Syria’s Kurds: abandoned by their US ally

Syria is at a “major turning point”, said Noura Doukhi in L’Orient-Le Jour (Beirut). When the current president Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former leader of the Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), ousted the dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 after 13 years of civil war, he inherited a country splintered into different spheres of control. The most formidable of these was Syrian Kurdistan, known as Rojava – a semi-autonomous territory in the northeast run for more than a decade by Kurdish-led groups.