So far, he has said the right things, apparently trying to govern with pragmatism. But the reality is that the future of Syria does not lie with him — and his fellow Sunnis — alone. Syria’s minorities will help decide the nation’s fate as well, and none is as large or powerful as its Kurds. They, after all, are the only real force in the country outside Damascus that can put a disciplined army in the field: the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which was built in alliance with the United States to destroy ISIS. No less important, they control about 70% of Syria’s oil and gas reserves.

That blend of military and economic neatly explains why, if Syria is to survive as a viable state, Sharaa must find a way to accommodate its Kurdish minority, which even amid the upheavals of war and displacement represent roughly a tenth of the country’s total population. Combined with a gaggle of other minorities — Christians, Alawites, Druze — Syria simply cannot be the Sunni Caliphate that Sharaa once sought.

Still, many Kurds remain wary. In the cafés of Qamishli, the main city of the Syrian Kurdish region popularly known as Rojava, people joke that Sharaa’s beard may be shorter — but his prayers are the same. They want Syria to work. They need it to. But behind the dark humor lies genuine fear: that a man defined by jihad can never build the pluralist state necessary to keep Syria together.

No one understands these tensions better than Aldar Khalil. Officially, he is a senior member of the Executive Committee of the Democratic Society Movement in Rojava — the Kurdish-run autonomous region in Syria’s northeast — and its most powerful figure. In reality, he is its de facto leader. Whether or not the Syrian state can hold together will come down, in large part, to the decisions he and a few others around him take.

To meet Khalil, I leave Qamishli and travel through pale emptiness to the town of Hasakah. At checkpoints, Kurdish fighters in faded fatigues wave me through. We enter the city and eat. Night falls and we wait for news. It’s time: follow the black car, we are told. We end up in a municipal building of some kind. Prominently displayed on a wall is a photo of Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who’s been in a Turkish prison since 1999, and whose picture you see everywhere in Rojava. We sit in a large room with Kurdish carpets on the wall. Coffee and bottles of water are laid out for us.

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Khalil enters with his security detail. He wears beige trousers and a checked shirt. I notice that his left hand is missing. Later I ask why, but nobody really knows. One of my guides ventures that it might have something to do with a grenade, but that’s just speculation.

Khalil’s manner is polite, controlled, his voice almost soft. “People in Syria began the revolution hoping for a democratic system,” he says. “But after the regime collapsed, what came was in total opposition to that: a government that wants to take us back 1,400 years.” He means Sharaa. “This is someone with a very restrictive mind,” Khalil continues flatly. “You cannot expect someone like that to change. Maybe he changes his name or city, maybe he speaks differently for the media — but his beliefs stay the same.”

So can the Kurds deal with such a man? “We are Syrians,” Khalil replies. “Either we cede from Syria — and we have no plans for that — or we need to work with whoever is in Damascus, we have to deal with him. We are forced to negotiate.” What about clashes with Alawites on the coast, and with the Druze in Suweyda earlier this year, which both led to brief revivals of Syria’s sectarian slaughter? Does Khalil blame the government for those? “Of course we blame the government.”

Khalil’s own vision is simple: a decentralized Syria, each community managing itself, united by loose federal ties. Fail, he warns, and the country will slide back into civil war, not just in Rojava but “everywhere in Syria”. Not that Damascus is the only threat to Rojava’s future. It was Turkey, after all, that armed and bankrolled Sharaa’s overthrow of Assad at the end of last year, and which has considerable sway with Damascus now. This also poses a considerable problem for Rojava, whose Kurdish forces President Erdogan sees simply as the Syrian version of the PKK — which it considers to be a terror group responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in its mountainous southeast.

“Recently we have had several meetings in Damascus with the Syrian government,” Khalil tells me. “But unfortunately, after every meeting, Damascus promises to form committees to work on integration and then, immediately afterwards, Turkey steps in to impede the process. At the moment, we have two delegations waiting to see what will happen next, because Turkey keeps undermining the negotiations.”

