Mick Hartley

The new regime in Syria seemed at first to be a welcome change from the chaos and brutality of the Assad years, but it wasn’t long before tales of violence against minority groups emerged….Alawites, the Druze, and in particular the Kurds. Giran Ozcan in Fathom – How Syria’s transition went off the rails:

It is easy, and wrong, to find simple causes for the recent violence in Syria. Examples include claiming that al-Shaara is taking orders from Turkey to attack the Kurds, or that the Kurds are being maximalist by seeking to retain the SDF and their self-rule in the north east.

Instead, the anti-Kurdish campaign of 2026 and the violence against other minorities in 2025 are part of al-Sharaa’s four point playbook.

First, al-Sharaa and the Syrian transitional government possess an extreme Islamist mindset. The interim constitution makes Islamic jurisprudence “the principal source of legislation,” meaning that the state will be run on religious principles.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem. The new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, may have scrubbed up nicely to give the impression that he’s put his Al Qaeda past behind him, but he’s still an Islamist.

Also concerning is that western support for al-Sharaa and his “unified” Syria impedes the post-9/11 struggle against Islamist extremism and jihadism. The unified, unaccountable Syria that al-Sharaa is building will have the same results in the future as such a state had in the past – repression, corruption, and extremism. U.S. policy after 9/11 was to push for openness and reform in the Middle East. Although Obama and subsequent presidents dropped George W. Bush’s emphasis on democracy, there remained an understanding that Islamist extremism and jihadism constitute threats to the United States and its friends. The alliance with the Kurds was a logical outcome of this policy. All the strands of Kurdish nationalism are hostile to Islamist extremism and jihadism as they deny Kurdish identity. The Syrian Kurds are particularly averse to Islamist extremism as they believe that the most powerful means of economic and social development is the empowerment of women. Any attempt to drop the Kurds as security partners and to rely on the goodwill of jihadis could be a fatal error.