The long text written by Tom Barrack, the U.S. Envoy to Syria and Washington’s Ambassador to Ankara, published on his “X” platform page, in which he announced the end of cooperation with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) due to the presence of the “Syrian State as a partner in the war on terror,” represents a shift in American policy in the region. It returns everything achieved in the last ten years—in terms of undermining the ISIS organization and encircling its cells and ideology—back to square one. Barrack’s tweet coincided with the ground offensive by the Damascus authority factions in the Raqqa and Hasakah governorates, accompanied, as usual, by horrific crimes including the liquidation of civilians based on ethnic and religious identity, the killing of captive fighters, the mutilation of female fighters’ bodies, and the desecration of graves and shrines, as well as acts of sabotage, looting, and arson.
The Damascus authority had terminated the March 10, 2025 agreement when the authority’s Foreign Minister, Asaad al-Shaibani, stormed the “negotiation round” meeting held in Damascus on January 4, 2026, between General Mazloum Abdi, commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces, and Murhaf Abu Qasra, the Minister of Defense in the Interim Government. That meeting was discussing the integration of the SDF as divisions and brigades into the “New Syrian Army.” This occurred one day before the Paris meeting (held on January 5, 2026), where al-Shaibani and the head of the General Intelligence Service, Hussein al-Salama, met with the Israeli delegation represented by Tel Aviv’s Ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan attending in the backrooms as an overseer and decision-maker.
On January 9, 2026, factions affiliated with the Damascus authority attacked the Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhoods, violating an agreement struck with the SDF on April 1, 2025. Under that agreement, the SDF had withdrawn its fighters and heavy weapons from the two neighborhoods, leaving only security forces with light weapons who collaborated with the authority’s General Security. Joint checkpoints were formed, and cooperation occurred with the Governor of Aleppo regarding administrative affairs; prior to that, the two sides had exchanged detainees. The authority’s reversal of the agreement, its breach of commitments, and the decision to launch a brutal attack on the two civilian neighborhoods came after the signing of the Paris agreement with the Israeli side. In Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud, Damascus authority factions committed crimes, some of which were documented: they killed prisoners, mutilated bodies, and threw the corpse of a female Kurdish fighter from a height, in addition to displacing tens of thousands of Kurdish citizens and insulting and physically assaulting civilians.
On January 13, 2026, the Damascus authority launched an offensive—following media preparation from itself and supportive, directed Gulf media that carried a massive amount of lies and fabrications against the Kurds and the SDF—starting from the Maskana and Deir Hafer axes, despite the SDF’s announcement of withdrawal from these and other areas west of the Euphrates. The authority continued mobilizing tens of thousands of fighters from its affiliated factions, and shelling and strikes began hitting SDF units withdrawing from the west of the Euphrates. The Damascus authority saw the withdrawal as an opportunity to stab them in the back and create chaos among the withdrawing fighters. This was accompanied by a deliberate and systematic incitement campaign targeting the Kurdish component. The authority’s media, the auxiliary Gulf media, and Arabic-speaking Turkish media collaborated in flooding the media space and “news market” with fabricated reports intended to provoke ethnic confrontations between Kurds and Arabs in Raqqa and Hasakah.
The authority aimed to use this as a pretext to continue the offensive under the guise of “saving Arabs from the hands of Kurds,” mobilizing all Arabs behind it, especially after the bankruptcy of its Arabist narrative following the massacres it committed against Alawite Arabs on the coast and Druze Arabs in Damascus and Suwayda. The attack on Raqqa witnessed terrible violations against the Kurdish component. Persecution and abuse took place based on national affiliation, and the authority left no room for Kurdish residents to flee the city, which was entered by jihadists and pro-Turkish militants—those most prone to abuse and brutality against Kurdish citizens. Despite the agreements and truces concluded between the authority in Damascus and the SDF, factions affiliated with the authority’s army continued their attacks and tightened the siege on the Kobani region, which was cut off from electricity, water, and internet services. The region began suffering from a shortage of food supplies in clear preparation by the authority’s factions to storm and enter the area militarily.
