On February 7, 1984, just a few months after Hezbollah drove a truck bomb into as U.S. Marine Barracks in 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced that U.S. forces would “redeploy,” initially offshore to U.S. naval vessels, though they soon returned home. Reagan may have seen the end of the peacekeeping operation as necessary given the failure of the turmoil of Lebanese confessional politics and militia violence, even after the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization. That withdrawal, however, and the “Black Hawk Down” humiliation in Somalia influenced Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden to conclude the United States was a paper tiger and that terrorism could work. The United States “left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat, and your dead with you,” Bin Laden said. Imagery of Western humiliation fuels extremism.
Both the Islamic State and the unrepentant, unreformed extremists who form the core of the new Syrian Army hate the Syrian Kurds.
This is why, when President Joe Biden announced his intent to withdraw from Afghanistan, his decision to set September 11 as the deadline was so bizarre. Any other date would have been better, but clearly either Biden or his National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan believed that the neatness of ending America’s longest war on the day it began was somehow elegant. The choice showed how aloof Biden and Sullivan were, at least initially. By transforming 9/11 into a date of a second Islamist victory would fuel a jihadist narrative far beyond what Al Qaeda’s hijackers might have ever envisioned. Fortunately, more mature voices convinced Biden and Sullivan to alter the date, and so the U.S. pulled out a month earlier on a day that hitherto had no significance. While Biden bungled the withdrawal and the Taliban still claimed victory, the impact of desperate Afghans falling from ascending aircraft would have been even worse had it been on the anniversary of the World Trade Center’s destruction.
President Donald Trump will now hand the Islamic State and its allies a symbolic victory on par with what Biden and Sullivan once almost gave Al Qaeda. At issue is Trump and his envoy Tom Barrack’s betrayal of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces as the new Syrian army and its associated jihadi militias reclaim Kurdish-administered territory.
Both the Islamic State and the unrepentant, unreformed extremists who form the core of the new Syrian Army hate the Syrian Kurds who form the heart of the Syrian Democratic Forces. First, the Kurds defeated the Islamic State when Turkey was quietly assisting the would-be caliphate and Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party waited on the sidelines with the hope that the Islamic State would destroy one of Barzani’s top Kurdish competitors. Second, the Kurdish forces grant women equality. This explains why the jihadists butcher the bodies of woman soldiers and throw them off high buildings. While Barrack promotes President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s promise to integrate Kurds as individuals into the new Syrian army, women need not apply.
The Kurdish resistance to break the Islamic State’s siege of Kobane was the turning point of the war and marked the beginning of the Islamic State’s territorial collapse. This is why the Syrian army’s advance toward Kobane is now so important. Already, the jihadis answering to al-Sharaa are desecrating graves of fighters who died in those battles against the Islamic State twelve years ago.
Islamists will view the fall of Kobane’s Kurds as avenging the Islamic State’s defeat and signaling its rebirth.
Should Barrack’s blindness to the true character of al-Sharaa’s army and his enthusiasm to please Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan lead to the new Syrian army taking Kobane, two outcomes are certain. First, there will be a massacre. Al-Sharra might shave his beard and wear a business suit, but those he commands neither have such finesse nor the restraint. What happens to the Kurds in Kobane should al-Sharaa’s army move in could easily become akin to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, when the United Nations stood aside and allowed Serbs to slaughter 8,000 Bosnian men and boys.
Second, Islamists will view the fall of Kobane’s Kurds as avenging the Islamic State’s defeat and signaling its rebirth. Far from making a new Syria safe and secure, Trump and Barrack’s willingness to see the Syrian army impose its will by force could easily fuel greater terrorism, not only in Syria but far beyond.