I leave Khalil and step into the night. The traffic is heavy. Concrete minarets stand tall in the gloom. The next morning I’m back on the road again. The sun is climbing high, flattening everything into gold and white. I drive near Qamishli airport, and, to my right, the Turkish border scars the horizon. Every few kilometers, a watchtower stands looking across. To my left, a Russian flag flaps limply over an armored compound.

It’s a physical reminder of the perennial role of outsiders here. Before I arrived, a regional expert explained the situation to me by way of analogy. “Think of Syria as a condominium,” he said. “Russia owns the walls, America the roof, and Turkey has the keys. Everyone else rents the space inside.”

He was exaggerating for effect, but I now see what he means. Everywhere I look in Rojava, there are signs of this uneasy balance: Russian soldiers buy bread from Kurdish stalls; American engineers fix irrigation pumps; Turkish drones strike sporadically. It’s a useful reminder of how crucial this region remains: Moscow still needs Damascus to keep its port on the Mediterranean, while Iran wants a corridor to the sea once more and the United States, half-hearted and weary, stays only to contain the remnants of ISIS.

To understand what this might mean for the Kurds, I meet Fawza Yusuf, co-chair of the Autonomous Administration’s Executive Council. Composed and cheerful, she heads the delegation that meets with Damascus, which is to say she’s the woman now negotiating the fate of Syria for the Kurds. Like Khalil, meanwhile, she stresses the importance of negotiating with the new regime in Damascus. “From the start we believed the only way is peace, dialogue, and negotiation,” she explains. “We must talk to Damascus directly — there is no other path.”

It is the language of a negotiator who understands both the limits and the possibilities of her position. “We have fought enough wars,” Yusuf continues, sipping black tea. “Now we need a country where our children can live.” Yet — and again like Khalil — she’s skeptical of Sharaa’s intentions. “Their policy is anti-democratic,” she says. “They still don’t recognize others. But we continue working.”

What she means by “working” is critical, both to the Kurds and Damascus, and it includes the slow-motion integration of the SDF into the national army. You cannot run an effective state unless you have a monopoly on the use of force, which comes through having sole control of its only army. The Kurds, for their part, accept this, albeit on their own terms. “We agreed with Damascus that we will join the Syrian army — but not as individuals,” she says. “We will join as brigades: the SDF will become three brigades in the national army and remain stationed here.”

The SDF gives Rojava leverage — up to a point. The force numbers roughly perhaps 70,000 fighters, most of them veterans hardened by years of war with ISIS. They’re battle-tested, and disciplined in light-infantry and counterinsurgency tactics, but lack heavy armor, air defense, and artillery. In open battle, then, they’d be little match for Damascus’s army or Russian airpower. Yet in their own territory – the plains and towns of the northeast – they could bleed any invading force through guerrilla warfare and local support.

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It is a clever sort of compromise: ostensible unity, but without surrender, even as Yusuf herself evokes a “decentralized” Syria going forward. Yet with many in Damascus seeing federalism as the short end of a secessionist wedge, optimism is perhaps harder in practice. Rhetorically, certainly, Sharaa is unequivocal about the need for a united Syria. “We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible,” he said on 25 February, during the opening speech of the Syrian National Dialogue Conference in Damascus.

And if a Turkish-backed Sharaa is one worry for Yusuf, another foreign power looms large over Syria too. Israeli aircraft have long been a presence in the night skies, striking weapons depots from Damascus to Deir ez-Zor, sometimes near the oil fields the Kurds control. A weak, divided Syria suits Israel’s security. While Iran’s land bridge to Hezbollah fell with Assad, the Israelis want to ensure that Iranian militias cannot burrow their way into the nascent post-Assad state.

But Israel and the Kurds have much in common. Both perennial outsiders in a largely Sunni Arab Middle East, they have survived by living on the edge, sustained by vigilance. They have collaborated in the past, and, for many of the Kurds here, Israel is a model of the type of muscular independence they seek.

