Transcript: Webinar – What’s Next for Syria’s Embattled Kurds?

Click here to watch the webinar.

PANELISTS

Amb. Eric Edelman
JINSA Distinguished Scholar; Former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey

John Hannah
JINSA’s Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow; Former National Security Advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney

Giran Ozcan
JINSA Fellow for Kurdish Affairs

The discussion was moderated by JINSA VP for Policy Blaise Misztal.

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TRANSCRIPT

Transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

Blaise Misztal:

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for this webinar discussing the latest developments in Syria, particularly the fighting and negotiating that has happened between the regime in Damascus and the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led U.S. partner on the ground. There has been a very fast-paced and fluid environment over the past couple of weeks.

I’m Blaise Misztal, JINSA’s Vice President for Policy, and I’m delighted to be joined by a panel that knows the area, knows the region and knows U.S. policy better than I think anyone else in DC, to help make sense of what is going on, certainly even as I struggle to keep up and figure out where things are going. So, I’m delighted to be joined by JINSA Distinguished Scholar Ambassador Eric Edelman, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and Ambassador to Turkey. I am also excited to welcome the Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow here at JINSA, John Hannah, who is also the former National Security Advisor to the Vice President, and JINSA’s new Fellow for Kurdish Affairs, Giran Ozcan.

Thank you all for being with us. Giran, I wanted to start with you to walk us through what has been going on, particularly in the last week, but maybe going back to last year and the March 10th agreement that started this process of negotiations between the SDF [Syrian Democratic Forces] and Damascus, which didn’t really seem to go anywhere for a long time. Then, just in the past couple of weeks, we’ve had this rapid pace of events with snowballing that has resulted in fighting over the last week and now maybe a new ceasefire deal. Can you walk us through it and maybe talk a little bit about how territory has also changed hands during that timeframe, with these maps that we have up on the screen?

Giran Ozcan:

Thank you, Blaise. We don’t want to go too far back into history. I think the Syrian civil conflict has been discussed quite a lot here. But if we just take the fall of Assad, from that day on, I think everyone who followed Syria knew that we had a completely different country and a completely different set of circumstances in our hands. And if we remember the HTS [Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham] forces that took over Damascus in December 2024, one of the first things that they did, and this is why we ended up with the March 10th agreement, was the massacres of the Alawites in the coastal region.

So, this hodgepodge of different jihadist movements and military units that came together to form the HTS that took over Damascus really showed their tendencies, first and foremost on the coast, against the Alawites, and the March 10th agreement was actually signed in the days after the horrific footage that came out of the coastal regions. Al-Sharaa needed some kind of win that could be presented, and it was a weak moment for him. The SDF at that time was in control of almost a third of Syrian territory, or everything almost from the east of the Euphrates River and a couple of neighborhoods in Aleppo and some extensions just close to the river, but just to the west.

Right now, the first map we have includes where the Kurds live in Syria, where we have a pocket up in the northeast, a pocket in the northwest, but generally along the border with Turkey. Now, the border that we’re talking about, the river that the SDF, up until a few weeks ago, had control of, was largely with cities like Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, which were cities predominantly populated by Arabs. But the SDF, with American backing all the way back in 2016 and 2017, pushed up to these areas to defeat ISIS. There was no other force on the ground willing to push into these towns to defeat the territorial caliphate that ISIS had declared.

Now, once that was done, the SDF turned into a bigger multiethnic force that included Arab fighters. And according to some statistics, 60% of the SDF consisted of non-Kurdish Arab fighters. So, this first map kind of explains how the SDF was formed and the components within it and the ethnic numbers that made up this force. The most recent figures, again, up until a couple of weeks ago, were roughly around 100,000. Now, if we look at the second map, up until the last few weeks, this was the territory that what we see here in the orange in the northeast of the country, was the territory that the SDF held and was governing for the last seven years.

In 2018, Turkey conducted its first cross-border operation that took the northwest, which is the city of Afrin, where the SDF was also present. In 2018, the Turkish military took over Afrin. In 2019, we had a second Turkish operation that took the cities up here in the north, where you can see the green in and amongst the orange there. But still, up until a few weeks ago, this was what the SDF was holding, and this gave them significant leverage in their negotiations for a final solution, and a step forward for Syria to unify the country and bring some sort of a unified administration that incorporated the Kurds and the SDF militarily into the Ministry of Defense.

