How to defeat ISIS and lose your semi-autonomy in a handful of simple steps

They’re smiling now, but what does the future hold for the Kurds? (Photo: AP Images)

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hese days, getting hold of contacts in northeastern Syria is never easy. Cell service is unreliable, Internet drops without warning, and officials from the Kurdish administration are too overwhelmed to talk. Mohammed Q., a local journalist I’ve gotten to know from the city of Hasakah in Syrian Kurdistan, is one of the few who picks up.

About a minute into the call, the sound cuts through the line; a low, heavy roar that needs no translation. A jet passes overhead, clear enough for me to hear from the other end. Hasakah sits beside a US military base, one of America’s last footholds in northeastern Syria, and the jets overhead are part of that presence, keeping a close eye over ISIS detention sites.

“The jets are flying around the al-Sina’a Prison,” he says. “Just to make sure no one escapes.”

As if life in Syrian Kurdistan wasn’t stressful enough already.

“Another facility,” he adds, “holds roughly 5,000 men awaiting transfer back to their countries of origin.”

Whether they’ll manage to make it all the way to the transfer without a prison break is anybody’s guess.

Today, several ISIS detention facilities remain scattered across northeastern Syria, some under SDF control, others increasingly influenced or administered by Damascus as part of recent arrangements.

Two weeks ago, al-Shaddadi Prison, roughly 40 minutes from Hasakah, experienced a series of escapes as control shifted from the Kurdish administration to the Damascus-based central government. Officials say most of those who fled were recaptured. Meanwhile, Hasakah sleeps under the roar of jet engines.

What’s unfolding in Hasakah is not an isolated security concern, but the possible unraveling of Kurdish self-rule in northeastern Syria. As Syrian government forces prepare to reenter key Kurdish cities under a new arrangement with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the region is approaching a decisive moment — one that could end a decade of de facto Kurdish autonomy, destabilize already fragile ISIS detention infrastructure, and trigger the displacement of millions. The absence of open fighting masks the severity of the moment.

Hasakah is also one of the last major cities in Syrian Kurdistan not yet fully taken over by forces loyal to Damascus, which helps explain why Mohammed Q. is here, why the skies are busy and why the people below are bracing for whatever comes next.

When ISIS exploded across northeastern Syria in 2014, Kurdish forces, later formalized into the SDF, became the only coherent ground force capable of stopping them. With US backing, they defeated ISIS city by city and, in the process, built a de facto autonomous region in northeastern Syria.

That autonomy was never recognized internationally, but it functioned. The Kurds ran local councils, internal security, courts, and social services across what became known as Rojava. Crucially, they also guarded tens of thousands of ISIS prisoners, an obligation the rest of the world was quite happy to outsource.

The SDF finds itself more isolated today than at any point since the defeat of ISIS. Turkey continues to view any form of Kurdish self-rule as a threat; and while the US military presence remains, its mission has narrowed almost exclusively to counterterrorism and prison security, not the preservation of Kurdish political autonomy.

It’s also hard to ignore that President Ahmed al-Sharaa didn’t exactly come up through Syria’s bureaucracy or its opposition politics, but rather through its jihadist underground. Before rebranding as a national leader, he spent years inside ISIS’s early predecessor networks and later ran Jabhat al-Nusra. For Kurds who remember those years, that history lingers in the background as an uncomfortable fact that shapes how concerned they are about Damascus’s reassurances today.

Since taking power in Damascus, Ahmed al-Sharaa has made it clear that Syria will not remain fragmented. His government’s position is simple: There can be no armed force, no administration, and no border control outside the authority of the Syrian state.

Up until now, Damascus tolerated the state of semi-autonomy for one reason only: It was too weak to stop them. Now, that weakness is gone. Damascus, no longer fighting for survival, has the patience to reclaim territory incrementally rather than by force. From the Syrian government’s perspective, there is no need to storm Kurdish cities when time and diplomacy can do the work instead.

On paper, it sounds almost technical. A small number of personnel from the central government deploying to “official facilities” like passport offices, ID departments, airports, and certain oil installations. The SDF frames it as a necessary concession to avoid outright confrontation. Civilians, however, see it as the opening move in a slow-motion takeover. Mohammed Q. tells me the Kurds feel like they’ve been abandoned by everyone — France, the US, perhaps Israel as well.

“In the coming days,” he tells me, “we’ll find out if this is a temporary pause or if two million Kurds will become refugees. My wife started packing ten days ago. Not just us. Everyone has their bags packed, and if anything happens, they will leave.”

Plan A is that nothing happens. Plan B is to stay put and hope the storm passes. Place C involves a hop, skip, and a jump across the border. So far, Plan C may already be off the table.

“Unfortunately, the border between Rojava and Iraqi Kurdistan is closed,” he says. “By the SDF on one side, and by the Peshmerga on the other.”

ATa recent White House press conference, President Donald Trump addressed the Kurdish question with characteristic bluntness.

“I like the Kurds,” he said, before adding that they were “doing it for themselves more than they were doing it for us.” Still, the president insisted, “We are trying to protect the Kurds.”

But in the past, empty words have not always translated into protection.

“Rojava is over, as I see it,” Mohammad Q. declares. “Tomorrow or the following day, the security forces of the Syrian government will be deployed in Qamishli and Hasakah. The propaganda that we’re going to give the Kurds their rights, democracy, it’s gone. It’s over.”

The Kurds have been here before. They resisted ISIS when few others could. They held prisons the world didn’t want to deal with. They governed territory no one would formally recognize. For the past decade, the Syrian Kurds held out hope that their dependence with regards to doing the jobs nobody else would or could do would result in the independence of their nation.

All this is being shattered by the quiet war in northeastern Syria. It’s a death by a thousand quiet calculations. The jets keep circling, officials keep meeting, and parents keep packing, just in case. An uneasy tension hangs over the region.

Tomorrow, for Rojava, may be everything.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1098)