Yet the Israeli model the Kurds quietly admire – a small, embattled state that survived by building institutions, intelligence networks and deterrent power – offers both inspiration and illusion. Israel’s strength came from coherent leadership, outside backing, and a shared national narrative. The Kurds, by contrast, remain divided between rival parties and foreign patrons. Emulating Israel’s vigilance is one thing; reproducing its fortress statehood in the middle of Arab Syria is quite another.

There are other dangers in being seen as Israel’s proxy. The Druze of southern Syria learned that lesson when their perceived ties to Tel Aviv turned them into targets for both foreign jihadists and the Damascus regime. For the Kurds, then, any open alignment with Israel risks uniting Ankara, Tehran, and Damascus against them: a trinity of enemies they can hardly afford. Their survival, as ever, depends on balancing between powers without becoming the pawn of any.

And if Syria’s future depends on Rojava — secession would certainly wreck the country’s economy, and perhaps even rekindle the civil war’s ethnic butchery — the whole region hinges on it too. If Rojava unravels, after all, Lebanon’s sectarian truce could collapse; Iraq’s Kurdish-Arab balance might crack; Turkey would face renewed insurgency; Iran would push its militias deeper west. If Syria’s fate still depends on foreign powers, then, those same foreign powers are bound to Syria too — whether at the White House or closer to home.

Back home, however, things feel anything but open. Over recent months, this has been most clear in Sweida, a southern town rocked by anti-government protests. Sweida is home to many Syrian Druze, a syncretic faith born out of Shi’ism, and which claims the loyalty of 3% of Syrians. The protesters waved Israeli flags, and for the first time in Syria’s history demanded self-determination. They have also set up their own “national” guard, born out of the militias that enforced order during the long years of civil war.

No one apart from Israel — which has been lobbying Washington for a weak Syria — wants to see the Balkanization of the country. Al-Sharaa himself is now distancing his country from the putative Abraham Accords. The Americans, certainly, are keen on stability, and have stepped in to avert a civil war. The fact al-Sharaa took time out of his busy New York schedule to meet both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and General David Petraeus, the ex-commander of US forces in Iraq, certainly hints at the hopes the White House now places in him.

Be that as it may, the Sweida violence suggests a country spiraling out of control, as do rumors of a resurgent Assadism on the coast. Yet in the end, such pessimism would be to misdiagnose the unrest. For the chaos is not an aberration, a disaster to be averted, but rather represents the birth pangs of a process long underway: the Sunnification of Syria. Whatever al-Sharaa’s claims, as he enjoys the world’s attention in Manhattan, what we are witnessing is the emergence of a new Sunni state — and not the pluralist nation that foreign analysts might like to imagine.

Outsiders often read the Syrian revolution as romantically simple: the people rose up against the tyrant, and after years of brutal struggle finally secured their freedom. But that overlooks other interpretations, especially when it comes to religion. The Syrian conflict, after all, was also about the long-oppressed Sunni majority versus the Alawite minority — another heterodox offshoot of Islam to which the Assad dynasty belonged. Viewed through that lens, the fall of Damascus, and al-Sharaa’s own triumph, was merely the culmination of Sunni empowerment.

I witnessed these tensions first hand, in 2009, while I was teaching business English to staff at the Syrian National Bank. By then, I had lived in the country long enough to discern a student’s sectarian background through dress, mannerisms, attitudes. My classroom reflected the country: Sunnis — including Kurds — made up around 70%; Christians 10%, Druze 3%; and Alawites 13%. The students were all supposedly supportive of the stern-looking president, Bashar al-Assad, whose portrait hung in every room, paid their salaries, and claimed to run the country under the banner of Baathism, a secular pan-Arab socialist ideology which didn’t care about your sectarian affiliation.