The March 10th agreement, which was signed between the SDF and al-Sharaa on March 10th, would lead to the integration of the SDF into the Syrian military. But what was left out of the March 10th agreement was the political articulation and what kind of political deal the Kurds would get in a future Syria. These issues were pushed to a future negotiation that would happen sometime in the next few years.

In the March 10th agreement, the language that was signed was left quite possibly intentionally ambiguous. As I said, it came after a moment of weakness for al-Sharaa, and he needed that win, and so an ambiguous agreement was signed on March 10th and a timeframe was given up until the end of 2025 for both sides to negotiate the details of what integration meant.

There were multiple rounds of meetings between both sides. After each round, positive statements were being made, but no practical steps were taken, and after each round, some minor skirmishes would occur up until we had the defining fight, I would say, in Aleppo just over two weeks ago.

If we go to the next map, this is the current state of play after a Syrian operation into the two neighborhoods, the two Kurdish-controlled neighborhoods in Aleppo. This operation caused the SDF to withdraw after days of heavy clashes. The SDF was pushed back to the east of the river. The Syrian army, feeling like they had the bit between their teeth, went chasing after further operations against the SDF, ultimately pushing them back over to the river. After this development, we saw a rapid collapse of SDF forces and the components that made up the SDF, especially the Arab tribes, the Arab components in Deir ez-Zor and the surrounding villages and in Raqqah. These components switched sides and ultimately supported the government, the al-Sharaa led forces, in their push against the SDF. This is the current state of play that we have in the country at the moment.

Blaise Misztal:

Great, thanks, Giran. Let’s pause there for a moment. Ambassador Edelman, maybe I could ask you what U.S. policy has been, or what the U.S. has wanted to see in Syria throughout this process of negotiations between Damascus and the SDF. Has the U.S. been involved? Has it taken a position and what role has it played in getting us to where we are today?

Amb. Eric Edelman:

Well, the U.S., Blaise, has played a role, a very active one. I think it has been occluded a bit by the fact that we have a few other things going on between Venezuela and Ukraine and Minneapolis and everything else that’s happening in the country. I think it’s important to pull the camera back a little bit and take a very long view of this because if you look back at the history going back 50 years of US relations with Kurds in this region, not just In Syria, but in Iraq and Iran as well, we have had a history of outreach to Kurdish leaders followed by what can only be described as sellouts of their interest.

The first, of course, occurring in the mid-1970s under the Nixon administration. But even the end of the first Gulf War led to the U.S. standing back after Saddam attempted to repress the Kurdish population in northern Iraq. Although the U.S. maintained relations with the two Kurdish parties in Kurdistan over the years between the two Iraq wars, there still was, I think, a sense of betrayal there.

This is something that French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy has just been re-emphasizing recently — that all of this takes place against a history of past betrayals. So having said that, I think that the administration has, from the get-go, from the arrival of HTS in Damascus, seen an opportunity, and it’s a real one, to try and bring some kind of new order to the Levant by having a government run by the majority Sunni Arabs in Syria that would integrate the various ethnic and confessional groups into one national government.

From my liking, there hasn’t been sufficient attention to the importance of maintaining proper respect in that effort for the role of minorities in Syria because it’s such a mosaic of confessional and ethnic groups, and I think some of that inattention has now come back to haunt U.S. policy a little bit in the last week or two.

Let me explain what I have in mind. The Syrian government, for understandable reasons, wants to create a refurbished nation state with central control, although this time it would be the majority Sunni Arabs who would be in control, and not the minority Alawite Arabs along the coast of Syria. Kurdish leaders, for very understandable reasons as well, have wanted to preserve their administrative autonomy that has grown over the years of the Syrian revolution. And so, in some sense, you can see these sort of two irreconcilable forces banging heads with one another.

The U.S., I think, has been, under Syrian envoy Tom Barrack, my successor several times removed, as U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, trying to broker some kind of agreement that would meet everybody’s minimal desiderata. But he’s not the only one involved in this. There are a lot of other outside players who I think are complicating things, notably including the Turks.

Because he’s resident in Ankara a lot of the time, I think he may have taken on quite a bit of the Turkish view of this, which has been to back the HTS and use this as an opportunity to ultimately reduce the Kurdish administrative control in northeastern Syria and actually eliminate it altogether, if possible. I think that’s the Turkish objective here.

