In north-eastern Syria, the people who helped dismantle ISIS’s self-declared “caliphate” are being asked, again, to pay for someone else’s plan.
For years, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces were the main ground partner to the Global Coalition to defeat ISIS in Syria. They fought the group street by street, then guarded prisons and camps holding tens of thousands tied to it. They kept a detention system running that the outside world needed, while the legal and political end state was deferred.
Now the SDF is being pressed into a rapid handover of territory and detention sites under an integration deal with Damascus. Integration could reduce fragmentation and impose clearer rules. But rushed integration, without monitoring or safeguards, can turn fragile containment into a scramble for control.
What changed this month is not ISIS’s strength. It is Washington’s signal. US envoy Tom Barrack said the original purpose of the SDF had “largely expired”, and called integration into the Syrian state the Kurds’ “greatest opportunity”. Damascus heard that time was on its side.
The first collision is the detention system.
The SDF has guarded prisons holding more than 10,000 ISIS members and overseen camps holding tens of thousands more. The system is imperfect, but it has been coherent: the force that fought ISIS also held its detainees.
Transition has broken that coherence. In Shaddadi, recent reporting put an escape during the handover at about 200 detainees described as “low-level” ISIS members, with many later recaptured; other accounts cited a smaller figure and a similar pattern of partial recapture. Control shifts create openings, and every escape is both a security risk and a propaganda win.
In Raqqa, Syrian officials announced they had taken control of Al Aqtan Prison, formerly under SDF authority, with public reporting still unclear about custody arrangements and perimeter security as control changes hands.
Washington’s response was urgent – and revealing. Last Wednesday, US Central Command announced a mission that began with the transfer of 150 ISIS detainees from Hasakah to Iraq, with the stated aim of eventually moving up to 7,000 to Iraqi-controlled facilities. Put simply, the US helped build a detention architecture in north-eastern Syria, then seemingly concluded that it could not trust Damascus to inherit it, so it began moving the problem across a border.
That may reduce immediate risk. But it also underscores a policy that was never finished. The world relied on the SDF to hold ISIS’s remnants, then refused to do the hard parts: repatriate foreign nationals, fund credible courts and evidence systems, and build a path beyond indefinite detention. The Kurds did not create ISIS. They were left holding its ruins.
If the new plan is to transfer detainees to Syrian state custody or relocate thousands to Iraq, the unanswered questions are the core of the problem: who prosecutes, under which laws, using what evidence; who pays for secure detention; and who is accountable when prisons become leverage or control fractures.
The second collision is civilian protection.
Washington is leaning on an interim government in Damascus led by Ahmad Al Shara, who has been described in major reporting as a former commander in an Al Qaeda-linked faction before recasting himself as a national leader. Kurds and other minorities point to reports of abuses by government-aligned forces elsewhere in Syria and fear that “integration” can become cover for coercion if armed factions are not controlled.
Responsibility for this does not sit with the SDF for not guarding ISIS detainees forever, or with Kurdish civilians for wanting safety. It sits with the governments that built a counter-ISIS system around one partner and then treated that partner as disposable.
If Washington and its allies want to claim that they are protecting the Kurds, protection must be more than advice to sign away leverage. It has to be enforceable terms.
Start with a phased, conditional handover of detention sites. Transfers should proceed only when clear chains of command are in place, vetted units hold perimeter security and independent monitors have access. Security co-operation should be tied to custody standards, not to calendar deadlines.
Set and enforce limits on militia entry into Kurdish areas, backed by real consequences for documented abuses.
Stop outsourcing the legal burden. Accelerate repatriation and prosecution where possible, and fund credible courts and evidence work where it is not. Leaving thousands in limbo breeds grievance.
There is a temptation to treat Syria’s north-east as a file to be closed: integrate, hand over, move on. That is how ISIS’s afterlife becomes someone else’s crisis. A rushed consolidation that weakens the force that has contained ISIS detainees is not a strategy. It is a gamble.
Syria’s unity may be a long-term aim. But unity imposed without safeguards will not look like national recovery, it’s a recipe for disaster for minorities. Autonomy in the north-east was not partition. It was a workable compromise in a fractured state, and it helped prevent ISIS from regenerating in the space where governance collapsed.
If Kurdish communities and other minorities are asked to surrender leverage in the name of Syria’s future, the price cannot be their safety, it must be their protection. The fight against ISIS was never only about defeating a group on a battlefield. It was about preventing its return. That work is being put at risk now by haste, wishful thinking and a familiar willingness to let the Kurds pay the bill.