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That, of course, was a lie. The Assad dynasty had stayed in power for 50 years by pitting the resentments and fears of the various sects against each other. They promoted Sunni clerics to positions of influence, based Syrian family law on Islamic jurisprudence, even married into a Sunni family — as Bashar did — yet still kept Sunnis out of power. All the while, they propagated the message that only they could protect minorities from Sunni tyranny. It was not uncommon for pro-government rallies to come with banners declaring “no to sectarianism”, the implication being that Sunni domination would result in the marginalization of Christians and others.

Such sectarianism also played out in my classroom. On exam day, no matter how hard the Sunni employees studied, or how rigorously I marked the papers — the Alawite students and those connected to the government would end up top of the class, with the results bitterly accepted by the Sunnis. Of course, I didn’t have the courage to make an issue of it. All of us, whether Syrian or not, knew what happened to the unruly. The horrors of Tadmor prison lived alongside us, as did slaughters of 1982, when the Hafez al-Assad crushed a Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising in the central Syrian town of Hama.

In 2011, that brittle sectarian order shattered. Bashar al-Assad repeated his father’s strategy and tried to crush the Sunni-led discontent. The Sunnis, in turn, went from peaceful demonstrations during Friday prayers to violent insurrection, with al-Qaeda-affiliated Ahmed al-Sharaa being one of the rebellion’s most effective leaders. Eventually, his victory came not from the international community, but from a rebellious Sunni redoubt of Idlib, a small town in northern Syria which prided itself on having quite literally thrown a sandal at Hafez al-Assad. The Sunnis, in short, had helped themselves to power: or so they told themselves.

Throughout all this, Syria’s minorities were in an impossible situation. Should they side with the tyrant they knew, or with the revolutionaries, some of whom were jihadists? At the same time, they were bombarded with regime propaganda, plenty of it real. Sunni Islamists, after all, had massacred the Druze at Qalb Lozeh in 2015, and ISIS had attacked them at Sweida. Christians, for their part, had their churches desecrated, their people killed or kidnapped. The prospect of joining the revolutionaries, then, was not as clear-cut as it seemed to many Sunnis. But with victory going to al-Sharaa’s forces, even neutrality could be interpreted as complicity, especially given the terrors Assad had inflicted on Sunni civilians.

Out of this sectarian chaos came Ahmad al-Sharaa. He was a jihadist, aggressively Sunni, who believed that minorities like the Alawites should not only renounce their support for Assad, but also their “heretic” faiths. Yet by 2017, al-Sharaa was courting Druze and Christian leaders in his newly established “Salvation” government in Idlib. Either he had changed — or he was just a political Machiavel.

Whatever the case, al-Sharaa reversed a lot of the damage that his group had been responsible for. On 10 June 2022, for instance, he visited Qalb Lozeh. Many Druze in the area had been forced to convert to Islam, the better to escape the clutches of Sunni extremism. In a marked departure from his earlier rhetoric, however, al-Sharaa publicly assured Druze leaders that there is no compulsion in religion, and that they were free to practice their faith without fear. This statement sent a strong signal to his followers that his Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamist group was changing.

Indeed, according to an informative new book on HTS, its political evolution is not unlike that of far-Right groups in Europe. To wield power, explain its authors Patrick Haenni and Jerome Drevon, al-Sharaa had to move to the center. Of course, there are still radicals on the periphery, but he increasingly relied on a broad Sunni populism over hardcore ideologues. Extremists — notably Osama Qasem, leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and once celebrated for his ties to al-Qaeda — were compelled to step down after being deemed a “liability”.

In al-Sharaa’s Salvation government was also a clue as to how the new Syria might look. His rump in Idlib was essentially a Sunni proto-state, as al-Sharaa transferred power from the warlords to a civilian government, run by a new generation of Islamist technocrats, each intimately connected to al-Sharaa himself. Certainly, Syria’s interim president has followed a similar path once he eventually took power in Damascus, filling state institutions, long hollowed out by Assad, with his own supporters, friends and family.