American diplomacy has been quite active in the last week. We had a phone call from the President to President al-Sharaa last night. We had a long meeting today between Tom Barrack and Hakan Fidan, the Turkish foreign minister. These meetings have been devoted precisely to this issue. But he also issued a very long tweet several hours ago that basically laid out a set of reasons, or maybe rationalizations, for the U.S., sort of abandoning its commitment to the Kurds in Syria and the SDF who played the role that Giran was just describing earlier of being the one reliable fighting force that we had after the [ISIS] caliphate was declared in 2014 and after it was reduced in Iraq and we needed to destroy it in Raqqa, its capital in Syria, the SDF fought and bled by our side for a decade.

What Barrack’s very long tweet suggested was “that was then and this is now” and that whatever support the SDF may have anticipated the U.S. would provide it in the longer run is now no longer operative because of the new conditions created by the fall of the Assad regime and the potential for creating a different kind of government and potentially a new signatory to the Abraham Accords.

Blaise Misztal:

Maybe it’s worth quoting a little bit from that tweet, Ambassador. I have it here. Ambassador Barrack wrote, “historically, the U.S. military presence in northeastern Syria was justified primarily as a counter to ISIS partnership. Today, the situation has fundamentally changed. Syria now has an acknowledged central government that has joined the global coalition to defeat ISIS, signaling a westward pivot and cooperation with the U.S. on counterterrorism. This shifts the rationale for the U.S.-SDF partnership. The original purpose of the SDF as the primary anti-ISIS force on the ground has largely expired, as Damascus is now both willing and positioned to take over security responsibilities.”

And then he finishes by saying, “In Syria, the United States is focused on one, ensuring the security of prison facilities holding ISIS prisoners currently guarded by the SDF, and two, facilitating talks between the SDF and the Syrian government to allow for the peaceful integration of the SDF and political inclusion of Syria’s Kurdish population.”

Amb. Eric Edelman:

One of the major open questions is whether what Ambassador Barrack said about the Syrian government’s willingness and ability to play the role that the SDF played in countering ISIS in Syria is accurate or not. And that is a very open question, because, of course, the HTS was, once upon a time, an actual affiliate of al-Qaeda. It fell out with ISIS, but many of the members of its military force are actually foreign jihadists who came to Syria to engage in jihad to begin with, and how much control over them Damascus has, how willing they are to actually play the role the SDF did, is a very big open question.

One of the reasons that I believe the President called al-Sharaa—it is hard to know, because we’re really operating in the sort of fog of war here—is a lot of pushback from Republicans in the Congress who have been worried precisely about this question, about whether Damascus is ready to take on this role. We already know that some jihadists have escaped from some of the jails. Some have been recaptured, apparently. But it’s an open question, and that is a major concern for the United States of America, because of the threat that these people represent, not just in Syria, but more broadly, in Europe and in the United States.

Blaise Misztal:

Thanks for that, Ambassador. That segways to my question for John very nicely. John, could you elucidate a little bit about the origins or the motivations or the strategic rationale for this basically “One Syria” policy that the U.S. seems to have had for the last year. Specifically, is Ambassador Barrack right that today, the situation has fundamentally changed in Syria, that the strategic rationale for the SDF has evaporated, that we now have the Syrian government in Damascus as a better, willing, more capable, westward, pivoting-anti ISIS force. Is that the sum total of U.S. interests in Syria?

The tweet basically says it’s guarding prisons. But over the past couple of weeks, we’ve had the U.S. conducting strikes against ISIS cells supposedly responsible for killing U.S. service members. So, there’s ISIS outside of the prisons in Syria, too. There’s no mention in Ambassador Barrack’s tweet about what the U.S. is after in Syria, about Iran, about Hezbollah, about Israel’s security, about any range of issues. So, tell us a little bit about how to understand why the U.S. has doubled down on this, bet on Damascus.

John Hannah:

Well, it’s a good question. It requires getting a bit into the President’s head, probably. If you remember, originally, when he went on his Middle East trip, his first planned trip outside the United States, he went to Riyadh, he met with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and he announced, “we’re going to give Syria a chance because I’m giving this [approach] essentially as a gift to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the President of Turkey.”

