The End of Rojava Is Bad News for the United States

 

American support for Syria’s subjugation of “Rojava”—the autonomous Kurdish-led administration in its northeast—is regarded by many of its supporters as a betrayal.

“Rojava” is the name that many Kurds use for their homeland across northern and eastern Syria and is part of Kurdistan’s wider geography and history. For decades, the countries of the region have attempted to suppress Kurdish identity in that region, treating the Kurdish language and culture with suspicion and hostility. However, when Syria collapsed into civil war in 2011, the people of Rojava built their own local administration system—both to survive and to take their fate into their own hands, a move that proved critical during the rise of ISIS in 2013.

When ISIS swept across Syria and Iraq and declared its “caliphate,” the Kurdish forces rooted in Rojava became the most reliable ground fighters against it. Those forces became the core of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which helped to defeat ISIS in Syria’s east. After the United States-led coalition announced ISIS’s territorial defeat in March 2019, the SDF, including Kurdish women under the name of Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), was the main ground force that fought house by house to reach that outcome. The Kurds paid a heavy price for their leading role in the fight; around 11,000 SDF members were killed in the war against ISIS, and over 20,000 wounded.

One of the things that drew global attention to Rojava’s struggle against ISIS was the extensive involvement of Kurdish women in the battlefields. Although women’s participation in political and military affairs is a rarity in the Middle East, for Rojava, it was a way to deliver a political statement that women belonged at the center of society, not at its edges. Throughout the struggle against ISIS, Kurdish women fought in frontline units and commanded fighters, including many men. In the minds of international observers, the YPJ’s fight against ISIS also functioned as a morality play: a movement advocating for women’s emancipation fighting against one built on women’s slavery.

The United States Has Long Protected Rojava

ISIS was never Rojava’s only enemy. To the north, Turkey has long viewed the Kurdish-led autonomous zone along its border as a national security threat—arguing that the SDF is linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish militant organization in Turkey that is designated a terrorist organization by the United States.

To combat the alleged influence of the PKK, Turkey launched several major cross-border military operations in different parts of Rojava between 2016 and 2019. According to a UN Security Council report, the 2019 Turkey attacks alone resulted in the displacement of more than 200,000 people in northern Syria. Today, Turkish forces and Turkish-allied Syrian militias maintain a sustained presence in Turkish-occupied areas of northern Syria along the border. According to Human Rights Watch, serious human rights abuses have taken place in these areas, including abductions, arbitrary detention, torture, and sexual violence.

For years, the United States acted as a partial shield for Rojava and the SDF against those enemies. Washington has never officially recognized Kurdish autonomy, but it armed and trained the SDF because the SDF was the most effective partner against ISIS. That partnership also gave the SDF strategic responsibilities, allowing it to control border checkpoints, oil and gas sites, and—most critically—the detention camps and prisons holding former ISIS fighters and their families. For the United States, shielding Rojava was strategically necessary: any sudden collapse of the SDF’s authority could lead to chaos in eastern Syria and potentially a resurgence of ISIS activity.

Ahmed al-Shara and the Rojava Question

This situation persisted until December 2024, when—to the astonishment of both Washington and the capitals of the Middle East—Syria’s political map abruptly turned upside down. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Islamist rebel movement in northern Syria led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, struck south and annihilated the moribund regime of Bashar al-Assad, swiftly taking control of western Syria. After consolidating power in Damascus, Jolani returned to his birth name—Ahmed al-Shara—and declared himself Syria’s transitional president in January 2025.

The sudden fall of the decades-long Assad dictatorship after decades of human rights abuses was celebrated across the region. Yet for the Kurds of northeastern Syria, the rise of Shara in his place raised major concerns about Rojava’s future. After all, the man now pressuring them to dissolve their autonomy and submit to Damascus’ authority was someone whose political origins sat inside the same jihadist world Rojava had long fought against to survive.

