Updated April 18, 2026 at 5:00 AM CDT
QAMISHLI, Syria — The former dividing line between Syrian government territory and Syrian Kurdish forces — a landmark previously approached with caution in this north eastern city — is now a busy street.
There is no trace of the photo of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad or its menacing message reading "they fought you and forget who your father was." The father, of course, was Hafez al-Assad, Syria's long-time ruler, whose name became synonymous with massacres of his own people.
The decades-old Assad regime was toppled in December 2024 by Turkish-backed Syrian Arab opposition fighters. Twelve years earlier, the Kurds broke away from Syrian regime control, establishing an autonomous region known as Rojava, envisioned as an island of secular democracy in the Middle East.
This January, Turkish-backed Syrian government forces, eager to integrate the region and its oil resources, advanced and pushed Kurdish fighters back into a small fraction of the territory they had previously held.
Now the Kurds are now being unwillingly absorbed into the new Syria taking shape under the wing of Turkey — which fought its own war with Kurds for decades — and the United States.
Kurdish losses spark sense of U.S. betrayal
Kurdish fighters along with the U.S. defeated the militant group ISIS in 2019. Syrian Kurds say more than 10,000 of their fighters were killed. This year after the Syrian government sent their troops to take back Kurdish territory, the United States said it no longer needed the Kurds' help.
The last of the 2,000 U.S. troops stationed in Syria withdrew this week. The final convoy departed on Thursday, bringing a decade-long U.S. military presence in the country to an end.
"At the end the Americans just follow their interests and we can't expect anything different from them," says Nowruz Ahmed, deputy head of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which runs the Kurdish-led region. "But this is not how it should have happened."
"The important thing is that we will stick to the agreement," she says, referring to a U.S.-brokered ceasefire which largely ended fighting with Syrian government forces in January.
"We don't want an internal fight between the Syrians to take place again," Ahmed says.
Under the ceasefire, what had been known as the Democratic Autonomous Region of North and East Syria will no longer control their borders or oil and gas resources. In exchange they have promises of Kurdish rights denied to them for decades by the previous regime.
Worry and uncertainty in Syria's Kurdish region
At a tiny cafe in Qamishli's covered market, Mohammad Bzara sets down plates of thick water buffalo cream with local honey and pillowy fresh bread.
It's a lavish but traditional breakfast here. Music by iconic Lebanese singer Fairuz plays in the background — an indication of the intertwining of Arab and Kurdish culture.
Qamishli is historically one of the most multi-ethnic Syrian cities. Armenian and Assyrian Christians fleeing massacres and genocide by the Ottoman Empire settled there in the 1920. For the past half-century, it has been majority Kurdish.
The autonomous region founded in 2012 aspired to be multi-ethnic, secular, democratic and gender-equal — remarkable aspirations in the conservative Middle East. Some of that will be lost as it is absorbed into the Syrian Arab Republic.
"No one knows what is going to happen next," says Bzara, the cafe owner, who is Kurdish. "It's not just me, everyone is afraid that there will be no stability, no security, that there will be killings and looting."
Although it's a school day, Bzara's sons — aged 10 and 14 — are working in the cafe. Public schools here have been closed since January to accommodate hundreds of Kurdish families displaced by the fighting between Syrian government forces and Kurdish fighters.
Dangers from the Iran war intrude on Syria
Although far from the battleground, the Iran war has also affected this corner of Syria.
A few miles from Qamishli, the pastoral scene of bright green spring wheat and grazing sheep and goats is broken by the tail fin of a large rocket rising up from the ground.
It's been there since the rocket slammed into the field in early March amid attacks between Iran and Israel and is now such a fixture that children climb inside the non-explosive shell casing to play.
"Iran attacks from the east and Israel attacks from the west and we are in the middle," says Akram Abdul Ghani, 60, a transportation ministry employee who was at work the morning the rocket slammed into the ground.
The region is known as Rojava in Kurdish — a name which incorporates the word 'west' and refers to a dream of a Kurdish state that would include Kurdish regions of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran.
Here too, in this village near the M-4 highway where U.S. armored vehicles rumbled by for years, there is a sense of betrayal.
"Honestly, the international coalition abandoned us to face great dangers alone, whether from the tribes or the Syrian government," says Abdul Ghani. "Is this our reward for defeating ISIS with U.S. forces?"
Arab tribes turn against the Kurds
For years, the region held together despite threats from the Syrian regime, Russian forces, Turkish-backed fighters, and ISIS - largely thanks to support from the U.S. and key Arab tribes.
