Syria’s Anti-Kurdish Offensive Suits Israeli Strategy

“I’m not saying Israel is working together with al-Sharaa, but what is happening is the result of the understanding reached in Paris between Israel and al-Sharaa, and the victims here are the Kurds,” Syrian Kurdish diplomatic representative Abdulkarim Omar tells Jacobin. “The US was in attendance, as well as [Turkish foreign affairs minister and former intelligence chief] Hakan Fidan . . . They devised a plan to begin attacking Rojava.”

Diplomatic sources repeated similar claims to Reuters, describing a critical meeting last month in which US and Israeli officials both greenlit al-Sharaa’s offensive, which saw government forces rapidly gain control of large Arab hinterlands, including former ISIS capital Raqqa, amid massive Arab defections from the formerly multiethnic SDF.

Omar speaks in Qamişlo, capital of the de facto autonomous region that the Kurdish movement has governed for the past fourteen years on the basis of a nominally feminist, direct-democratic politics inspired and directed by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Government forces have besieged key Kurdish city Kobanê, cutting off medicine and food supplies, while drone strikes and advances by government-allied tribal forces threaten to sever Qamişlo from the sole border crossing linking Rojava to the outside world.

Damascus has deployed Turkmen and Islamist militiamen with long-term anti-Kurdish vendettas, including commanders sanctioned for war crimes against the Kurds. It is also benefiting from Turkish intelligence and technology as it executes Ankara’s long-term goal of liquidating the Kurdish-led autonomous region. Simultaneously, al-Sharaa is effectively using Hasbara-style tactics to discredit the Rojava project as a mere exercise in separatist terrorism. As observers have noted, the Syrian Arab Army produced maps identifying Kurdish-populated districts of Aleppo as terrorist-occupied open-fire zones, while government-affiliated media activists mock the tunnel networks painstakingly dug out by the SDF to shelter them from a years-long campaign of Turkish airstrikes as proof that cowardly Kurdish “terrorists” are sheltering below hospitals in dense urban environments.

Public posturing in support of the Kurds’ secular project by Washington and Tel Aviv, not to mention Moscow, has never translated into material support in the face of Turkey’s prior anti-Kurdish offensives in Syria. This also meant that these latest reversals were met with resignation on the Kurdish street.

When I visited Rojava shortly after Assad’s dramatic 2024 ouster, local civilians and frontline fighters not infrequently expressed unlikely hopes of direct Israeli military support for the Kurdish-led administration, which immediately faced attacks from Turkish-backed militias now directed by al-Sharaa. “The Kurds are like children who grew up without parents, leaving them desperate for love from anyone,” a local journalist told me at the time.

A year on, the mood has shifted. While the United States had long maintained a “tactical, temporary, and transitional” presence in Syrian Kurdish territories on the basis of the US-Kurdish collaboration against ISIS, Donald Trump–appointed envoy to Syria Tom Barrack has made it clear that Washington’s interests now lie with Damascus.

Speaking in the streets of Qamişlo with an AK–47 in his hands, senior Syrian Kurdish politician Gharib Hesso repeats sentiments held by thousands of ordinary Kurds now taking up arms throughout Rojava: “Due to the silence of the international community, we have to protect ourselves,” he says. “The [Syrian] government reaches shady deals under their own initiative: we don’t get to see them, and we don’t accept them.” Soldiers on the front line openly express hopes that the ceasefire and integration deal will collapse as the United States departs, giving them the opportunity to fight mano a mano with forces they view as indistinguishable from the al-Nusra Front militants they first drove out of Kurdish territories in 2013 — prior to any collaboration with the United States.

Last-ditch appeals to Tel Aviv have naturally disappointed the Kurds’ supporters in the feminist and internationalist left, including international volunteers still on the ground in Rojava. More seriously, they contribute to the ongoing polarization of Syrian politics along ethnic grounds.

Especially following Syrian government massacres which killed over a thousand members each of the Alawite and Druze minorities in 2025 — the latter only halted by direct Israeli intervention — Kurds fear ethnic retribution by Islamist forces ideologically indistinct from the Kurds’ long-term nemesis in the Islamic State. Conversely, overtures to Tel Aviv have only intensified Arab perceptions of the Kurds as Western proxies, fighting for an identitarian cause with no place in a Sunni Arab–majority Syria.

Ugly scenes of government fighters desecrating cemeteries in fact belonging to Kurdish-allied Arab fighters or toppling the statue of an Arab female fighter in the anti-ISIS war, show the depth of this bitter polarization. In Qamişlo, corresponding anti-Arab sentiment runs high, as armed Kurdish youth spend sleepless nights on patrol on the lookout for Arab fifth columnists collaborating with Damascus — inevitably described as “ISIS sleeper cells,” in language picked up from the Kurds’ long-term US partners.

In reality, there was always a deep tension between the Kurds’ stated vision of a multiethnic, federal “brotherhood of peoples” and the reality of their military control over large, restive Arab populations. Though the SDF long offered the most palatable package of basic security and humanitarian provision in Syria’s complex map of control, Arabs nonetheless chafed under heavy-handed security measures and a political project generally viewed as a smoke screen for furthering Kurdish interests.

