President Trump’s tactic of “flooding of the zone” has focused much of the public sphere on issues and events generated by the president’s interests and whims, driving the suffering of millions of people into oblivion. Deserved attention is paid to Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, his intervention into Venezuela, the imposition of arbitrary and punitive tariffs on European allies, and the assault of ICE on Minneapolis. But the White House distracts and diverts attention away from the agony of Gaza and Ukraine, Trump’s undermining of the rule of law, the corruption and enrichment of his family and friends, and the crisis over affordability.

Trump’s comfort with strongmen and dictators and his hostility toward democrats, liberals, and socialists have distorted international affairs in fundamentally disruptive ways. A prime example—largely marginalized in the public sphere—is the fate of an ally of the Americans whom Trump is ready to betray once again: the Kurds of Syria.

As a scholar of nationalism and ethnic conflict who has written extensively on the history of Turks and Kurds, including the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians during World War I, and as a Kurdish teacher of philosophy deeply troubled by what is about to befall his people across the border not far from his hometown in southeastern Turkey, we are convinced that the impending tragedy awaiting the Syrian Kurds can be prevented—but only if the United States acts honorably to protect a people who have sacrificed their lives to carry out the US mission to defeat ISIS, the brutal jihadist movement that terrorized Syria, Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East.

The Kurds are a nation without a state of their own. Since World War I, the Kurdish people have repeatedly been used as a tool by global powers—supported when convenient, abandoned when no longer useful. Through a century of fragmentation and suffering, tens of millions of Kurds, divided across several states—Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Armenia, each with its own “Kurdish Question”—have been seen as a problem rather than a nation entitled to self-determination. Divided by state borders, oppressed by fellow Muslims, and unable even to study in their own native language in schools in Turkey and Iran, the Kurds have endured systematic erasure.

For generations, Kurds have tried every path offered to live freely on their own land and with basic dignity. They have pursued armed struggle, achieving little beyond further destruction and loss. They have tried negotiations, peaceful compromise, and legal and political participation within systems that call themselves democratic, but their civil rights and representation have consistently been blocked. Within the states they live in, Kurdish politicians have given up their struggle for full independence and focused their efforts on securing autonomy within Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. But they have received little in return—no lasting protections, no recognition of their rights, and no significant measure of justice. Kurds have often been described as “the orphans of the world,” left without reliable allies in moments of crisis.

In Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers Party has given up armed opposition; its founder, Abdullah Öcalan, languishes on a prison island in the Marmara Sea; and those Kurdish political leaders not yet imprisoned by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are desperately trying to work out a program of rights and recognition with the Ankara government.

In Iraq, Kurds—dominated by authoritarian clans—have secured unrecognized and embattled autonomy in the north of that fractured country, but any attempts at independence have been opposed internationally.

In Syria alone, during the 14 years of civil war between the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad and Islamist and other insurgents, the Kurds—who make up 10 percent of Syria’s population—formed an autonomous, relatively democratic regional government: the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, known in Kurdish as Rojava (Western Kurdistan). Its ideological foundations and efforts at direct democracy arose from commitments to socialism and feminism. Kurdish armed forces, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), commanded by women as well as men, fought alongside Americans against ISIS beginning in 2014, as ISIS seized much of northeastern Syria. With the SDF on the ground, and American air power, weapons supplies, and intelligence, ISIS was effectively defeated as a coherent movement by 2017.

Kurds ruled large swaths of Syria inhabited primarily by Arabs rather than Kurds, while at the same time resisting horrendously brutal incursions launched from Turkey by migrant anti-Kurdish Syrians.

The new Syrian government of Ahmed al-Sharaa, which came to power in late 2024, sought to centralize its authority throughout the country and demanded that the Kurds disband their militias and have their fighters join the Syrian national army individually. Kurds feared such a move would destroy their ability to defend their endangered autonomy. After a year of negotiations, government advances drove Kurdish fighters out of Aleppo. The Syrian Kurds agreed to a ceasefire—one of many—but it soon broke down.