OPINION:
While the world watches Iran and the risk of wider regional confrontation, another crisis is quietly accelerating in Syria, exposing the growing costs of Washington’s unresolved Syria policy and its tolerance for territorial disunity.
That cost became clear on Jan. 4, when the collapse of talks between Damascus and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces reignited violence in Aleppo, underscoring a warning Washington can no longer afford to ignore: Syria’s prolonged fragmentation has become an untenable status quo and a growing strategic liability with consequences that extend well beyond Syria’s borders.
By Jan. 6 the impact was visible on the ground. Fighting between Syrian forces and the SDF escalated in the Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiya neighborhoods, with sustained shelling striking residential areas. Historic Christian quarters were among the damaged districts, a reminder of how quickly political stalemates erupt into human tragedy.
The talks were intended to integrate armed forces and dismantle autonomous military structures. However, failing to meet the Dec. 31 deadline has perpetuated a dangerous pattern: a frozen conflict that periodically thaws into violence, drawing civilians into disputes they have no power to resolve.
This impasse directly affects Syria’s most vulnerable communities, including the Aramean (Syriac) Christians.
Arameans descend from the ancient Aramaic-speaking civilization that founded the biblical Kingdom of Aram-Damascus, with Aleppo itself known in Scripture as Aram-Zobah. They have lived continuously in Syria for more than 3,000 years. They are custodians of Aramaic, the language of Jesus and a living bridge to Syria’s pluralistic past.
Since the Assad government ceded authority in 2012, northeast Syria has remained under de facto People’s Protection Units (YPG) control, later formalized through the SDF. During this period, Aramean communities have faced mounting pressure, including property confiscation, forced conscription, interference in Aramaic schools and threats to both secular and religious leaders.
These are governance failures that hollow out pluralism and drive population flight. As the violence in Aleppo demonstrates, these unsettled arrangements serve only to ignite instability that now threatens to spread to the northeast.
The departure of indigenous communities is often permanent; once these locally rooted populations vanish, they do not return. Iraq provides a sobering precedent: the erasure of Aramean Christians did not lead to stability but to a hollowed-out society prone to radicalization and perpetual disorder.
Syria risks following this same path, losing the very people who serve as a vital bulwark against both Islamic extremism and Marxist-Leninist radicalism, and a cornerstone for future economic recovery.
The unresolved status of the SDF also heightens the risk of conflict beyond Syria’s internal front lines. Turkey has repeatedly warned that the YPG, which dominates the SDF’s command structure, operates as the Syrian branch of the PKK, a group also designated as a terrorist organization by the United States.
Ankara views the presence of such an autonomous armed entity along its southern border as an existential security threat. Under the first Trump administration, Washington acknowledged these concerns and tacitly permitted targeted cross-border security operations by its NATO ally.
As long as a non-state armed force controls roughly a third of Syria’s territory outside the internationally recognized authority of the central government, the risks of fragmentation and renewed escalation remain high. Syria’s Christian population, already reduced to a small fraction of its pre-war size, cannot endure another cycle of displacement without risking the near-total disappearance experienced by ancient Aramean communities in neighboring Iraq.
Washington now faces a choice. The Trump administration has a pivotal opportunity to rectify the strategic errors of the past. For years, the Obama-era orthodoxy shielded the SDF from legitimate criticism. U.S. Envoy to Syria Tom Barrack recently suggested that Syria needs a “shared highway toward security.”
In practice, this road cannot be paved on a foundation of unaccountable armed enclaves. Acknowledgment of past cooperation against the Islamic State group must no longer serve as a blank check for parallel structures that undermine Syrian sovereignty and leave historic minorities in a perpetual crossfire.
A unified Syrian state, however imperfect, offers a more sustainable framework for accountability and minority protection than a patchwork of armed enclaves. American leverage remains decisive. Any U.S. engagement — whether diplomatic, military or tied to sanctions relief – should be conditioned on two clear and verifiable outcomes: the genuine integration of SDF forces into a national military framework without the retention of autonomous armed units and enforceable legal protections for indigenous groups.
The survival of the Arameans, Syria’s oldest continuous indigenous people, is not a sectarian concern. It is a litmus test of whether Syria’s future will be genuinely pluralistic or will simply revert to a system that reproduces the failures of its past.
The window for decisive action is narrowing. America’s moral leadership and its strategic interests demand action against the extremist vacuums that arise from minority erasure. Defending persecuted faith groups and indigenous populations is not merely a moral appeal; it is a prerequisite for a more peaceful and prosperous Middle East. Washington should clarify its conditions now, before facts on the ground make them irrelevant.
• Johny Messo is president of the World Council of Arameans (Syriacs) and author of “Arameans and the Making of ’Assyrians’: The Last Aramaic-Speaking Christians of the Middle East.”
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