The most influential was the Shammar tribal confederation, which predates and still transcends national borders here. In January, Sheikh Manaa Hamidi al-Jorba, known as the prince of the Shammar, directed his fighters to switch sides and fight with Syrian government forces.
At his palace near the Iraqi border, al-Jorba sheikh Manaa Hamidi al-Jarba, explains why:
"There is no such thing as belonging to one side," he says, sitting behind a huge desk in his marble palace, flanked by images of his late father and a crystal whisky bottle he says was a gift from the C.I.A. "An alliance comes in the form of sometimes temporary tactics and sometimes a long strategic program."
A saddle from one of his many Arabian horses hangs near the entrance to a meeting hall that accommodates hundreds.
"We have an obligation to protect our people and our region. To protect their dignity and their land," he says.
A changing security landscape
One of the most visible changes since January are the hundreds of oil tankers barrelling
on to highways on their way to Damascus from Syria's northern oil fields.
Kurds here are afraid that they will lose even more of their hard-won gains under the ceasefire.
Kurdish forces have agreed to become part of the Syrian army. But the Syrian government has rejected the formation of distinct Kurdish brigades. And the conservative Arab government has also refused to incorporate Kurdish female fighters, despite their key role in defending the Kurds and religious minorities.
"Of course there will be hugely negative changes that will affect our region," says Fawza Ahmed, a commander of the wing of female fighters and a member of the negotiating committee with Damascus. "Especially for women's rights and for the representation of different ethnicities."
Minority fears in the new Syria
The Syrian government is headed by Ahmed al-Sharaa, a one-time al-Qaeda commander. He emphasizes he has renounced that ideology but his background and that of many of his fighters has left many minority groups worried.
Yazidis, the ancient religious minority that was the target of genocide by ISIS are terrified that without the protection of the Kurds, ISIS could return. Many worry about Syrian government forces who were originally Islamist militant fighters.
"The danger is not over in Syria," says Israel Delf, a Yazidi leader in the Jazira region of northeast Syria. "They have the base and the mentality — if they have the opportunity to do so, nothing will stop them," he says of violence by Syrian government fighters.
Since the regime fell in late 2024, there have been mass killings in minority areas including Allawites — the sect of foreign leader Bashar al-Assad and the Druze, another influential religious minority in Syria.
Christians, in one of the countries that first embraced Christianity, have been leaving in greater numbers after the bombing of a Damascus church.
Sharaa has pledged to punish any security forces involved in killings.
Zainab Ahmad Nasro, an elderly Yazidi woman, is in a garden in the village of Brazan. She keeps her eyes on the ground as she pulls up clumps of chamomile, a medicinal herb.
She is from the Kurdish city of Afrin — taken over by Turkish-backed fighters in 2018. She and her husband were displaced and her husband has been missing for four years.
"We escaped again," she says. "But they took my husband and he's been missing until now. And I think they killed him."
There is no proof though and it haunts her. In the village near Afrin they had what she describes as a beautiful life — a farmhouse and sheep and their own well.
Like many others here, she says she does not accept Sharaa's promises to protect minorities, and she is afraid of Arab Islamist fighters who believe that Yazidis are infidels.
"I don't trust all the agreements that they are making," she says. "They have agreements, but they're fighting each other. We are Yezidis. They are our enemies. They want to kill us."
Kurds set aside differences in face of threats
Kurds form one of the world's largest ethnic groups without their own state but have faced long faced internal divisions as well as external threats.
A more unified stance emerged after Syrian government military operations in January. Particularly important, Iraqi Kurdish leaders across the border set aside their differences to offer political and humanitarian support.
"The Kurds have unified because of these attacks," says Mohammad Salih at a stall selling Kurdish flags in the Qamishli market. At 45, he is old enough to remember how selling or waving the flags would be grounds for arrest under the Assad regime.
This year the market is full not just of the emblem of Syria's Kurdish region but the traditional white, yellow and green flag with a yellow sun that is a symbol of Kurdish unity across borders.
More than a decade of self-rule has instilled in a generation of Syrian Kurds here a strengthened sense of identity.
In the market, Eva Shekmos, 18, has just finished exams and is having a dress made for the Kurdish new year which mirrors the spring equinox.
She wears a confident smile and pendant in the shape of Kurdistan around her neck. The dress she is having made will be the colors of the Kurdish flag.
Shakmos says she plans to be a Kurdish teacher. Had she gone to school before the Kurds broke away from the Syrian government, she would have been educated almost entirely in Arabic.
"I think the Rojava future is bright," she says, using the Kurdish name for Syria's Kurdish region. "Before as Kurds we were not unified. Now we are," she says.
Copyright 2026 NPR
