Despite a recent attempt at civility offered by Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa to the Kurdish people in a meeting in Kobane, the recent devastation of the Syrian Democratic Forces, through a takeover of the Al-Hol Camp in Rojava, appeared imminent months earlier.
Knowing the appetite of the new Syrian leader’s troops for jihadism and sympathies with it, the recent breach in US relations with the SDF annihilates protections for the Kurdish people and endangers the region, with lax US policy to blame for these tragedies.
As Sharaa continues to disempower the SDF of political power and Kurdish autonomy in this entire area, thousands of ISIS extremists and fighters are poised to spill over into the heartland of Syrian minorities. This will have devastating effects, not only on Syria, but for the neighboring region – and once again, imperiling Israel.
Israel must see, clear-eyed, not only the Islamist jihadist who now has free rein in Syria but the new middle power controlling the country. It is Turkey, not Iran, that seems equally comfortable being as intimate with Islamist jihadists as the dying regime in Tehran.
A shameful moment in foreign policy
Whatever the outcome in an increasingly volatile Middle East, the betrayal of the SDF and the Kurdish people is a shameful moment in US foreign policy. There is growing recognition of the harm this has wrought to both American national security and reputation.
Citing bipartisan outrage, Sen. Lindsay Graham has announced draft legislation called the “Save The Kurds Act,” proposing crippling sanctions on any entity engaged in anti-Kurdish hostilities. Perhaps understanding the callous blunder by US policymakers, this morning a joint statement by France, Germany, Britain, and the United States called for stability.
While the US was always transparent, the partnership with the SDF was finite, the execution of this shocking abandonment could prove more ignominious for the US than Washington’s precipitous and callous exit from Afghanistan or Libya. America’s abandonment of the Kurds, and pandering to an increasingly bellicose and imperial Islamist Turkey, hands Syria and the wider region a new, much more formidable Islamist overlord than the Iranian hegemon.
With an Iran strike likely to be devastating to the dying regime, Iran faces collapse and denuclearization imminently. The US will finish the transfer of ISIS extremists to Syria and leave. Soon after, with Iran defanged, the US may, many fear, also abandon Iraq, leaving the Iraqi Kurdistan Region similarly exposed despite its constitutional rights.
The new regional strongman is already no longer the United States but an extraordinarily empowered Turkey that seeks influence from the Bosphorus to Afghanistan.
This time in place of Iran, the world will have placed a NATO-member Islamist state with the second-largest army in Europe, the alliance’s second-largest military (surpassed only by the United States), advanced drone technologies sufficient to change the tide of the Russia and Ukraine war, and a fanatically pro-Islamist superpower to be in lockstep with Qatar.
In retrospect, what is so alarming is that this disaster could have been foreseen and avoided.
The reality at Al-Hol Camp
I have seen Al-Hol Camp firsthand, during a visit three months ago in October 2025, when I witnessed its potential for risk. It is vast, at almost 1,000 acres; its extraordinary size is itself a security challenge.
It was then that SDF troops, who had previously fought against Sharaa’s extremist group, the Idlib-based HTS (Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham), described their brutality to me as we discussed the possibility of centralization of power under the Syrian leader rather than the decentralization and federalism that could protect all of the country’s minorities.
Sharaa’s troops “do not hide their extremism,” I was told. Today, this extremism is evident in videos of the atrocities circulating widely, including the terrorization of degrading besiegement of the tiny Yazidi community, desecration of SDF graves in military cemeteries, the exhuming for defilement of Kurdish remains, and images of the corpses of Kurds enucleated, some eviscerated.
One image I was provided showed a gaping cavity in the chest of a uniformed Kurdish male soldier, suggesting his heart had been cut out, all intentionally documented. The visual evidence proves premeditated genocide, reanimating my memories of the atrocities of October 7.
I had arrived to Al-Hol by land from Iraq on my way to meet with Gen. Mazloum Abdi, commander of the SDF in Al-Hasakah. To reach there, we had driven hours into the Syrian desert, leaving behind busy traffic intersections and any semblance of normality (at the time) in post-Assad Syria.
At its height, Al-Hol had been home to over 66,000 former ISIS members. During my visit, 25,000 remained, as the others were finally repatriated to their countries of origin. More than 21,000 had come from Iraq and Syria, but over 42 foreign nationalities still have citizens in this camp.
Rojava is not only home to the Syrian Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, and secular Arabs, but many Druze from the Southwest and Alawites from the coastal areas have found refuge there after facing genocide themselves in coastal and southwestern Syria, again at the hands of Sharaa’s troops.
While the people of Rojava feared the same fate, they could not have imagined how rapidly their Kurdish protectors would be relinquished of their security brief, leaving the very minorities targeted by both Assad and ISIS at the mercy of the same Syrian army that perpetrated minority genocide months earlier.
Extremist takeover
Even before the upheaval, during my talks with military leaders in October, some 2,500 ISIS extremists were at large, conducting ambushes and other smaller-scale terror attacks. The end of the SDF security cordon means these extremists will be working to spring the ISIS extremist women and children free. Breaches and facilitated releases have already occurred.
Before the disbanding of the SDF at the camp, since 2016, the northeast Syrian Kurdish Autonomous Administration had control over Al-Hol Camp secured by the forces, even as the war with ISIS was ongoing.
Early on, the camp hosted a handful of Iraqi families and was relatively open to movement with stable conditions. But by early 2019, it received a massive influx of new residents, following the joint SDF-Global Coalition campaign on Baghouz – the last stronghold of ISIS in Syria, ballooning the camp’s population to over 70,000 individuals from over 50 countries. Syria had become the world’s global magnet for “jihadist-tourism” (many arrivals facilitated by Turkey).
With the camp’s rising population, the extremism increased. ISIS residents began to establish a new version of the caliphate inside the camp, violence and killings established within the camp population, brutally targeting any camp residents who would cooperate with the camp administration. Though thousands have been repatriated, the radicalization has become endemic.
Immediately before I arrived, there had been a tragic killing of a girl inside Al-Hol by other camp members. Hanan explained that a group of women had gathered at one of the gates of the Annex and handed over a body wrapped in a shroud to the security forces. The body was transferred to the Kurdish Red Crescent clinic inside the camp, one of several medical facilities on site.
Upon examination, the body was of a young female covered in huge ecchymoses – bruises – on her thighs, face, and neck, with an apparent human bite mark to the face.
I inspected the video footage of the corpse filmed as the shroud was removed. The body was referred to the National Hospital in Al-Hasakah for autopsy, where forensics confirmed the victim was a 14-year-old girl of Turkestan nationality who had been raped prior to her death and murdered by strangulation.
Reports document that ISIS wives are so radicalized that they have held several of their own court proceedings in self-made ISIS Sharia courts and then sentenced camp residents to lethal effect. Speaking to the camp workers earlier this week, these Syrian ISIS wives are the most extreme radicals in the camp population.
If the Islamists are allowed to capture the Levant and the Middle East, the United States will have abandoned not only the Kurds and the minorities but also any semblance of humanity or moral values. This possibility is causing growing consternation in Washington, suddenly keen to roll back the disaster of these events.
Syria, the SDF, the Kurdish nation, and all peoples of Rojava deserve better. They deserve safety, as do Israelis and all residents of the Middle East.
The writer is senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Follow her @MissDiagnosis.