With Assad’s 2024 defeat, the Kurdish project was no longer the only show in town. The massive Arab defections that accompanied the SDF’s 2026 collapse were thus occasioned by a mix of legitimate Arab grievances, tribal opportunism as al-Sharaa’s rule consolidated, and simple desire to live in a unitary, internationally recognized state. In this context, Israel’s cultivated self-image as a friend to non-Arab minorities has only exposed the Kurds to retributive violence.

Whether by force of arms or at the negotiating table, those majority-Arab areas were always likely to revert to government control. But it is now the fate of Rojava’s Kurdish heartlands that hangs in the balance — a fate likely to be decided by ongoing shifts in US and Israeli policy, as the region gears up for Washington’s mooted operation against Iran.

An eleventh-hour ceasefire agreement has been reached between Damascus and Qamişlo, with Kurdish divisions expected to integrate into the Syrian army while retaining a limited degree of military and political integrity. But most locals place no more stock in this ceasefire than three recent agreements successively violated by al-Sharaa’s forces as they surged across the Euphrates, treating it with the same derision they now apply to the “brotherhood of peoples” slogan.

Rather, the expectation is the United States will likely stick around for only as long as it takes for their forces to complete a last-minute extradition program, flying thousands of ISIS detainees long held by the Kurds to neighboring Iraq.

These urgent deportations expose a contradiction at the heart of US policy in Syria. If the United States believes al-Sharaa is “willing and positioned” to take over anti-ISIS operations, why is it frantically flying out ISIS members the moment their camps and detention centers risk capture by al-Sharaa’s forces?

This contradiction is deep-rooted in the US security establishment. Whereas the Pentagon followed up on its prior experiences in Iraq to partner with the secular Kurds as part of its war on terror, the CIA backed “moderate Islamists” against Assad in line with its long-term policy against communist states.

The Pentagon’s Central Command currently appears to be slowing down the ISIS deportation program to throw a final bone to their Kurdish partners, but with US escalation against Iran looming, the anti-Iranian tendency is winning out. US policy is aligning behind al-Sharaa, with the White House backing the CIA’s position through its Trump-appointed, pro-Turkish Syria envoy Tom Barrack. The United States appears reassured that the new Sunni strongman in Damascus can secure their interests against the Shia militias now massing along the Syrian-Iraqi border, obviating the key factor that ultimately motivated the United States’ long-term presence in Syria’s Kurdish regions.

Al-Sharaa is benefiting from these global dynamics to exert total domestic control. “Al-Sharaa is reaching agreements with everyone in order to remain in power,” Kurdish official Omar says. “With Russia, Israel, Turkey, the Gulf states, joining the International Coalition [against ISIS] . . . Anything it takes to remain in power.”

Alongside the ongoing US withdrawal, Russia has also pulled out of its own long-term base in Qamişlo, in a bid to preserve its more strategic military presence on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. Al-Sharaa has warmly returned the favor, flying to Moscow to break bread with Vladimir Putin even though the Russian Air Force had long pounded his forces with air strikes as part of a years-long campaign to keep Assad in power.

Likewise, al-Sharaa is proving himself able to deal with both Israel and Turkey, the two competing regional powers dominant in his new Syria. It would be an exaggeration to say that Damascus and Tel Aviv have put their long-term differences to rest. Israel continues to launch air strikes, conduct land operations, and oppose Turkish expansion elsewhere in Syria even as it ignores the conflict in Kurdish regions, while Damascus is cautious about normalizing relations with Israel given al-Sharaa’s militant Islamist base of support. Nonetheless, Tel Aviv appears cautiously content with the status quo in Syria, as it focuses its attention on Iran and its proxy militias in Iraq.

Turkey and Israel have their differences in Syria, but the two powers will be crucial US allies in any assault on Iran, and each is finding a functional interlocutor in al-Sharaa. The new president is willing to licence both Turkey’s long-term goal of liquidating Kurdish autonomy in the north, and Israel’s de facto occupation in the south. It may even suit Israel’s interests if Turkey is allowed to deepen its already profound security relationship with al-Sharaa, since these realities justify Israel’s own occupation.

PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan, who will soon enter his fourth decade of captivity in Turkey, has recently been allowed to speak out by his Turkish captors as part of an ongoing peace process in part intended to stymie Israel’s designs on Syria by drawing the SDF toward an accord with Ankara. In published minutes of these discussions, the PKK leader references his historic anti-Zionist position and describes himself as the only person able to prevent the SDF from falling under Israeli dominance. He instead calls for a modus vivendi with Turkey as he warns: “Israel has been at this for thirty years. For three decades, Israel has been secretly promising us a state.” Öcalan goes on to predict the “Gaza-ization” of Kurdish territories across Syria and Iraq as Israel attacks and partitions those countries.

Yet Gaza-ization can occur under both Israeli and Turkish dominance. Even if the latest Kurdish-Damascus ceasefire deal holds, the map of northern Syria proposed under this deal and already implemented in Turkish-occupied zones of the north of the country will closely resemble the occupied West Bank. Kurds and their political leaders are being hemmed into isolated enclaves set to be patrolled by ethnically Kurdish but centrally controlled security forces and systematically denied access to the resources, border crossings, and international political access they need to preserve any meaningful autonomy.

Syria’s Kurds might condemn their former Western backers, and look to their own weapons for protection. But they seem unlikely to be able to withstand Syria’s new Western-backed order for long.