For more than a decade, they were the United States’ closest allies in Syria, fighting against the Islamic State, guarding American bases and running internment camps and prisons that held tens of thousands of jihadists and their relatives.
That alliance is now disintegrating. The United States has turned away from its longtime allies, the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., and thrown its support behind the new government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa.
Without U.S. backing, the S.D.F., a Kurdish-led force, has wobbled and beaten a retreat as the government moves troops into northeastern Syria to seize control, ending a standoff that has endured since President al-Sharaa took power in December 2024.
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The collapse of the S.D.F. marks a turning point in Syria’s political transition after the fall of former President Bashar al-Assad and now paves the way for the government to take over the strategic region, its oil fields and rich agricultural lands.
The pivot by Washington is a huge win for Mr. al-Sharaa, who has struggled to pull the country back together, as well as for Turkey, which vehemently opposed American support for the S.D.F. and backed Mr. al-Sharaa.
But for the S.D.F. and its supporters, including U.S. officials who worked closely with the group, it feels like a betrayal of those who fought loyally alongside the United States and lost many thousands of combatants in the process.
The bleakness of the S.D.F. position was laid out by Ilham Ahmed, a senior leader of the Kurdish-led civilian administration in northeastern Syria, when she appealed at a news conference last week for the United States to stop playing both sides and to take a clear position to stop an offensive against its positions by Syrian government forces.
“If there is no reaction it is easy to presume they gave a green light,” she said of the American position on the government offensive. “They should take a clear stance.”
Ms. Ahmed also appealed for wider international support to enforce a cease-fire and support the political demands of the Kurdish administration. But she said that Arab states supported the al-Sharaa government and that reactions from European countries had been weak.
“The entire world owes these troops who fought against ISIS,” she said.
The S.D.F. was born following the terrifying rise of the Islamic State, which took over a swath of territory straddling the Syria-Iraq border in 2013 and built a so-called caliphate on a harsh interpretation of Islamic law and sheer brutality.
Seeking a way to fight the group without putting American troops on the front lines, the United States partnered with a Kurdish militia. It air dropped weapons to help break the siege of the Kurdish town of Kobani in 2014, and the partnership expanded from there.
For the U.S., it made sense. The fighters were well trained, not Islamist, and eager to work with American troops. In time, with U.S. financial and military support, they grew, added Arab fighters and rebranded themselves as the Syrian Democratic Forces (although there was very little about them that was actually democratic).
With logistical and air support from the United States and others, the S.D.F. destroyed the ISIS caliphate, pushing the group from its last patch of territory in Syria in 2019.
It continued to work with the United States to prevent the resurgence of ISIS and provide security across northeastern Syria with a force of tens of thousands of men and women under arms.
That alliance angered Turkey, who saw the group as no more than an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a Kurdish militant group that has fought a bloody, 30-year insurgency against the Turkish state.
It also angered Syrian rebel groups and activists for imposing Kurdish rule over Arab-majority areas and doing its own deals with the Assad regime.
The rebel offensive that toppled the Assad regime in December 2024, changed the paradigm for the Kurds. The United States established close ties with Mr. al-Sharaa and sought to bring the two groups to work together.
The U.S. ambassador to Turkey and envoy for Syria, Thomas J. Barrack Jr., led the negotiations and secured an agreement between Mr. al-Sharaa and the Kurdish leader of the S.D.F., Mazloum Abdi, in March last year.
But those negotiations stalled and missed the deadline for S.D.F. to integrate its armed units and administration into the Damascus government by the end of 2025.
Mr. al-Sharaa complained that the Kurdish side kept augmenting its demands while making no move to withdraw from Arab-majority areas. The Kurdish leaders said they were holding out for security guarantees for their people in light of sectarian killings elsewhere in Syria.
In the end Mr. al-Sharaa lost patience and moved to seize control of two Kurdish-held neighborhoods in the city of Aleppo. From there Syrian forces moved rapidly, securing two large provincial capitals of Raqqa and Deir al-Zour in recent days.
Newaf Xelil, an analyst at the Berlin-based Kurdish Center for Studies, said the swift advance of Mr. al-Sharaa’s forces in recent weeks had been enabled by the full embrace of his government by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United States.
That has baffled many in the S.D.F., he said, who still distrust Mr. al-Sharaa and many of his fighters for their past links to Islamic militancy and jihadism.
Mr. al-Sharaa was sent to Syria from Iraq more than a decade ago by the leader of the Islamic State, where he founded a Qaeda-affiliated rebel group. He later broke with Al Qaeda but has never fully renounced the group.
The Kurds, given their more secular outlook, could help dilute the Islamist character of Syria’s new government, Mr. Xelil said, a goal many thought that the United States shared.
“We thought that they wanted Syria to become a normal government with an army not made up of jihadists,” he said, adding that it could have helped Syria reconcile with Israel.
The fighting in recent days could complicate the merger of S.D.F. fighters into the new security forces, he said.
He criticized Mr. Barrack, the U.S. envoy, for his full-throated support for Damascus. Mr. Barrack wrote on social media on Tuesday that the S.D.F.’s role had “expired.”
The Kurds had hugely miscalculated, Asli Aydintasbas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, wrote in a WhatsApp message.
“While the U.S. has never promised a Catholic marriage to the S.D.F., there was a sense that the relationship would continue and seamlessly merge into a more decentralized Syrian structure. All of that planning is now meaningless.”
President Trump showed his ambivalence to the Kurdish position in comments to the media on Tuesday, while he commended Mr. al-Sharaa’s efforts to control the situation and secure prisons where thousands of ISIS members are detained.
“He is working very hard, the president of Syria,” Mr. Trump said.
“I spoke with him yesterday because we were talking about the prisons, and what was going on. We have some of the worst terrorists in the world in those prisons, and he is watching it.”
But the U.S. Central Command announced Wednesday that it had transported 150 ISIS fighters detained in the city of Hasakah to a facility in Iraq, to prevent a breakout, a sign of growing security concerns.
Mr. Trump said the U.S. was also working to protect the Kurds. “I like the Kurds,” he said. “But just so you understand, the Kurds were paid tremendous amounts of money, given oil and other things, so they were doing it for themselves more than they were doing this for us. But we got along with the Kurds and we are trying to protect the Kurds.”
Hussam Hammoud contributed reporting from Syria.
Ben Hubbard is the Istanbul bureau chief, covering Turkey and the surrounding region.
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