Editor’s Note: This article was published as part of the inaugural edition of The Commonwealth Times and reflects events as reported at the time of the referenced news coverage.
The Kurdish fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces did not ask to become America’s indispensable proxy in the war against the Islamic State. They were chosen — selected by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency because they were willing to bleed in Raqqa, in Kobani, in the Deir ez-Zor corridor, in a hundred shattered towns whose names most Americans never learned to pronounce. More than eleven thousand of them died in that campaign, fighting house by house through the caliphate’s self-proclaimed capital so that American soldiers would not have to. Now, as Turkish armor advances across the plains of northern Syria and Turkish-backed militias lay siege to towns that Kurdish families have inhabited for generations, Washington has offered neither military shield nor diplomatic protest — a posture that raises urgent questions about the strategic coherence of American security partnerships.
The current offensive, which Ankara launched in earnest in early 2026 following the collapse of the Assad regime in late 2024, represents Turkey’s most ambitious territorial thrust into Syrian Kurdish-held territory since Operation Peace Spring in October 2019. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has seized upon the post-Assad vacuum — the regime fell in December 2024 after a stunning rebel advance led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — to pursue what he has long described as a thirty-kilometer-deep ‘security zone’ along Turkey’s southern border. Turkish forces and their Syrian National Army proxies have targeted Kobani, the city whose desperate defense in 2014 and 2015 became a global symbol of resistance against ISIS, as well as strategic positions around Manbij and Tal Rifaat. The offensive has displaced tens of thousands of civilians and prompted humanitarian organizations to warn of a catastrophe in the making.
Erdoğan’s strategic calculus is neither new nor obscure. Turkey designates the People’s Protection Units, or YPG — the backbone of the SDF — as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, which has waged an insurgency inside Turkey since 1984 and which both Ankara and Washington classify as a terrorist organization. This designation has furnished Turkey with a durable rhetorical license to conflate counterterrorism with ethnic consolidation, and the post-Assad disorder has furnished the opportunity. With the Syrian state dissolved into competing fiefdoms, with Russia’s attention and military resources consumed by its grinding war in Ukraine, and with Iran’s regional influence diminished after the fall of its client in Damascus, Turkey faces fewer constraints than at any point in the Syrian conflict’s long and pitiless history.
The Trump administration’s posture has been one of studied disengagement. The approximately nine hundred American troops who remained in northeastern Syria at the start of 2025 — a residual force whose primary mission was the continued detention of ISIS fighters and the prevention of the caliphate’s reconstitution — have been drawn down significantly. Administration officials, speaking on background, have characterized the Syrian theater as a legacy commitment with diminishing returns. President Trump himself, reprising the rhetoric of his first term, has publicly questioned why American forces should remain in a region that, in his formulation, offers ‘nothing but sand and death.’ The Pentagon has not publicly opposed the drawdown, though senior military commanders have communicated to Congress in closed session that the reduction imperils both the ISIS detention mission and the broader counterterrorism architecture in the Levant.
This is not the first time the United States has recalibrated its Kurdish partnerships in response to shifting strategic conditions. The pattern is by now so well established that it constitutes something closer to a recurring strategic calculation than an aberration. In 1975, the CIA armed Iraqi Kurds at the Shah of Iran’s behest, then abandoned them overnight when Tehran reached an accord with Baghdad. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush encouraged the Kurds of northern Iraq to rise against Saddam Hussein, then watched as Republican Guard helicopters slaughtered them by the thousands. In October 2019, President Trump withdrew American forces from the Turkish border zone, effectively greenlighting Erdoğan’s Operation Peace Spring. Each strategic realignment has compounded the last, and each has tested not merely Kurdish trust but American credibility with every partner and proxy who contemplates the value of alignment with Washington.
The consequences of the current strategic repositioning extend well beyond the moral. The SDF continues to guard detention facilities holding an estimated ten thousand ISIS fighters, including roughly two thousand foreign nationals whose home countries have refused to repatriate them. The al-Hol displacement camp, long described by counterterrorism officials as an incubator for the next generation of jihadist ideology, remains a powder keg. As SDF forces are compelled to redeploy from detention duty to defensive positions against the Turkish advance, the risk of mass breakouts — a scenario the Pentagon has war-gamed repeatedly — grows acute. The Islamic State, though territorially defeated, has maintained a steady tempo of insurgent attacks in the Syrian desert and the Iraqi borderlands. A security vacuum in the northeast would be, for ISIS, not a setback but a providence.
