The Kurds have long been the United States’ most reliable allies in defeating ISIS and keeping the terror group from regaining power.

Washington is celebrating a “New Syria” under the government of President Ahmed al-Shara, the transitional authority now ruling from Damascus. But for those who spent the last decade in the dust and detention facilities of northeastern Syria, the air feels heavy with a familiar dread. There is a lesson American policymakers seem determined to relearn: abandoning Kurdish partners does not end terrorism, it resurrects it.

If the Islamic State resurges in 2026, it will not be a mystery. It will be the foreseeable consequence of weakening the Kurdish-led security system in Rojava, the most effective force ever assembled against the Caliphate.

The warning signs are no longer subtle. During a recent House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Chairman Brian Mast (R-FL) revealed the scale of the crisis: instability has forced US Central Command to emergency-relocate roughly 7,000 ISIS fighters from Syrian detention facilities into Iraq. Such transfers increasingly resemble a frantic retreat. Since January, thousands of detainees have been moved by land and air because the new authorities in Damascus cannot or will not secure the system the United States spent years building.

For nearly a decade, American counterterrorism success in Syria rested on a simple truth. US airpower is formidable. But it cannot sit in village teahouses gathering intelligence, and it cannot guard thousands of ISIS detainees who still dream of a second coming of the caliphate. Those are human missions. In Syria, the Kurds carried that burden when no one else would.

The partnership worked because it was personal and costly. Kurdish fighters gave the United States a way to defeat a global terror movement without filling American graveyards. That blood equity, paid for in Kurdish lives, became the backbone of regional stability. Today, that equity is being traded away for hollow realism.

As Washington pushes for a rapid handover of security responsibilities to Damascus, Kurdish forces are being forced into an impossible choice. Testimony before Congress suggested the al-Shara government’s recent actions toward Druze, Alawite, and Kurdish communities are “steps in the wrong direction.” When a Kurdish soldier is forced to choose between guarding an ISIS prison and guarding his daughter’s school from sectarian violence, he will choose his daughter. That is the moment the prison gates swing open.

To policymakers in Washington, these detention facilities are a bureaucratic problem. To ISIS, they are a human reserve. Every veteran fighter who escapes during a chaotic transfer is also a teacher of terror and a force multiplier, someone who knows how to recruit, train, and indoctrinate the next generation.

ISIS did not emerge out of nowhere. It rose from regional power vacuums, broken detention systems, and abandoned local allies. The conditions now forming in northeastern Syria mirror those that followed the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, when prisons emptied, militias splintered, and extremism metastasized.

There is a sustainable alternative that does not require endless war or large-scale deployments. It requires the strategic courage to maintain a limited US footprint as a form of stabilization insurance. It means continued support for Kurdish-led security forces, sustained funding for detention operations, and political pressure to ensure minorities are not targeted during Syria’s transition.

Realism requires not only the calculation of costs but also the recognition of consequences. Ending America’s partnership with the Kurds would not end the war in Syria. It would outsource the next one to a movement that thrives on chaos and memory. If Washington walks away now, it will not be turning the page. It will be reopening the chapter that ISIS has been waiting to finish.

About the Author: Heyrsh Abdulrahman

Heyrsh Abdulrahman is a Washington-based senior analyst and former Kurdish regional government official with experience in Iraqi political and military affairs and US-Iraq security relations. He writes on Middle East security and Iraqi governance for US and international outlets.

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