Shara’s pre-presidential career is long and colorful. He cut his teeth fighting against US troops in Iraq as a member of al-Qaeda, before being captured and incarcerated in an American prison camp. While in prison, Shara successfully passed himself off as an Iraqi, leading to more lenient treatment; he was released from prison in 2011 and promptly reassigned to Syria to organize an al-Qaeda cell there amidst the national uprising. When the leader of the “Islamic State of Iraq,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, attempted to absorb Nusra into his organization, Shara refused, laying the groundwork for a bloody inter-Islamist fight within the broader Syrian war. Eventually, as ISIS crumbled and Syria’s other rebel groups declined, Shara’s organization—by then rebranded as HTS—carved out a fiefdom around the northern Syrian city of Idlib, cultivating a reputation for technocratic governance and willingness to engage with the West.

In doing so, Shara laid the groundwork for international support following the takeover of Syria. After he assumed the presidency, the West and the region adapted to him with shocking speed; the United States, the United Kingdom, and the UN Security Council each removed personal sanctions on him within weeks. In early 2025, Shara met President Donald Trump on the sidelines of a summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Months later, the new Syrian leader visited the White House, where Trump sprayed perfume on him and (perhaps undiplomatically) asked him how many wives he had.

America Didn’t Stop Shara from Attacking the Kurds

This behavior clearly conveyed the message that the Trump administration intended to do business with the new Syrian government, regarding the Rojava issue as an afterthought. All of this strengthened the new Syrian government in Damascus and left the SDF negotiating from a weaker, unequal position. On March 10, 2025, Damascus and the Kurdish-led SDF signed a framework to integrate the north-east into the Syrian state by the end of 2025, encompassing both civilian bodies and armed forces. Kurdish leaders asked for basic safeguards such as local self-administration, clear security guarantees, and protection from arrests and revenge attacks, but Damascus demanded full control and an end to independent Kurdish institutions.

Progress on implementing the agreement stalled through late 2025, as neither side fully trusted the other. In early January 2026, the simmering conflict exploded into open warfare after a high-level meeting between the SDF and Damascus on January 4 abruptly broke down. The next day, Syrian government forces began mobilizing, and fighting erupted around the Kurdish-majority districts of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh. According to Reuters, more than 45,000 people were displaced from Aleppo as Kurdish civilians fled toward Afrin during clashes between the Syrian army and the SDF. During the clash, many civilians were killed, wounded, and tortured. Social media spread videos of Syrian army soldiers mutilating the bodies of dead Kurdish soldiers, which human rights organizations called a violation of international humanitarian law and the dignity of the dead.

After taking Aleppo’s Kurdish pockets, the Syrian military swept outward across Rojava. By mid-January 2026, it had overrun most of the autonomous region and taken over strategic cities like Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, which Kurds had held since the fall of ISIS. With these victories, Damascus took control over crucial infrastructure, including the oil and gas fields, border crossings to Iraq, and ISIS detention camps.

The End of Rojava Could Have Consequences for America

This rapid capture, along with the human cost of the military attack, led the Kurdish leadership to desperately seek a way to stop the onslaught. Under intense international pressure, the two sides reached a truce on January 30—on favorable terms to Damascus, with the consent of the United States. According to the agreement, SDF personnel would be absorbed into the state defense and interior ministries as individuals, not as preserved units. Furthermore, all Kurdish-led civil institutions would be dissolved or integrated into the central government, essentially spelling the end of Rojava as an autonomous region.

Damascus and Ankara have each called the agreement a success, and Western nations have described it as a “historic step” toward a lasting Syrian peace. But for many Kurds in Rojava, the agreement has amounted to a humiliation. For more than a decade, the Kurds of eastern Syria fought and died against both ISIS and al-Qaeda-linked forces. That the new president of Syria rose from that world is doubly concerning. So far, Shara has said all of the right things, and earned plaudits from the West—but, as seen during the abortive rebellion in Syria’s western Latakia region in March 2025, he is more than capable of using brute force to bring his enemies to heel.

A similar concern ought to trouble policymakers in the West. Is it truly wise to dissolve the independent Kurdish army—which, after all, was the region’s most proven partner against ISIS—and to place its remnants under Shara’s government?

Many have argued that Washington’s policy with regard to Rojava amounts to abandonment. This would not be the first time, of course, that the United States used a local ally when needed, then abandoned it after receiving a better offer. But the lesson could be a sobering one. In the future, when the next Middle East crisis arises and the United States needs another local ally to help fight its enemies, who will trust it again?