syria in January 2025 (Keyona P. Smith/US Army/Wikimedia Commons)