Authority factions besieged the (Al-Aqtan) prison in Raqqa, where the SDF engaged in fierce clashes to thwart the factions’ attempt to release ISIS prisoners, as they had done at the Shaddadi prison and with thousands of ISIS family members in the Al-Hol camp, who were released. The authority also attempted to cover up its opening of prison doors for thousands of ISIS detainees by providing the United States with misleading information regarding their numbers, claiming the issue involved only 120 escaped prisoners and that it had arrested 90 of them!
For its part, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) announced that it had begun transferring ISIS detainees from Syrian prisons to prisons in Iraq “to ensure that terrorists remain in secure detention centers.” It is expected that the total number of ISIS detainees transferred from Syria to an Iraqi-controlled detention center will reach 7,000. It is clear from this position and procedure that the U.S. military does not trust the Damascus authority and does not view it as an honest or reliable party to hold such a large number of dangerous ISIS fighters. Therefore, it chose Iraq as the location for the new prisons, despite the U.S. administration—and particularly its representative in Syria, Tom Barrack—repeatedly stating that the authority in Damascus has become an “ally” against terrorism and is capable of fighting the organization’s cells, thus fulfilling the role previously played by the SDF and “replacing” it.
Barrack remains steadfast in this position, even though the first meeting between the authority and American military officials in Palmyra on December 13, 2025, witnessed an offensive operation carried out by a member of the authority’s General Security, resulting in the death of three American soldiers and the wounding of others. In other words, the beginning of Barrack’s joint “poem” with the authority of Ahmed al-Sharaa was an act of blatant betrayal.
The recent American stance toward the Kurds, the SDF, and the Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria—abandoning them despite their status as loyal and reliable allies who fought ISIS in Kobani, liberated Raqqa (which the organization had declared its capital), and sacrificed tens of thousands of fighters—and Washington’s blind bet on the Damascus authority, given its nature, suggests that the U.S. administration is pushing the entire region into a spiral of violence and chaos that may exceed Syria’s borders to reach neighboring countries, especially Lebanon and Iraq. Regardless of the details of what was agreed upon in the Paris meeting between the Damascus authority and Israel—which, according to the official announcement, resulted in “understandings” to form a “crisis cell” and intelligence and diplomatic cooperation—it is clear that the United States has decided to withdraw from Syria and leave the Syrians in the custody of the authority, fully knowing its reality, nature, and jihadist ideology. Whatever the reason behind this decision and the functional role to be assigned to the new ally, the “Syrian State” led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, the upcoming phase managed by this authority, under the supervision and follow-up of the United States, is the phase of “The Management of Savagery” in Syria, and perhaps the entire region, using and activating the role of the jihadists of the “Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham” authority led by Ahmed al-Sharaa.
The fact is, the United States is leaving Syria in the hands of an authority it knows is jihadist and based on the same ideological foundations and “theoretical premises” as ISIS; the dispute between the two organizations is purely worldly, based on control, influence, and governance. The whole world witnessed ISIS flags, “signs,” and “symbols” on the arms of Ahmed al-Sharaa’s authority jihadists. Furthermore, the crimes of mutilating bodies, killing prisoners, cutting the braids of Kurdish female fighters after liquidating them, destroying gravestones, and imposing the niqab on women and girls in the neighborhoods and cities entered by the authority’s factions have brought back memories of ISIS crimes and violations in Sinjar, Raqqa, Kobani, and elsewhere. Now, Syria is being handed over to a jihadist authority that releases “yesterday’s comrades” from among ISIS detainees in prisons, while its media—and the auxiliary Gulf media—portray the ISIS family members in the Al-Hol camp as “innocent civilians” whom “the SDF detained unjustly and without right.”
This is a new mission entrusted to an obscurantist jihadist authority, occupied with liquidating the sectarian, religious, and ethnic components of the Syrian people, seeking to build a centralized totalitarian state that rejects pluralism and diversity. This is a near-literal translation of what jihadist theorist Abu Bakr Naji presented in the “Management of Savagery” thesis, according to the stages: starting with “vexation and exhaustion,” moving through the “management of savagery,” and ending with the stage of “achieving power and empowerment” and completing the construction of the Islamic Emirate. The United States, represented by Tom Barrack, will oversee the building of this “functional state” that will be tasked with dirty missions in the region. It will cover for all stages of the ongoing “management of savagery” at the hands of the organization leading this “state,” and will even facilitate these stages with money and diplomacy, without any regard for the life, freedom, dignity, safety, and future of the Syrian people.
