Israel and Iran have long squared off in Syria, and now Turkey, the Assad government, and Russia find themselves staring each other down in the northeast. But as the congressionally chartered Syria Study Group noted, U.
It is these two challenges that U. But without a concerted attempt to address them, these outstanding issues will bedevil the United States, its allies, and its regional partners moving forward. Some 3. Agreements negotiated with Russian help in places such as Daraa, Homs, and eastern Ghouta effectively appear to be instruments of surrender that enable further abuses.
Making matters worse, nativist anti-refugee sentiment has swelled in neighboring Lebanon, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently put forward a scheme to push as many as a million refugees back into Syria—a project he will try to implement now that U. That project to resettle a significant proportion of Syrian Arab refugees—what SDF leaders characterized as ethnic cleansing of their largely Kurdish region—now appears to be on hold due to the deal struck by the SDF to let the Assad regime return to the northeast.
Facilitating the return of refugees to an Assad-ruled Syria ought to be a nonstarter, both morally and under international law. To avert this unacceptable outcome, the United States and other interested nations—especially U. These efforts should focus on resettling these refugees where they currently reside and helping current host countries better integrate them into their economies and societies. Beyond coordinating international efforts, there are two ways the United States can help with this process.
First, it can provide financial and other humanitarian assistance to those nations absorbing large numbers of Syrian refugees. This aid will be most important to countries such as Jordan and Lebanon that host large Syrian refugee populations alongside refugees from earlier regional conflicts, and the United States and its allies should experiment with new assistance models to help them cope with Syrian refugees.
Second, the United States should accept its own fair share of Syrian refugees to demonstrate its own willingness to shoulder the burdens involved. But should Trump leave office in the near future, it could prove more politically feasible. Dealing with an Assad regime that retains effective control over much of Syria will prove an extremely difficult question for U. The Assad government remains a pariah state that starves, gases, and executes those under its rule and ought to be treated as such.
Nations that profess adherence to democracy and human rights cannot allow themselves to be party to the rehabilitation of a regime with a heinous record of crimes against humanity. Nonetheless, Assad is unlikely to depart anytime soon—and the United States needs a policy to cope with this unfortunate reality. That starts with forging agreement among fellow democracies—especially France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—not to bring Assad or his government in from the cold.
A mutual and public commitment not to receive regime officials in any capacity, send out diplomatic feelers to Damascus, or participate in Assad-led reconstruction efforts would represent a good first step toward coordination on this front. It also meant diplomatic engagements, which held Kurdish interlocutors accountable for questionable governance and human rights practices. Instead, because the United States prioritized expediency, it focused almost exclusively on the physical aspects of stabilization — namely, the restoration of essential services like water and electricity — at the expense of social and political ones.
To be sure, the latter issues are undoubtedly hard to define. Furthermore, the scale of destruction and human suffering in Syria was so vast that it was difficult to envision meaningful societal change taking place without the restoration of some basic services. In addition, given that coalition airstrikes as part of the defeat-ISIL campaign were responsible for much of the devastation, there was a strong moral and strategic imperative for the United States to fix what it broke.
All the same, service delivery alone could never have addressed the vulnerabilities in these communities that made them susceptible to extremism. A focus on hard numbers may have obfuscated the more intangible but potentially more consequential issues — like lack of social cohesion or corrupt governance — destabilizing the political environment. More troubling, in creating winners and losers through service provision, the United States may have cultivated the precise situation it hoped to avoid — a sense of injustice or discrimination that academic literature suggests might actually make communities vulnerable to violent extremism.
The singular focus on essential services was all the more questionable given that the regime continued to provide many services throughout Syria. For example, in the education sector, the United States admirably repaired dozens of schools in northeastern Syria, but provided a curriculum that was not nationally accredited.
As a result, many families continued sending their children to regime schools—even with the heavy dose of fascist indoctrination— to ensure they could continue their education in the future. Herein lays the most fundamental problem with the U. As a political tool, stabilization merely buys time and space for a political end state. However, because the United States never put the resources behind, nor clearly articulated, what a post-Assad transition would look like — admittedly an intractable challenge — it remained unclear what endgame the United States was ultimately trying to stabilize towards.
This approach may have been tenable if Washington had been willing to maintain an indefinite presence in Syria until some change in the security environment eventually made a political settlement possible. However, both the Obama and Trump administrations were insistent that the engagement in Syria was to be short-term. Accordingly, it was incumbent upon policymakers to identify clear political conditions, short of a long-term political solution, that stabilization efforts were seeking to achieve.