Then President Trump proceeded to meet with al-Sharaa the next day, gave him a presidential audience, with MBS in the room and President Erdoğan on the phone. Immediately, Trump said that he liked al-Sharaa, and he thought that al-Sharaa was a guy with a tough past, but this is a tough neighborhood, and you need strong men like this to hold countries together in a difficult neighborhood and be good partners, hopefully for the United States.

I think that’s kind of the theory of the case, that if al-Sharaa is able to give the right answers to questions of U.S. core security interests regarding Syria, that is: Are they willing to fight ISIS? Al-Sharaa says yes. “ISIS is an enemy of mine as much as yours,” and Damascus has signed up officially as a member of the counter-ISIS coalition. Are you ready to oppose Iranian influence and Hezbollah influence in Syria? “Yes, we hate them more than you do. They’ve destroyed our country, and we’re determined to root it out and keep it out of Syria.” Are you prepared to have some kind of accommodation with Israel? Basically, the answer was yes.

And if you saw what al-Sharaa did, for the first time in a generation, he immediately went to direct negotiations with Israel, with his most important aide, the foreign minister, al-Shaibani, leading the effort with multiple meetings going on in 2025 to try and reach, initially, some kind of new security accommodation for that area close to the Israeli Golan Heights but also for the Druze down in Suwayda that Israel has a great interest in to try and protect their interest after that awful massacre last July that we saw.

They just had another negotiation, a resumption of negotiations, back in early January, in which they formed with Israel and the United States a trilateral kind of committee to monitor events in that area of concern to Israel and to make sure that no hostile forces that could threaten Israel were getting a foothold there. So, they’ve given a lot of right answers to the United States. Al-Sharaa is friends with the people that the President trusts in the region. These include, for whatever reason, President Erdoğan, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in particular, and as Eric said, Trump’s ambassador, who’s a very close friend of his, who apparently has been provided with extraordinary power and freedom of movement to set Syria policy without any real checks or balances from anybody else in the administration, save for the President.

I think the President has bought into his vision that al-Sharaa is our guy, and we’ve got to go all in for him. And nothing was more evident of that fact when they decided to give up what was obviously the most powerful tool in our toolkit, which was the Caesar sanctions and the permanent repeal of those sanctions. That was obviously, for at least the last year, al-Sharaa’s very, very top priority.

Blaise Misztal:

If only someone had warned against losing that leverage, John.

John Hannah:

We issued a report last October that said that removing these sanctions is highly risky. Al-Sharaa’s most important priority was to get rid of those very tough kinds of secondary sanctions that basically inhibited all trade and commerce with Syria. We were fine doing six-month waivers, giving al-Sharaa a chance, and encouraging people to do things without worrying about incurring any kind of U.S. sanctions, but al-Sharaa insisted we should go all the way, and Barrack and the President eventually endorsed that totally in November.

This happened despite some reticent Republicans on the Hill who wanted to highly condition any kind of removal of those sanctions on performance on a range of issues of critical importance to the United States, including the treatment of minorities and reaching some kind of acceptable accommodation with serious minorities, which, after all, make up 25, 30, 35% of this population, depending on who you who you believe.

It’s very hard to imagine that crushing the minorities the way that they have — they crushed the Alawites on the coast in March and crushed the Druze in Suwayda in July, and have been, in the last several days, on the verge of perhaps doing the same to the Kurds in the northeast — it’s hard to believe that you can carry out that policy, and then turn around and be the kind of stable, unified, multiethnic, multi-sectarian partner that the U.S. is looking for in the Levant.

That was the big prize in Syria. That you could switch from a regime that for 50 years has been an absolute thorn in the side of American policy in the Middle East and a threat to virtually every neighboring country, which are all good security partners of the United States. You had a once in a lifetime opportunity to switch them into a kind of a pro-Western camp.

The way the President has gone about doing that with Tom Barrack is to go all in on al-Sharaa without any real regard to the fact that we’ve had these two major ethnic massacres already in the span of a year, and we’re on the verge of a third one. I think you see a lot of people in Congress actually now having some buyer’s remarks that they did give away all the U.S.’s leverage by giving away the Caesar Sanctions entirely. We’ve got very few cards to play with.

