Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa must think President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, let alone the U.S. Senate, are idiots. While he talks about reform and a tolerant, peaceful Syria, Al-Sharaa is a former Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist who once had a $10 million U.S. government bounty on his head.
While Al-Sharaa changed his style, his language, and his tactics, there is little evidence he has changed his ideology. In an October 2025 trip to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, I visited United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR)-managed facilities and shanties for new arrivals from Syria. Alawis from Latakia and Homs not only spoke about the arrival of Al-Sharaa’s forces, but they showed videos of the subsequent harassment, beatings, and shootings of unarmed civilians. The interviewees in question were not Assad-era war criminals; UNHCR screens its refugees to limit services to non-combatants and Bashar al-Assad did not draft elderly women into his army. In visits to Syria and Armenia, Druze from Suwaydah and Christians from Aleppo told many of the same stories.
While Al-Sharaa changed his style, his language, and his tactics, there is little evidence he has changed his ideology.
Now, the same occurs in northeastern Syria as the Al-Sharaa’s army pushes into territory long governed by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. After Al-Sharaa’s forces took control over Raqqa, the mixed Arab and Kurdish city and former capital of the Islamic State that the largely Kurdish Syrian Democratic Council has governed for much of the past decade, Al-Sharaa’s troops and Islamic State veterans he incorporated into his new army, went door to door slaughtering Kurds who had not left. The closest parallel to the ethnic cleansing in which Al-Sharaa now engages is Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
As such sectarian and ethnic violence becomes the rule rather than the exception, the excuses of Al-Sharaa and his apologists in Turkey and among some Washington think tanks wear thin. U.S. Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack has embraced a vision of strong, centralized leadership across the Middle East, one in which strongmen guarantee security and investors can grow economies. It is a naïve read of the Middle East for two reasons: First, it discounts ideology. As an investor and a real estate developer, business deals and making money may motivate Barrack, but projecting this onto Islamists is naïve. Men like Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei may embezzle billions of dollars, and Al-Sharaa, by putting his brother in charge of investments and Syrian contracts, may also aspire to, but their goals for government and society are less material.
Second, Barrack misreads history. Strong, centralized presidencies seldom bring peace and security, a lesson leaders like Saddam, Assad, and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh learned. In contrast, the stridency of political debate notwithstanding, both federalism and democracy stabilize Iraq. When U.S. officials talk about a future for Syria in which the government respects religious and ethnic minorities and women and does not threaten neighbors, they are describing a system akin to the Kurdish-administered area, rather than that which Al-Sharaa now pursues.
The ramifications from Al-Sharaa and his extremist minions continuing to target Syria’s Kurds could destabilize the region. Turkish triumphalism aside, the Syrian Kurds have nowhere to go. They are hardly the Marxist or terrorist force their detractors depict; academics who repeat Cold War talking points only expose themselves as confusing amplification of partisan talking points for fieldwork and research. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) saw its dismantlement not as a surrender, but more as a sign of normalization. They believed both that the end of the terrorism calumny would secure Syrian Kurdistan as a legitimate entity and that Kurds could engage freely in politics in both Turkey and Syria. If the Turks and Al-Sharaa force the Kurds—none of whom have anywhere else to go—to fight, then there could be a return to insurgency not only in Syria but also Turkey. Erdoğan may scoff, but if Turkey was as strong as Barrack and Erdoğan believed, it would have been able to defeat the Kurdish insurgency, rather than stalemate over four decades despite far superior equipment.
Turkey is no longer a consistent Western ally and likely would not allow the United States to enforce a no-fly and no-drive zone from its airbases.
If Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize, he should protect Kurds, Christians, Druze, and other minorities, rather than support their persecutors, and instead create both a no-fly and no-drive zone in Latakia, Suwayda, and northeastern Syria. There is precedent. In 1991, the genesis for the Iraqi Kurdish safe haven came from Turkish President Turgut Özal, who wanted to avoid a refugee influx. The original safe-haven morphed into a larger no-fly zone to prevent Saddam from using his helicopter gunships to bomb the Kurds. The United Nations also approved a no-drive zone prohibiting military vehicles from northern and southern Iraq, though Coalition partners did not consistently enforce it. More recently, Turkey has floated the idea of a similar buffer zone in Iran should Khamenei’s regime collapse.
Turkey is no longer a consistent Western ally and likely would not allow the United States to enforce a no-fly and no-drive zone from its airbases. But Erdoğan—his ego and Barrack aside—does not wield veto power over U.S. policy. The United States has alternatives. Israel, too, could provide a base for a no-drive zone in Suwayda. Jordan’s Muwaffaq al Salti Air Base now hosts U.S. F-15E Strike Eagles. The Kingdom also hosts F-16 Fighting Falcons and older A-10 Thunderbolt II “Warthogs,” most often used in ground support operations. Iraqi Kurdistan and the Erbil International Airport might also host U.S. assets to defend Syrian Kurds. While the Barzanis see the Kurds as competition, they would be hard-pressed to say no to the United States or deny support to their brethren against an existential threat. Even if Kurdish Prime Minister Masrour Barzani or his heir apparent Areen says no, the United States has an alternative in Sulaymani, whose leaders Bafil and Qubad Talabani are much more sympathetic to Syrian Kurds.
Barrack and Erdoğan may argue that a no-fly/no-drive zone would create de facto federalism and repeat the Iraqi experience, but in such a case, they have an alternative: call off the slaughter, return the Syrian army to west of the Euphrates, turn over to Kurdish authorities those on video committing war crimes, and decommission both the commanding officers under whom they served and the non-Syrian jihadists whom Al-Sharaa previously naturalized and integrated.
For Syria’s future, Trump’s legacy, Rubio’s ambition, and the Kurds’ survival it is time for Trump and Barrack to give Erdoğan and Al-Sharaa an ultimatum rather than obeisance.