Maybe that explains why the Gulf kingdoms, which initially viewed al-Sharaa with deep suspicion due to his Islamism, eventually came round. Perhaps, they thought, he was someone who wanted to build a state not unlike their own — conservative, authoritarian, anti-Iran and pro-stability, all elements the emirs could work with. And, what was more, none of this contravened Sunni Islamic jurisprudence: which, as its long history testifies, has always taken a pragmatic approach to wielding power. Sunni Islam, as historians like Marshall Hodgson have shown, is quietist by temperament, and has happily lived alongside caliphs, sultans and presidents.

At the same time, al-Sharaa’s Salvation government was not intolerant of minorities. That was clear enough in his rapprochement with the Druze and Christians, but also his ban on the notorious jizya payments — a tax levied on non-Muslims for protection and exemption from military service.

By the time Damascus fell, Haenni and Drevon write, Syria’s minorities had gone from “dhimmis [protected minorities] no more” to “citizens not yet”. And if that hints at the ambiguous status they enjoy in the new Syria, al-Sharaa’s country is also being shaped by forces not directly under his control. Once again, the experience of Idlib is revealing here. Under years of Islamist rule, the rural hinterland had inevitably become more conservative. Meanwhile, Druze who had initially converted out of fear found that their children had forgotten the tenets of their faith, and prayed and fasted like Sunnis.

Yet if the Sunnification of northern Syria had begun long before the Assads finally fled, this must once again be tempered by al-Sharaa’s apparent moderation. When I last visited Idlib, in March 2025, it was a bustling town like any other, albeit with the occasional shop selling Kalashnikovs. There was no religious police enforcing the hijab, and shops remained open when the call for prayer came, just as they had before the revolution. Islamic laws were adhered to because people in Idlib — devout or not — accepted them. In post-Assad Damascus, too, life continued as before. In the Christian quarter of the Old City, alcohol was available in the bars, just as it had always been, and I suspect this will remain the case.

That’s shadowed elsewhere too. Al-Sharaa has repeatedly emphasized that the Syrian people are one. By March, when the interim government drafted its 2025 constitutional declaration, it confirmed that Syria would remain a republic, its president would be a Muslim and the republic’s source of law was Islamic jurisprudence. All the while, minorities and their personal beliefs were protected. All this is based on the 1973 constitution, and affirmed the secular social contract first drafted by the Assads.

Even so, and as the constitutional primacy of Muslims implies, Sunnis will ultimately shape Syria’s future. In many ways, it didn’t matter whether they’re Islamists, devout Sunnis or liberals. Most Syrian Sunnis, after all, are small “c” conservatives, traumatized by war and shaped by the fight against Assad. This has glued them together, allowing them to stand alone if need be.

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This Sunni supremacism has manifested itself in other ways too. For one thing, Friday sermons have become overtly Sunni in tone. Hezbollah — a Shia militant group — is referred to as Hizb al-Shaytan (“the party of the devil”). Black and white flags emblazoned with the Islamic declaration of faith, long associated with jihadists, are waved by Sunnis as they go about their business. When the bastion of traditional Sunnism Sheikh Osama al-Rifai — someone who has often disagreed with al-Sharaa in the past — returned from exile in January, he received a rockstar’s welcome. In fact, al-Sharaa appointed him the grand mufti of Syria.

All the while, the war’s aftershocks have continued to play out. In February, former Assadists tried to foment a counter-revolution of sorts, resulting in massacres of Alawites near the coastal city of Latakia. Sunni revanchism soon followed, and old scores were settled: former Assadists, paramilitaries and Alawite officers, who had raped and tortured Sunnis, were killed and buried in unknown graves. But so too were many innocent Alawites, simply caught up in the violence, with the sect increasingly seen as a fifth column. The Druze in Sweida have faced similar troubles. After the summer’s violence, Druze leaders accused al-Sharaa of siding with Sunni Bedouins: but then committed political suicide by calling for Israeli support and demanding self-determination. In the eyes of many Sunnis, they, like the Alawites, are edging towards treason.