And I think to some extent, al-Sharaa knows it, but he basically also knows that he’s got Trump and Barrack on his side, together with the Turks. He’s never really wanted to give the Kurds what they required in terms of autonomy in their own region, keeping their security forces intact as a territorial guard in their own region to protect their communities, and he’s now seen an opening to crush it.

Despite several ceasefires over the last couple of weeks, he’s continued to push on at every juncture. He’s had tactical pauses, and the President’s phone call last night was another one of those. Now we’ve got another four-day pause in effect. But I think he’s driving with Turkish backing and a lot of Turkish pressure, that you know we were going to learn a lot about, probably in the coming days and weeks and months. We can all speculate about it, but I think he’s pressing to effectually force the Kurds into a surrender here and to incorporate all those Kurdish areas with very limited local autonomy.

Al-Sharaa has made expressions and issued a decree about Kurdish cultural rights and whatnot. We’ll see if those ever get into a permanent constitution, much less what happens to the Alawites and Druze in any such constitution and their rights as well. But I think that the U.S. has a very low bar now, which is, “al-Sharaa, don’t commit another massacre like what happened to the Alawites and the Druze. We can’t see a bloodbath in the northeast. We’ll pressure, together with Turkey and others, to get the Kurds to essentially get down on their knees and accept integration into the Syrian state on al-Sharaa’s terms.”

This policy, I think, includes the more or less dismantlement of the Kurdish defense forces, this SDF, and whatever incorporation they get into the Syrian army will not be as organized, coherent units, but as individuals scattered, kind of to the four winds of the Syrian Defense Forces. This approach is unlike what he’s done, for instance, with certain foreign jihadi groups that have actually joined as complete units. He’s accepted those into the new Syrian Army. He’s accepted these Turkish-backed terrorist groups as well, which have got a lot of blood on their hands and have been sanctioned by the United States for their atrocities against the Kurds.

He incorporated them as full units into the new Syrian Army, and yet refuses to do that for the Kurds, who, we can’t repeat it enough, were the tip of the spear for everything good that happened against ISIS over the last decade, when no other force, including Turkey, was prepared to really put skin in the game, boots on the ground, to do the anti-ISIS operation that we needed to do.

The Kurds were our best option. They performed extremely admirably. The Kurds lost well over 10,000 to 11,000 people in that effort. I think there is a great risk that they are being forced to bend the knee under U.S. pressure. I think it’s a [questionable] bet that al-Sharaa is going to succeed in unifying the country, being a force capable of fighting ISIS, keeping Iran out, making peace with Israel, and that he’s not going to eventually, once he gets what he wants inside of Syria, return to some form of his jihadist roots and become a real problem for us and a problem for all of Syria’s people.

Blaise Misztal:

Thanks, John. Let me read another part of Ambassador Barrack’s quote from earlier today: “The greatest opportunity for the Kurds in Syria right now lies in the post-Assad transition under the new government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa. This moment offers a pathway to full integration into a unified Syrian state with citizenship rights, cultural protections and political participation long denied under Bashar al-Assad’s regime, where many Kurds faced statelessness, language restrictions and systemic discrimination.”

So, John, I think you just mostly answered what was going to be my next question, which is: that sounds like a great deal. What’s wrong with it?

But, Giran, let me ask you, my understanding is that there was a ceasefire. This deal was put on the table on Sunday. It seemed to have been accepted. Then the SDF commander flew to Damascus. Yesterday, he left Damascus, and it seemed like, without having accepted the deal, it seemed like it was off the table. Then we had a call from President Trump. We now had the sort of this four-day ultimatum offered.

You’re in touch regularly with people on the ground, from the SDF. What’s your sense? What happens next? Are they going to take the deal? Is there going to be more fighting? Where do we go from here?

Giran Ozcan:

So, Blaise, this calls into question whether there was a deal on the table in the first place, all the way going back to the March 10th agreement. And, just to say a couple of things about Ambassador Barrack’s role, before I go into why the deals that have been put on the table might never have been on the table in the first place. I mean, even from the very beginning, Ambassador Barrack kind of damaged his position as an honest broker by, firstly, coming against some of the political demands that the SDF had made all the way back early last year.

Ambassador Barrack came out publicly criticizing the SDF and stating that Syria could not be run in a decentralized way. This, right at the outset, put pressure on the SDF and its positions, and even though Ambassador Barrack had stated that the U.S. was not going to prescribe anything for Syria, he essentially ruled out several of the scenarios that the Kurds may have wanted to pursue very early on.

