Whitewashing Damascus

America’s Syrian gamble rewards brutality, betrays the Kurds and reveals how cheaply Donald Trump trades in memory.

In the space of two days, Syria’s map has been redrawn with a speed and savagery that would have seemed unthinkable just a year ago. Government forces, backed by tribal militias of dubious pedigree, have pushed the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) out of large parts of northern Syria they had controlled since the darkest days of the Islamic State. Raqqa, the former capital of ISIS’s grotesque caliphate, has fallen back under Damascus’s sway. So too has much of Syria’s oil wealth, lost to the state for over a decade.

Predictably, Washington’s response has been one of accommodation. Presiding over this moral contortion is Donald Trump, who has chosen to recognise Syrian strongman Ahmed al-Sharaa (better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) - a man whose political evolution from al-Qaeda affiliate to interim president has been lubricated by expediency and violence.

His forces’ conduct in Rojava with horrific beheadings filmed on mobile phones, and women discussed as spoils of war, has been chillingly familiar. The SDF itself has said the executions were carried out “in the style of ISIS.” Yet, this is the man Trump has chosen to treat as a partner in counterterrorism.

America’s Kurdish allies have every reason to feel betrayed. For a decade, the SDF served as Washington’s most reliable boots on the ground against ISIS. Kurdish fighters bore the brunt of the war that ended the Caliphate’s territorial rule in 2019, guarding prisons packed with hardened jihadists and camps such as al-Hol, where the families of ISIS fighters still fester in radical limbo. Now Damascus is taking over those prisons, after clashes near facilities like al-Shaddadi and al-Aqtan left Kurdish fighters dead and wounded and ISIS detainees perilously close to escape.

This handover is being hailed as ‘progress’ in Washington, which says all about the cynical and amnesiac nature of American political memory.

Trump, meanwhile, has boasted of coordinating with Damascus to prevent ISIS prisoners from slipping away and speaks approvingly of Jolani’s assurances. His envoy, Tom Barrack, talks of a “pathway” for the Kurds into a unified Syrian state, complete with citizenship rights and cultural protections. Such language would be comforting if Syria’s recent history did not mock it so thoroughly.

But even American officials have admitted to being squeamish about the events unfolding on the ground. Retired officers warn that jihadists and takfiri extremists are embedded within government-aligned forces, raising doubts about Damascus’s ability or willingness to control them. Turkey, long hostile to Kurdish autonomy and eager to brand the SDF as an extension of the PKK, looks on approvingly.

The geopolitical irony is sharp. Trump rose to power railing against “radical Islamic terrorism” and imposing sweeping travel bans in the name of security. Yet he now embraces a man whose past would have once made him a poster child for Trumpian outrage. America has made the mistake before of arming jihadists in Afghanistan to humble the Soviets and indulging warlords in Iraq to suppress insurgents, of outsourcing stability to thugs and calling it ‘pragmatism.’ Each time, there has been a bloody reckoning.

Senator Lindsey Graham has threatened to resurrect “bone-crushing” Caesar Act sanctions if Syrian forces continue their advance, warning of permanent damage to relations. But such threats ring hollow when the White House has already conferred legitimacy. Recognition, after all, is a signal which tells every militia leader in the region that power, once seized and sanitised, can be rewarded no matter how stained its origins.

The tragedy of Syria is that its people have been subjected to every variety of foreign cynicism: Russian bombs, Iranian militias, Turkish interventions and American half-measures. Trump’s recognition of Jolani has added another layer to this ruinous pattern. It abandons allies who fought America’s enemies, launders the reputation of a jihadist in a suit, and mistakes the absence of ISIS flags for the presence of peace. Syria has seen this movie before. It never ends well.