In the end, though, Syria’s process of Sunnification will conclude only if Damascus manages to incorporate the Kurds into the new state. Most Kurds are Sunnis, and though they have spent years fighting the Arab majority, Damascus could probably bring them on board more easily than the country’s religious minorities. Mazloum Abadi — head of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and one of the de facto leaders of the Kurdish enclave in Syria’s north — is a formidable political operator. But he is fast running out of political road. For one thing, the PKK, the SDF’s sister organization in Turkey, has disbanded. For another, the US have abandoned Abadi in favor of al-Sharaa, and if the former seeks support from Israel, or allies himself with the Druze, he’ll soon become discredited. The SDF, then, are outgunned both militarily and diplomatically, and the resources required to restart another civil war seem politically out of reach.

Either way, each of these stories — Druze unrest, Alawite reprisals, Kurdish bargaining — all point the same way: towards a Sunni majoritarian state. That doesn’t mean Syria will become an Islamist theocracy. But it does likely mean that pluralism, minority rights and perhaps even democracy itself will operate within a conservative Sunni framework. Whether that’s better or worse for the exhausted people of Syria will probably depend on where and how you pray.

With Russian forces withdrawing in disarray, Washington wrong-footed, and Tehran neutered by Israel, Erdoğan appears the main winner from the extraordinary developments in Syria. Turkey’s own objectives in Syria are clear enough: liquidating the Kurdish presence on its border by establishing a 20-mile deep corridor of Turkish influence. In fact, it was reportedly Assad’s refusal to capitulate to this proposed violation of Syrian sovereignty which led Ankara to give an implicit green light to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s military operation. Aleppo, the first city to fall to HTS’s blitzkrieg advance, was a former jewel in the Ottoman Empire’s crown. After its capture, the Turkish flag flew from the Aleppo citadel once more.

Under Assad, the Kurds were written out of state politics — literally. Hundreds of thousands were denied Syrian identity papers, following a Sixties policy intended to “Arabise” the country’s north. In practice, that involved displacing the Kurds, described by an official as a “malignant tumour” in the body of the nation. Over more recent decades, Assad tolerated a militant Kurdish presence within Syria’s borders. The idea was to provoke nearby Turkey, a Nato member and key Western ally. Yet as the relationship between Damascus and Ankara warmed after the Cold War, that arrangement came to an end, and local Kurdish leaders were jailed or expelled. Many locals bear the scars of torture from those dark years, particularly after Assad’s security forces violently repressed a Kurdish uprising in 2005.

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The revolutionary Kurdish political movement has moved away from its Marxist-Leninist roots, instead advancing a unique model based on women’s autonomy, minority representation, and a nominally devolved system of municipal governance. That’s even as it retains a strict Leninist political culture, an ideological paradox which nonetheless allowed the Kurds to react swiftly following the 2011 outbreak of the Syrian civil war. Soon enough, they declared autonomy in Rojava, as Syrian Kurds refer to their homeland. During the brutal fight that followed, the Syrian Arab Republic spilled oceans of blood to keep Arab-majority cities in its grasp. That it quickly withdrew its forces from Kurdish areas, surrendering control to a ragtag militia, shows how little it cared about its nominally Kurdish citizens.

Beyond the Baath Party’s Arabist sentiments encouraging a dismissive view of Kurds, Assad likely felt able to ignore his country’s Kurds for other reasons. When compared with the Kurdish homelands in Iran, Iraq and Turkey, the arid badlands of Syrian Kurdistan were long dismissed as poor and undynamic. Yet the Kurds, bolstered by returning militants, battle-hardened during a dogged guerrilla war against Turkey, proved the only local force capable of defeating Islamic State. Along the way, they saved the Yazidis from genocide, and forged unexpected tactical partnerships with both Americans and local Arabs. As they drove Isis out of its former strongholds, including its erstwhile capital Raqqa, the Kurds helped forge a fragile multi-ethnic alliance alongside Arab Muslims, Yazidis, Christians, and other minorities. Known as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), this alliance has since faced existential threats. That includes a deadly Islamic State insurgency; sporadic battles against Assad; and successive military occupations launched by Turkey — with Ankara bitterly opposed to the project in Kurdish-led autonomy on its southern border.