After that, the deals that were put in front of the SDF and after every negotiation, every meeting in Damascus, something mysterious would happen. The deals would be walked back, or the meetings would end abruptly or the deal that was on the table would no longer be there.

Here, the Turkish role is very important. There is some reporting on this already, whereby after every meeting between Assad al-Shaibani, the Syrian Foreign Minister, and Hakan Fidan, the Turkish Foreign Minister, a deal would be walked back by Damascus. We have reporting about a January 4th meeting, just this year, in which General Mazloum Abdi traveled to Damascus and was in a meeting with the Syrian Minister of Defense.

At some point, after a couple of hours of discussions in which a CENTCOM commander is also present, Assad al-Shaibani walks into the room and abruptly ends the meeting, saying that they will reconvene in a few days. The day after that, the meeting abruptly ended. The operation in Aleppo against the Kurdish-held neighborhood starts. And that, again, happens on the next day after Asaad al-Shaibani met with Hakan Fidan in Paris.

So, there are a couple of things here whereby a deal between the SDF and Damascus, one, was probably never honestly brokered in the first place. And two, even if there was a deal that could have been agreeable to both sides, Turkey intervened at every stage to prevent that.

And why that may be the case is because of something that has absolutely nothing to do with Syria, in terms of the nation-states and the borders that we’re talking about. Turkey right now is in a negotiation with the PKK, which is the Kurdistan Workers Party, in its own territory. It’s negotiating an end to an almost five-decade-long conflict in Turkey with its own Kurds, with its own Kurdish organization, and real progress has been made on that front, in which the PKK dissolved itself last May and has ended the conflict with Turkey.

On its part, the PKK completely disbanded and announced that it was terminating its war with Turkey for Kurdish rights. While that is progressing, and while the Turkish parliament is now convening on a wide-ranging report on constitutional amendments and legal amendments to end the Kurdish conflict in Turkey once and forever, progress in Syria was watched keenly by Turkey at every stage.

Now, 2.5 million Kurds in Syria gaining autonomy would have set a very high bar or a very significant precedent for the Turkish state while it was engaging with its own Kurdish population about how to resolve the Kurdish issue in Turkey. So, there are reasons as to why Turkey saw the SDF Damascus deal as a domestic issue for itself and intervened accordingly.

Just to add on to something that Ambassador Edelman said earlier about the capacity or the intention of the HTS in Damascus to fight ISIS, which U.S. policy now seems fully committed to. As you quite rightly said, ISIS is in Syrian prisons. ISIS is in the Syrian desert, but ISIS is also amongst the ranks of the groups that are now called the Syrian military, as we saw with the most recent killing of the three Americans – two American soldiers and a civilian – who were killed by supposedly an ISIS operative, but formally and officially a member of the Syrian army.

So, when ISIS is so rampant throughout the country, the question as to whether HTS in Damascus or the factions that now form the Syrian army have the capacity or the intention to fight ISIS is outstanding. The surprising thing here is that, as the writer of The Art of the Deal, President Trump has forsaken his hedge, the SDF, in entrusting the fight against ISIS fully to Damascus. By putting that hedge aside completely, he has turned this into more of a gamble than a trade. I think we’ll all be keenly watching in the next few months and years whether this will pay off or not.

Blaise Misztal:

Any sense of whether the SDF is going to take this deal?

Giran Ozcan:

As of now, we have four days where the SDF will look at the deal and see what it’s been given, because there have already been different versions of the deal that was presented to them. Even the Arabic and English translations of the same deal by Damascus in its own public publication had one or two discrepancies.

So, I do think that the SDF is leaning towards taking whatever deal it’s offered right now, given the circumstances, given that the city of Kobani, where all of this started12 years ago, is completely besieged by the very forces that the U.S. partnered with the Kurds to defeat in the first place. Given the conditions on the ground, I agree with John that this is a capitulation that’s being forced on the SDF and the Kurds. And I really do not see any way out of this other than agreeing to the deal that’s on the table right now.

Blaise Misztal:

Ambassador Edelman, given the history that you laid out in your first comments of the U.S. having temporary and transactional partnerships with the Kurds — I think that’s how the US military has always referred to its partnership with SDF — did the Syrian Kurds overplay their hands in the last nine months of negotiations? Were they pushing for more than they could realistically get? Were they counting too much on the U.S. to back them in ways that they should have known better?

