WhatsappNorthern Syria is not just collapsing—it’s exposing a lie Washington desperately tried to sell: that Abu Mohammad al-Julani had become a “responsible state actor.” The past 72 hours buried that fiction under Kurdish corpses.
Videos now circulating from areas seized west of Tabqa show Julani’s fighters piling Kurdish bodies onto white pickup trucks and bragging over them like trophies. (reported/unverified) The imagery is grotesquely familiar—celebration over slaughter, filmed intimidation meant to terrorize a community into flight. Anyone in Israel who watched October 7 recognizes the psychological warfare immediately. This is not a rogue militia losing discipline. This is ideological theater. ISIS wrote the script; Julani is performing it.
And the timing is not accidental. While CENTCOM is striking ISIS across Syria to prevent the group from exploiting instability, Julani’s forces are manufacturing instability by smashing the SDF—the very force guarding ISIS detention camps. The U.S. said it plainly on January 10 when it warned that operations aim to “deny ISIS the ability to exploit instability.” Washington understood the risk. It just chose not to stop the man creating it.
Even worse: reports from Deir ez-Zor indicate Islamist prisoners are being released by Julani’s men. (reported/unverified) If even partially true, that is not “collateral chaos”—that is ISIS methodology. Empty the cages. Flood the battlefield with radicals. Overwhelm local control. Julani is not fighting ISIS. He is recycling it under a state flag.
Let’s stop pretending this is complicated. Julani didn’t evolve. He rebranded. HTS was Al-Qaeda’s Syrian arm. Its leadership never repented, never disarmed, never changed doctrine—it simply swapped logos and learned to talk to diplomats. Now, as Kurdish towns fall and Islamist detainees walk free, the mask is off.
This is where Trump’s Syria policy implodes under its own naïveté. Influenced heavily by envoy Tom Barrack’s push to normalize engagement with Julani’s government, Washington bought into the fantasy that empowering Damascus would stabilize Syria and weaken Iran. Instead, it green-lit a jihadist consolidation campaign against America’s only reliable anti-ISIS partner. Barrack’s “realism” became abandonment. Trump didn’t betray the Kurds out of hostility—he betrayed them out of miscalculation, trusting that Julani would prioritize governance over ideology. The result: Kurdish collapse, ISIS risk, Turkish expansion, Islamist momentum.
And make no mistake—Turkey is the architect here. Ankara couldn’t openly invade again without backlash, so it weaponized Julani as its Kurdish extermination arm. Erdogan removes the Kurdish buffer without firing a Turkish shot. Washington lets it happen. And America’s Kurdish allies pay the price—again—while U.S. officials issue statements and go home for the weekend.
Momentum now favors Julani completely. Town after town is falling. Kurdish defensive lines are thinning. ISIS prisons are destabilizing. If the U.S. does not intervene decisively, Damascus will finish what Turkey started and erase Kurdish territorial control west of the Euphrates.
This is the moment Israel must quietly but unmistakably enter the equation—not with press releases, but with leverage. Israel has no territorial stake in Raqqa, but it has a strategic stake in preventing a jihadist belt from stretching unbroken from Idlib to the Druze south. A crushed Kurdish buffer means Islamist forces freed to project power east, south, and eventually toward Jordan and the Golan perimeter.
Jerusalem has already proven it can operate deep inside Syria when red lines are crossed. The Kurds, like the Druze, are not enemies of Israel; they are secular minorities standing between the region and Islamist expansion. Israel can assist indirectly—intelligence passed through American channels, pressure on Washington to re-engage militarily, and deterrent messaging to Ankara that further ethnic cleansing will trigger consequences. Even limited Israeli signaling changes calculations: Turkey fears Israeli unpredictability more than U.S. statements.
And here’s the part Western analysts still whisper instead of saying aloud: once Islamist regimes succeed in removing one minority autonomy zone, they move to the next. The Druze in Sweida are watching the Kurds’ fate as a preview reel. Israel already declared it will not allow harm to come to the Druze. But deterrence works only if it is believed early—not after pickup trucks start filling in the south.
Julani has shown exactly who he is. The videos, the prisoner releases, the ideological fingerprints—they are not echoes of ISIS. They are continuity.
Washington empowered the wrong “strongman.” The Kurds are bleeding for it. Israel understands the pattern. And unless someone stops Julani now, Syria won’t just lose the Kurds—it will gain ISIS 2.0 under state protection.