These political conditions should have been articulated from the outset. The moment the United States decided to militarily partner with the SDF, it needed to be prepared to carry that policy out to its logical conclusion and support them politically.
Alternatively, if the White House was unwilling to make the necessary investments upfront to ensure a longer-term strategy with the SDF, it should have more seriously considered the Turkish proposal for a local Arab force even if their relative fecklessness meant a significantly longer and costlier engagement for the United States.
Instead, by adopting a policy riddled with contradictions and failing to ever reconcile them, U. This begs the question — why did the United States never modify an admittedly flawed policy? Others stayed in the camp, infiltrating the regular population and adding to its paranoia and confusion. Not long after this, a convoy of armored vehicles flying American flags approached on the highway, from the Lafarge Cement Factory.
When the convoy stopped in front of the camp, relief washed over Khairi. Then the convoy started moving again. Khairi and the other refugees did not know that Trump had ordered an immediate withdrawal of all U. Fighting persisted between the Turks and the S. Her older brother, Ali Mohammad, took her to the hospital in town.
Unlike the detainees, most of the refugees went south—some in cars, others on foot—unsure where they were going or what they would do. When Ali Mohammad returned to the camp with Amal, she was dead. Khairi and his relatives stayed to bury her. In a clearing outside a mosque, they dug a grave and marked it with a stone on either end.
The sun was setting. No one had eaten in several days. Khairi set out to scavenge for food. It looked as if a tornado had descended on the camp. He marvelled at how quickly everything had changed. The next day, he hired a truck. The departing Americans, after their brief pause outside the camp, proceeded east on the M4, through the middle of the battle, with Turkish forces on their left and the S.
Both sides stopped fighting to let them pass, then resumed. In the end, Brousque and the S. It took the Americans three days to transport all their equipment and heavy weaponry out of Syria. Locals hurled rocks at them and called them traitors. The Syrian government had pulled most of its troops out of the region two years earlier, to quell uprisings elsewhere in the country.
A massacre appeared at hand. When I met Mazloum, in February, he recalled telling his fighters that under no circumstances were they to let ISIS advance beyond the street where he grew up. By then, the U.
He refused. This must have been a strange moment for Mazloum, because the U. He was born in , shortly after the creation of the Syrian Arab Republic, which institutionalized the repression of Kurds.
After graduating with a degree in architecture, Mazloum joined the P. He rose through its ranks during the eighties and nineties, while the group carried out kidnappings, assassinations, bombings, and suicide attacks in Turkey. He was imprisoned on a small island in the Sea of Marmara, where he remains today. In , at the outbreak of the Syrian revolution, Mazloum founded the Y. Three years later, when American officials offered to support the Y.
Mazloum says that his organization is not connected to the P. That is preposterous; what is debatable is the nature of the connection. As the Y. This bureaucracy—the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria—now governs about a third of the country, garnering considerable revenue, from taxes and trade, which, many experts believe, directly finances the P.
For the Americans, the S. As the war against ISIS progressed, the Kurds, despite their fidelity to a designated terrorist organization, developed an extraordinarily copacetic relationship with U.
At the command level, this symbiosis seems to have been largely thanks to General Mazloum , whose competence and reliability permitted American officials to overlook his political associations. The results spoke for themselves. Today, Mazloum commands more than a hundred thousand fighters, fewer than half of whom are Kurds. His astonishing trajectory, from the leader of a fledgling militia to the general of a multiethnic army controlling a large swath of Syria, has endowed him with an almost mythical stature.
Some Americans express a similar awe. Army major told me. For my meeting with General Mazloum, I was instructed to show up at an S. Guards paced the terraces of a luxurious residence with patios and an expansive swimming pool—the Hollywood version of a narco mansion, except that everyone was nice. Mazloum, the only person on the property in uniform, received me in a small, austere room with a few couches and coffee tables.
Soft-spoken and clean-shaven, with graying black hair and an open face, he radiated the guileless enthusiasm of an idealist and the imperturbability of a veteran commander. It is a sign of the insular and secretive culture of the P.
Throughout the Raqqa offensive, he avoided the press and remained sequestered with his American counterparts inside the Lafarge Cement Factory. His first public appearance came last March, after the S. At a choreographed ceremony, Mazloum briefly addressed international media outlets that had covered the battle.
When we spoke, he explained to me that it would have been inappropriate for a subordinate of his to have declared such a momentous victory. But his decision to step into the spotlight was also tactical: in addition to declaring victory, he implored the U. His worry was understandable. Three months earlier, in December, , while the S.