Amb. Eric Edelman:

I think it’s early to tell, because we still don’t really know everything that’s gone on in this process. I suspect that may be the case, that they may have been counting more on U.S. support than they ought to have given the history of past betrayals, frankly, of the Kurds.

I would be interested in Giran’s view of this. Depending on how this all plays out, I am not 100% persuaded that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will proceed with his opening to the Kurds inside Turkey, because, again, we have a history there, going back a decade, where he had openings and discussions and negotiations. Obviously, they’ve gone way farther this time than in the past. But if he thinks that the balance of forces is changing, and it’s changing drastically against the Kurds in the region, I could easily imagine him walking away from this opening to the Kurds as well.

Blaise Misztal:

I have one last question for John, and then I welcome any questions that you, the audience, have. If you do want to ask anything of our panelists, please submit your question using the Q and A function in Zoom, type your question in there, and then I’ll be able to read it out for our panelists to answer.

John, I wanted to ask you about the implications of everything that has happened up in Syria’s northeast for Israel, which has been more focused on the southwest, the Golan Heights and Suwayda, where the Druze are concentrated. Does this have any repercussions for Israel’s interests in Syria, or is this mostly just something that’s going to be isolated to the Kurdish areas up away from what Israel cares about?

John Hannah:

I think that there is probably some consensus in Israel that, given the current rulers in Damascus, these very suspect one-time jihadists, maybe still current jihadists, have taken over the country, that in that circumstance, you probably don’t want an emboldened, stronger, centralized Syrian state. Better to have it be weaker, better to have it be consumed by internal things, rather than thinking about going after external adversaries.

And I think to the extent to which you see al-Sharaa and this Syrian Army made up of all these jihadist forces, kind of consolidating power, with the backing of the United States and Turkey, who obviously has its own issues with Israel, particularly with regard to Turkey’s aspirations to be the dominant power inside of Syria, I think that’s probably problematic for Israel.

What it exactly means for the Druze is hard to say. I can’t imagine it means anything good. I think of all of the ethnic and sectarian components in Syrian society. There probably was a lot riding on them, seeing the Kurds being able to establish a model up in the northeast of some level of local autonomy and local security with some real representation and power inside of Damascus. That could be a model for the Druze as well, and now that possibility is obviously being crushed.

The Kurds appeared, in terms of their military strength and power, to be the strongest of these ethnic sectarian groups inside of Syria and with the greatest chance of establishing some kind of precedent for a more decentralized, multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian country being put together. And that looks like it’s now quickly withering and dying on the vine.

So, to that extent, Israel’s going to have to deal with this stronger, centralized, consolidating force in Damascus that is very closely aligned with a hostile Turkey, due to either American disengagement or American approval. I think Israel still may be able to make a deal with them in the form of a narrow security deal down along the Golan Heights. But I think overall the trend of events is going to be worrying for Israel.

Amb. Eric Edelman:

Giran was rightly saying that from the vantage point of Ankara, the major concern with all of this is the impact on the internal discussion with Kurdish parties in Turkey. But there is an external dimension as well, because the Turks always have seen the Kurds as a cat’s paw for Israel.

I mean, there are Israeli-Kurdish ties. The Turks always have vastly overstated the nature of those ties, but there’s no doubt in my mind that they see the reduction of Kurdish influence in northeastern Syria and northwestern Syria, for that matter, as essential to curbing Israel’s ability to exercise influence in post-Assad Syria as well. So, Turkey’s got both a domestic and an external element that’s driving their policy here.

John Hannah:

In addition to perhaps having over relied on the sense that the U.S. cavalry would come to their rescue at their moment of greatest peril, there’s now a lot in the Twitter sphere about SDF officials talking about contacts with Israel, suggesting they would welcome any help from Israel.

I think they ought to be very, very cautious about relying on the IDF to come to their rescue. Frankly, the IDF did in the case of Suwayda back in July. But I think that, as much as the Israelis have valued their ties with Kurdish groups over time and their common interests against a fairly radical Sunni-majority Middle East, the Kurds are in a different position than the Druze with regard to Israel’s interests and obviously Israel’s internal domestic politics.