Throughout this fraught process, constructing a quasi-state while espousing a determinedly anti-statist ideology, the Kurdish movement demonstrated a protean diplomatic adaptability, finding various accommodations with Assad, Islamist and secular opposition forces, the US and Russia. With Russian and Iranian troops stationed in western Kurdish regions, and the US, UK and France to the east, the Syrian Kurds were able to exploit tensions between the two blocs, and make themselves indispensable to both. Kurdish forces even mediated when US and Russian patrols clashed while establishing their respective zones of influence in 2019-2020: a striking illustration of their ability to profit from the chaos of great-power conflict.

This pragmatic spirit enabled the Kurds not merely to seek reconciliation with Arab tribal federations, which had formerly thrown their weight behind Isis, but also maintain a tense if functional détente with Assad and his Russian backers. The Syrian army, for its part, was generally confined to small administrative centres and garrisons in Rojava’s cities. This tension was made tangible in the complex, interlocking geography of Qamishli, where the Assad regime controlled some streets and the Kurdish movement others. Anarchist international volunteers would regularly pass Syrian regime soldiers in the street, each studiously ignoring the other.

But with Assad ignominiously dispatched to Moscow, the calculus has changed. After helping the West defeat Isis, to the tune of 10,000 dead Kurdish fighters, Syrian Kurdish representatives want to pay a key part in rebuilding Syria. Their involvement in Syria’s government would benefit Western strategic interests, securing an anti-Iranian axis while creating a counterweight against Islamist rule.

In practice, however, the situation seems grim: and Turkey is to blame. Up to 100,000 Kurds have already been displaced in the latest round of fighting. Yet that’s not the fault of HTS, whose campaign has been marked by relative restraint toward local minorities, but rather Ankara-backed militias taking advantage of the chaos to attack internally displaced Kurds and Yazidis. “The situation remains critical,” says Mohammed Sheikho, a local council leader who weathered attacks by Turkey’s jihadist proxies to lead thousands of people to safety in regions still under DAANES control. “Many thousands of [displaced people] remain outside. Houses are not to be found. We lack blankets, ways to keep warm, heaters, bread, food. Many other people were detained [by Turkish-backed forces], and their fate is unknown until now.”

Even worse, Turkish proxies, united under the banner of the Syrian National Army (SNA), are now staging a fresh assault on the DAANES heartland. To paraphrase Voltaire, these militias are neither Syrian, nor national, nor an army. Rather, they’re funded and armed by Turkey; dedicated to executing Turkish aims against the Kurds; and encompass a muddled collection of mostly jihadist militias, including some sanctioned by the US for war crimes.

Meanwhile, Turkish air power continues to pound the US’s Kurdish partners across the north-east. A Turkish drone strike has just killed 12 civilians, including six children, in the town of Ain Issa (despite Turkey’s posturing as a friend of the anti-Assad revolution, no drone strikes targeted Assad’s forces as they capitulated to HTS).

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The situation appears grave. Yet that same spirit of pragmatic cooperation, which has ultimately enabled the Kurdish movement to survive 13 years across one of the 21st century’s deadliest conflicts, could yet pave the way for an unexpected outcome. HTS and the DAANES are reportedly engaged in negotiations, with HTS so far seeming relatively restrained. But other forces are set to profit more directly from HTS’s rise to power. As Yusuf Can of the Wilson Center explains, though the DAANES could capitalise on their “relatively established” institutions, Turkey is “cautiously jubilant” at the prospect of using HTS to gain leverage with everyone from Trump to Iran.

