Without pressure, we may see the wholesale destruction of the forces and the authority that paid the highest price to defeat ISIS. It is also likely to result in the freeing of thousands of jailed jihadis
January 21, 2026 17:31
The situation in northern Syria is moving fast. The conflict between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the army and auxiliaries of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, now subject to a partially observed four-day ceasefire, was probably inevitable. But few expected it to erupt with such sudden fury.
At present, Sharaa’s army, consisting for the most part of Sunni Islamist veterans of the long insurgency against the Assad dictatorship, is located on the edge of Syria’s majority Kurdish Hasakeh Province. In a lightning move at the beginning of the week, Damascus’s men crossed the Euphrates river and rapidly conquered two Arab-majority provinces, Deir al Zur and Raqqa. They then continued northwards, leading to a general mobilisation of the Kurdish population, amid fears of a massacre.
These fears are not without basis, or precedent. Sharaa’s soldiers and the tribal host that accompanies them began, as they encountered Kurdish fighters and civilians, to behave towards them in ways that have become wearingly familiar to observers of the jihadi and tribal form of warfighting. Footage and evidence have emerged of captured SDF soldiers, including female fighters, summarily executed and in a number of cases beheaded. Civilians have been filmed by delighted jihadi fighters being forced to bark like dogs and recite rhymes of loyalty to “Abu Amsha” and various other Islamist commanders (many now re-badged as senior officers in the West-approved, Turkish-trained “New Syrian Army.”)
Perhaps most worrying of all, as they move into Hasakeh province, the Islamist army is beginning to approach areas where the bulk of ISIS prisoners and their families have been held since the demise of their “Caliphate” in 2019. So far, Sharaa’s men have moved past one such facility, a jail in Shaddadi, southern Hasakeh. A number of ISIS members escaped as a result. The Kurds suggest the number may be as high as 1,500. The government forces have also taken over the al-Hol encampment, where 24,000 relatives of ISIS prisoners were resident. An unknown number of these have also now departed the camp.
The clash between the Islamist authorities and the SDF was doomed to happen for two reasons: firstly and most fundamentally, because the government in Damascus is in the process of building a Sunni Islamic Syria, based on the austere, narrow precepts adhered to by the jihadi group that came down with Abu Mohammed al-Jolani from Syria’s northern Idlib province to assume rule in Damascus in December 2024.
A flavour of the worldview adhered to by that circle may be gleaned from perusing the career and statements of its chief religious authority, one Abd al-Rahim Atoun. In September 2021, Atoun delivered a lecture in Idleb entitled “Jihad and Resistance in the Islamic World: the Taliban as a Model.”
In reference to the October 7 attacks, Atoun said that “what the mujahideen are doing for the sake of Allah Almighty in the Battle of the Flood of Al-Aqsa is the greatest act of Islam in this era, and it is a blessed jihad to repel aggression and defend religion”.
Atoun compared HTS’s march from Idleb to Damascus to the October 7 attacks, asking “the Almighty to disgrace the Jews, suppress them, and curse them and those who support and back them against the mujahideen”.
Atoun was the highest religious authority of Sharaa’s HTS movement, and may be considered his guide in these matters.
Unsurprisingly, a government controlled by people of this stripe has encountered difficulties in its relations with non-Arab and non-Muslim minorities in Syria. Last year, three instances of sectarian massacres took place at the hands of forces associated with the Syrian government. The Alawis on the western coast in March, and the Druze of the south-west in April and on a much larger scale in July, were the targets of the murderous intentions of the Damascus government’s combination of re-badged jihadi commanders and tribal militias. Slaughters of thousands of people, on a scale and in a style similar to October 7, took place.
These forces are now being directed against another Syrian minority, the Kurds, and are behaving along similar, predictable lines.
The second aspect that made the clash inevitable was that the Syrian Kurds, unlike the other minorities mentioned here, were running their own, successful, Western-oriented autonomous entity. The Damascus authorities want a centralised, Islamic, Arab Syria. There was never the slightest possibility that they would accept the continued existence of the Kurdish Autonomous Administration, with its secularism, its emphasis on women's rights, and its links to the United States and a number of European governments, forged by the central role it played during the war against ISIS.
Predictably, the negotiating process got nowhere. Time has run out. The Damascus Islamists are demanding unconditional surrender. Their forces have launched an invasion and are conducting operations along familiar lines.
The remaining question is whether the West is prepared to allow a massacre of Syria’s Kurds and the wholesale destruction of the forces and the authority that paid the highest price to defeat ISIS. Only Western pressure (along with the Kurdish resistance, which will be as determined as ever) can hold back the jihadis east of the Euphrates now.
Failure to act will have consequences not just for Syria’s Kurds. It is likely to result in the freeing of thousands of now incarcerated jihadis. This ought to concentrate minds in the chancelleries of the West. But there needs to be concerted action, and pressure on the Syrian authorities to call their forces off now. Time is short.
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