As much as I might like things to be otherwise, I think it would be precarious for the SDF to be counting now on the IDF to come to their rescue at the last minute here, given everything that has happened.

Blaise Misztal:

To that point, Giran, maybe you could give us just a very brief overview of what the Israel-SDF relationship has been like over the last couple of years. Are there ties between them? What do they consist of?

Giran Ozcan:

Again, publicly reported, there are several back channels. The Israeli Foreign Ministry had contacts with the Foreign Relations Department of the autonomous administration in the northeast. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has had personal sympathy for the Kurdish cause for years, and as soon as he took office and became the foreign minister, in his inaugural speech, he talked about the Kurds and how Israel needed to establish more strategic ties with the Kurdish nation. As Ambassador Edelman quite rightly said, Turkey vastly exaggerates those ties and the extent and the depth of that relationship.

Blaise Misztal:

Ambassador Edelman, maybe a final question for you. Again, as you laid out, the U.S. has many times had partnerships or promised support for the region’s Kurds that have then melted into thin air over time.

Are there repercussions and strategic implications of seemingly having done this once again, or at the very least, having taken another strategic pivot away from the partnership with the SDF? Is that going to affect our ability to partner with others in the region or around the world?

Amb. Eric Edelman:

You know, potentially it could, I think it’s a little early right now to say, because I think it’ll depend a little bit on how things play out in the next few weeks. And it will depend a little bit as well, I think, on a question that John kind of touched on, which is whether this is going to end up being a harbinger of the United States just basically withdrawing from its involvement in Syria.

I mean, the President made no bones about the fact that he would like to get the very small Special Forces presence that we’ve had in Syria for a decade out of the country. So, a lot of this will depend on whether people see this as the United States on its way out of the region, or the United States sanctioning the sellout of an erstwhile partner for the last decade, even as it tries to continue to influence events in the region. If it’s the latter, I think the potential consequences will be more severe than if it’s the former.

John Hannah:

I agree with Eric, you never know exactly how these forms of betrayal by the most powerful country on Earth ultimately affect its own strategic interests and everybody else’s willingness to either partner with them, or the fear that adversaries might have of the U.S. I would just say though, that sitting here today, it’s been a very bad week for groups and peoples that have put their eggs in the U.S. basket.

This group includes not just the SDF. The Iranian people, who were called out into the streets on January 2nd by the President and told that we would come to the rescue if they started to be killed, and we were “locked and loaded,” and none of those things were actually true, at least not yet. Things may still develop in Iran, let’s see.

Of course, our NATO allies in Europe on the question of Greenland fall into this group. So, in terms of building enduring U.S. partnerships and alliances with people that are on our side, who are pro-American, pro-Western and want to work with us against really problematic adversaries, it hasn’t been a great week.

Amb. Eric Edelman:

Hard to disagree with that.

Giran Ozcan:

First and foremost, you know who is going to think twice going forward: it is the Iranian Kurds. So if, and when, something does happen there, it gives them something to mull over before any kind of decision.

As a quick response to Ambassador Edelman’s question about what this means for the Turkey-PKK peace process going forward: From the very beginning, there were two main considerations, and a lot of analysts here in DC were arguing back and forth about whether this was a Turkish regional calculation, engaging with the PKK and the peace process, or was it a domestic consideration for Erdoğan.

It was both. One of them has been resolved. The regional calculus side, the Syria equation in regard to the Turkish calculation, has been resolved. But the domestic consideration remains. My guess is that it will continue, especially now that this significant obstacle again in the Turkish mind has been removed and has been resolved to their liking, but the domestic considerations continue, and I think Erdoğan still needs the process domestically.

Amb. Eric Edelman:

Particularly if he wants to run for another term as president.

Blaise Misztal:

Giran, John, Ambassador Edelman, thank you so much for your time and your expertise today. Thank you to everyone who joined in to watch. If you want to know more about why JINSA thinks that a Syria that treats its minorities fairly and integrates them well is important, I commend to you John’s paper from last fall that lays everything out there, including why maybe lifting the Caesar Act and letting go of all of our leverage on Syria might not play out so well. It turns out to be a very prescient argument.

For more analysis of what’s going to happen in Syria, the deal that might or might not happen between Damascus and the SDF, Giran is going to be all over that. So please make sure to tune into our website at jinsa.org for all the latest. Thanks for tuning in and have a good afternoon, everyone.