There is, moreover, the question of what Turkey’s offensive portends for the broader post-Assad settlement. The fall of Bashar al-Assad created a fragile and contested political landscape in which multiple armed factions — the HTS-led transitional authority in Damascus, Turkish-backed groups in the northwest, SDF forces in the northeast, remnant regime loyalists, and various jihadist splinter cells — compete for territory and legitimacy. A durable political settlement requires, at minimum, the inclusion of Kurdish political aspirations in any new constitutional framework. Turkey’s military campaign is designed precisely to foreclose that possibility, to ensure that no autonomous Kurdish entity survives in northern Syria that might serve as inspiration or sanctuary for Kurdish political movements within Turkey itself. Erdoğan is not merely fighting the YPG; he is attempting to engineer a demographic and political fait accompli.
The argument advanced by those who counsel American restraint is not without internal logic. The United States cannot, they contend, indefinitely garrison every contested frontier in the Middle East, nor should it subordinate its relationship with a NATO ally of eighty-five million people to the interests of a non-state militia. Turkey controls the Incirlik Air Base, a linchpin of American nuclear posture in the eastern Mediterranean. Turkey commands NATO’s second-largest standing army. The transactional calculus, by this reckoning, is clear.
But this reasoning, however arithmetically tidy, commits a category error that has plagued American foreign policy for decades: the confusion of alliance management with moral obligation. The United States did not stumble into partnership with the Syrian Kurds. It recruited them, armed them, embedded Special Operations forces among them, directed their campaigns from combined operations centers, and promised — through the mouths of generals, ambassadors, and special envoys — that it would not permit their destruction. These were not casual assurances; they were the currency in which the most powerful nation on earth purchased the blood of thirty thousand fighters who stormed the Islamic State’s fortifications on America’s behalf. To leave that debt unrecognized is not realism — it is a strategic miscalculation with compounding consequences.
Furthermore, the notion that accommodating Erdoğan’s ambitions serves American strategic interests requires a credulity that recent history does not sustain. Turkey under Erdoğan has purchased the Russian S-400 missile defense system in defiance of NATO interoperability standards, resulting in its expulsion from the F-35 program. It has detained American citizens and consular staff on spurious charges as instruments of diplomatic leverage. It has facilitated the transit of foreign fighters into Syria during the early years of the civil war. It has, in sum, behaved not as an ally whose sensitivities merit deference but as an authoritarian state whose appetites expand in direct proportion to the concessions it receives.
The broader geopolitical signal is equally troubling. American disengagement from northern Syria does not occur in isolation; it is read in Taipei, in Kyiv, in Tallinn, in every capital where policymakers weigh the reliability of American security commitments against the apparent trajectory of American will. If the United States will not sustain a modest force presence to protect an ally that bled for American objectives, on what basis should any partner believe that Article Five of the NATO charter, or the Taiwan Relations Act, or any other instrument of American commitment, carries force beyond the parchment on which it is written? Credibility, as the strategists never tire of observing, is indivisible. It cannot be selectively withdrawn from one theater without hemorrhaging from every other.
What is required is neither a maximalist military intervention nor a romantic attachment to Kurdish nationalism, but a calibrated assertion of American interests and American honor. The administration should halt the drawdown of forces in northeastern Syria and make explicit to Ankara that the United States will not countenance the destruction of the SDF. It should press for an immediate ceasefire and for the inclusion of Kurdish representatives in whatever political process emerges from the post-Assad transition. It should impose targeted sanctions on Turkish officials responsible for the displacement of civilian populations. And it should condition future defense cooperation with Turkey — including the modernization of the F-16 fleet — on verifiable restraint along the Syrian border.
None of this is simple. Statecraft never is. But the question before the American republic is not one of convenience; it is one of character. The fighters who bled in Raqqa did so under the American flag, beside American soldiers, in service of an American objective. They earned, by any measure of justice known to civilized nations, the right not to be abandoned to the artillery of a neighboring autocrat. If the United States elects not to honor that obligation in this instance, it must reckon with the cost to its credibility the next time it asks a partner to take up arms on American objectives.