Unfinished War

America’s strikes on Islamic State militants reveal a country fracturing anew under the weight of history, sectarian fear and geopolitical neglect.

A year after the fall of Bashar al-Assad and half a decade after the Islamic State lost its caliphate, American forces are still hunting jihadists across Syria. The killing or capture of roughly 25 ISIL operatives over the past few days, that was triggered by the deaths of two American soldiers and a civilian interpreter, was presented as a counterterrorism effort. It was also an admission that Syria remains too broken to be left alone.

That reality is awkward for Washington. The American military presence, now about 1,000 troops, was meant to shrink as attention shifted elsewhere. Instead, it persists because the conditions that allowed ISIL to flourish have not disappeared.

The Islamic State’s caliphate was territorially crushed by 2019. Yet its survival, in skeletal but lethal form, speaks to a deeper failure of Syria’s inability to knit itself back together after 14 years of civil war. ISIL thrives not because it is strong, but because the state around it is weak, divided and contested. America’s continuing presence, now roughly 1,000 troops, down from double that at the height of the campaign, exists less to defeat the group than to prevent its reconstitution amid chaos.

That chaos is no longer confined to Syria’s eastern badlands. Along the Mediterranean coast, in Latakia and Tartous, sectarian tensions have returned with a vengeance. Protests by members of the Alawite minority, triggered by the bombing of an Alawite mosque in Homs, reflect a growing fear that the community which once monopolised power is now dangerously exposed. The attack, claimed by an obscure Sunni extremist group, echoed earlier atrocities, including a suicide bombing of a Damascus church. Syria’s minorities, once sheltered cynically by Assad’s police state, now face the perils of freedom without guarantees.

Calls by Alawite figures abroad for federalism and communal self-determination may sound abstract, but they tap into a raw historical memory. The modern Syrian state was stitched together by French colonial administrators who bundled sects and regions into an artificial whole. Assad’s regime held it together through fear, patronage and repression. Its collapse did not resolve Syria’s contradictions; it merely exposed them.

The interim government that replaced Assad has inherited a poisoned chalice. It must contend simultaneously with jihadist remnants, Kurdish militias wary of central authority, Israeli incursions in the south, and now sectarian unrest along the coast. Sporadic clashes between government forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces underline the fragility of the post-Assad settlement. America, long allied with the SDF, now finds itself balancing counterterrorism cooperation with a desire to normalise relations with Damascus.

That balancing act is complicated further by geopolitics beyond Syria’s borders. Israel has expanded its footprint beyond the Golan Heights, establishing checkpoints and conducting raids that Damascus decries as occupation. Donald Trump, having lifted sanctions on Syria and publicly praised its new president as a “strong guy” while urging Israel to “get along” with its neighbour. Such remarks reflect Washington’s broader fatigue with Middle Eastern entanglements.

Indeed, the timing of America’s latest military campaign is telling. It came just as Washington signalled its intention to shift strategic focus away from the Middle East towards the Western Hemisphere. Syria, like Iraq before it, has a way of defying such pivots. The killing of three Americans was a sharp reminder that disengagement does not immunise distant powers from local disorder.

The deeper problem is that no external actor has a coherent vision for Syria’s political future. The defeat of ISIL removed a common enemy, not a shared purpose. What followed was a scramble for influence rather than reconstruction. Without inclusive institutions and economic revival, Syria’s interim rulers risk presiding over a hollow peace.

For now, American airstrikes may thin the ranks of ISIL. They will not, however, address the grievances that sustain militancy or the sectarian wounds reopening along Syria’s coast. History suggests that states emerging from long civil wars rarely fail all at once. Syria’s war, it seems, has merely changed its shape.