Two U. After Republican senators joined the backlash, Trump relented on his timetable. But he never rescinded his order to withdraw. When I asked Mazloum if U.
The first official warning he received to the contrary came in October, when the ranking U. Trump, however, never suggested that it was his understanding. Rather, it appears that U. By all accounts, these Americans genuinely believed in their partnership with the Kurds and were anguished by the way it ended.
The question is whether they did the Kurds a disservice by not adequately explaining to them that the collective will of U. In Syria, perhaps more than anywhere else, the unprecedented friction between the White House and its foreign-policy apparatus is on stark display. Almost every Kurd I met, including Mazloum, distinguished between the U. We still have confidence in our American brothers-in-arms. In , when Bashar al-Assad appeared to be losing his grip on the country, Vladimir Putin came to his aid.
A prodigious Russian air campaign turned the tide of the civil war. In addition to enabling regime atrocities, Russia has killed thousands of Syrian civilians. Russian security contractors have also committed horrific crimes. A video showed Russians murdering a Syrian with a sledgehammer, then decapitating him and lighting his corpse on fire.
However problematic the U. The next afternoon, government military units returned to parts of northern Syria for the first time in seven years.
During the next week, a cascade of events upended the strategic balance in Syria and, by extension, throughout the Middle East. An earlier ceasefire, negotiated by Vice-President Mike Pence, had been neither respected by Turkey nor enforced by the U. Mazloum agreed to relinquish his remaining border positions, and Russia replaced the U. Russian troops also joined regime forces on the S. Near Ain Issa, Russian soldiers commandeered the largest U. A large Russian flag waved on the roof of a former U.
Special Forces. They ate with us. They laughed and joked with us. We had the feeling that we belonged to the same team. Earthen berms and trenches lined the north side of the M4. A few hundred feet beyond them were the Turkish-backed militias. Before October, downtown Ain Issa had been a bustling souk. Now it was deserted. Regime soldiers walked by shuttered stores, garages, barbershops, and restaurants.
When I introduced myself and tried to ask them questions, they nervously hurried off. They wore mismatched uniforms and tattered sneakers, and several of them looked underfed. Of the handful of soldiers I managed to interview, all but one had been conscripted. None was armed, and I later learned that the S.
The regime forces that Mazloum allowed back into Kurdish territory are restricted to the frontiers and pose little danger to the S. By stopping the Turkish offensive, securing Russian protection, and limiting the deployment of regime troops, Mazloum prevented northern Syria from descending into chaos.
But this emergency diplomacy grants only a temporary reprieve. The longer the Kurds must contend with an existential threat from Turkey in the north, the less able they will be to defend their Arab satellites in the south—Deir Ezzour and Raqqa—from Russia and Assad. This secondary effect of the U. To the extent that Trump has articulated a coherent policy in Syria, it reflects his view that the country is irredeemably doomed and therefore no longer our concern.
The regime, uninhibited by a fear of American repercussions, has since conducted additional gas attacks and wantonly slaughtered tens of thousands of its citizens by other means. Nowhere is this more true than in the city of Raqqa. The truck that Nashat Khairi hired to take his family away from Ain Issa stopped ten miles north of Raqqa.
Khairi, his wife, and their seven children unloaded their belongings on the roadside: mattresses, blankets, pots and pans, their fan and stove. All around them, thousands of refugees from the camp had pitched tents in empty fields, amid grazing livestock. Khairi told his family that they would not be staying there.
After a night under the stars, he hitched a ride to Raqqa to look for someplace with a roof. He discovered a city whose utter decimation might be unique in this century. By the summer of , the S. Because the S. For four months, the U. One front-line S. When the last ISIS holdouts surrendered, the layout of the city was unrecognizable. Months of labor were required just to uncover the streets. The effort was overseen by the Raqqa Civil Council, a municipal authority established by the Kurds which currently operates under the Autonomous Administration.
Large rig-mounted jackhammers smashed the vast mountains of concrete into manageable pieces, which were then used to fill in craters, seal ISIS tunnels, and reinforce levees on the Euphrates River. Smaller slabs were pulverized and repurposed as cement. Thousands of bodies were extracted, as were tens of thousands of mines. Once the main arteries were passable, water stations and basic plumbing were installed.
People started moving back. Ibn Khalil, in a wheelchair, held a hookah pipe in his left hand and a cappuccino in his right. In January, , an assassin had entered his house and shot him six times in the chest; ISIS claimed responsibility. Ibn Khalil told me that the American officials who had encouraged the development of the Civil Council had promised to secure him a visa so that he could undergo surgery in the U.
But they never followed through. His personal disappointment echoes a larger one.
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