In north-eastern Syria, the people who helped dismantle ISIS’s self-declared “caliphate” are being asked, again, to pay for someone else’s plan.
For years, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces were the main ground partner to the Global Coalition to defeat ISIS in Syria. They fought the group street by street, then guarded prisons and camps holding tens of thousands tied to it. They kept a detention system running that the outside world needed, while the legal and political end state was deferred.
Now the SDF is being pressed into a rapid handover of territory and detention sites under an integration deal with Damascus. Integration could reduce fragmentation and impose clearer rules. But rushed integration, without monitoring or safeguards, can turn fragile containment into a scramble for control.
What changed this month is not ISIS’s strength.
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