What of the future? Will Turkey follow through on its threats of a cross-border operation to crush the Syrian Kurds for good? Or, given HTS’s unexpectedly conciliatory rhetoric towards minorities, perhaps there could be space for a multi-ethnic federation. If Turkey can, finally, be encouraged to end the communal bloodletting, a negotiated settlement encompassing all of Syria’s diverse populations could yet emerge. But despite these efforts, further bloodshed seems inevitable, with Donald Trump’s return to the White House unlikely to pour oil on troubled waters.

At the time of writing, Turkey’s proxy militias are advancing on Kobanî, the Syrian Kurdish city where the Kurds first turned the tide against Isis in 2014, launching their partnership with the US and UK. But 10 years on, with bands of Turkish-armed Islamists once again appearing over the horizon and swearing vengeance on the Kurds, their nominal Western allies are nowhere to be seen.

But when Israel’s air force counterattacked on 26 October, destroying targets in more than 20 locations across Iran, not one of its aircraft was even challenged. Exposed as vulnerable in its own capital, the Ayatollah regime is weaker than ever. And now, perhaps, the revolutionary wind that engulfed the Assad dictatorship could blow all the way to Tehran, as Iranians throw off their fundamentalist masters.

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The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be manoeuvred into fighting a war against Iran. Conscious of what had happened to Bush when he ordered the invasion of Iraq, Obama started his tenure by apologising for America’s erstwhile support for the Shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

As late as this January, when an Iranian drone killed three American soldiers in Jordan, there was no US retaliation against the Islamic Republic. Israel, too, was subject to Obama’s rule. On 13 April, Iran launched 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles against the Jewish State. Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Advisor and a former Obama official, was frantic as he acted to prevent any Israeli counterattack, implicitly threatening the loss of US military aid if Israel retaliated. A bewildered Pentagon official wondered if Sullivan had close relatives living in Tehran.

Yet no amount of US pressure could stop Israel’s final crushing of Hezbollah. It started on 27 September, with the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, alongside his entire high command. Iran’s response, a few days later, was massive: over 190 ballistic missiles, each the size of a fuel tanker truck, which might have killed thousands were it not for Israel’s unique Arrow interception system.

Once again, Sullivan tried to stop Israel’s retaliation, but this time he failed. On 25 October, Israel launched air strikes that revealed the extent of Iran’s weakness. IDF planes attacked Iranian targets at will, including a key missile production unit in the top-secret Parchin base, just 19 miles from Tehran. That was enough to prove to Iran’s enemies that there was no real strength behind its façade of strategic superiority. All the country had left were the Revolutionary Guards.

It fell to Mohammed al-Jawlani, head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, one of the several Syrian anti-regime groups, to test Iran’s residual power. He chose as his target Aleppo, historically Syria’s most important city and second in population only to the capital Damascus.

Al-Jawlani’s variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hezbollah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hezbollah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus Airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

That left Iran with no quick-reaction options at all: there was no other airport securely held by Assad’s collapsing forces. Nor could Iran risk trucking troops into Syria overland across Iraq. Not even its own Shi’a militias, with tens of thousands of armed men, could have secured their passage across Kurdish controlled north-east Syria.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenceless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hezbollah, clearly they cannot even defend themselves, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.

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Israel's plan to weaken the Iranian regime

By Edward Luttwak

If that happens, Iran’s long-forgotten regular armed forces, denied modern weapons and reduced to playing second fiddle behind the Revolutionary Guards, might also make their move. That would certainly decide the fate of the regime: if a sizeable part of their 350,000 men were to act. Nobody can know if regular Iranian officers and men are less inclined to support the dictatorship than the Revolutionary Guards, but Iran recently had elections in which the hard-line candidate was squarely defeated. Nor is there much evidence that Iran’s soldiers, sailors and airmen are enthusiasts for the regime that leaves them without any modern aircraft, land weapons or warships.

The fall of Iran’s dictatorship, which for so long has combined intense repression at home with aggression abroad, would not solve the Middle East’s problems overnight. But it would certainly liberate many Iranians, and finally end Iran’s support for murderous Shi’a militias from Iraq to Yemen. Syria, in short, could just be the start.