Less than a month after the repeal of Caesar Act sanctions, Syria’s transitional president Ahmad al Sharaa launched an offensive against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, triggering Arab tribal defections and a rapid loss of territory. The fallout has jeopardized Islamic State containment in northeast Syria by disrupting intelligence networks built by the Syrian Democratic Forces, widening security gaps, and degrading detention-and-camp control. The most acute consequence has been mass escapes from the al-Hol refugee camp, which held approximately 24,000 family members linked to the Islamic State. A recent U.S. intelligence assessment estimates that roughly 15,000–20,000 individuals are now at large.
In spite of these developments, Washington is doubling down on a Damascus-centered approach, pressing the Syrian Democratic Forces toward integration and treating the central state as the successor partner. The premise is that a unified Syrian state under al Sharaa can absorb the burden of countering the Islamic State and enable a U.S. military drawdown. Until recently, the United States kept a limited but consequential footprint in northeast Syria to support Syrian Democratic Forces’ operations against the Islamic State. It also held the al-Tanf garrison along the Syria–Jordan–Iraq corridor, a critical forward platform for surveillance and disruption. Washington has since handed over al-Tanf to Damascus and is in the process of withdrawing its remaining 1,000 troops from Syria within a month.
However, Syria is only a year into a fragile transition and still lacks the institutional depth and local security architecture required for durable stabilization and containment of the Islamic State. That transition is being further undermined by al Sharaa’s coercive consolidation and the extremist character of segments of his security apparatus, which are intensifying sectarian polarization. This is creating a permissive environment for radicalization that the Islamic State can exploit to infiltrate state structures and rebuild networks. Washington’s mission against the Islamic State is ending at the very moment the group is poised to resurge. This makes consistent political pressure on Damascus more important than ever to preserve stability and compel action against radical elements within the security apparatus.
Security Gaps East of the Euphrates
Al Sharaa’s lightning offensive began in Aleppo’s Kurdish neighborhoods of Sheikh Maqsood and Ashrafiyeh. Despite repeated ceasefires, it pressed east as Damascus mobilized Arab tribal networks inside the Syrian Democratic Forces to defect. Within days, the remaining Kurdish forces fell back to their strongholds in Kobani and Hasakah, losing roughly 80 percent of the territory they once held. A U.S.-mediated ceasefire reached on Jan. 30 has, so far, held and is being paired with a phased integration framework. International pressure helped soften Damascus’ earlier stance, moving from the Jan. 18 agreement’s terms of near capitulation and individual integration toward a unit-based model that incorporates forces from the Syrian Democratic Forces into four brigades.
Officially, the deal folds the northeast back into the Syrian state, allowing al Sharaa to claim restored sovereignty and territorial integrity, while Kurdish authorities continue to exercise de facto administrative and security autonomy on the ground. However, implementation remains tenuous, with both sides holding diverging interpretations of what integration entails. On the military track, the main points of contention concern heavy weapons, the size and composition of the brigades, and the future of the Women’s Protection Units. Other fault lines include under-specified arrangements for control of resources and border crossings, and the scope of Interior Ministry deployments, which have so far been limited and largely symbolic. These divergences can still be managed through diplomacy but only with sustained international pressure and continued American leverage. Otherwise, Damascus may see an opportunity to resume military operations once U.S. forces fully withdraw or attention shifts to another regional crisis. Any forceful takeover of Kurdish areas would likely spiral into mass sectarian violence and provoke a Kurdish insurgency. It would deepen social fragmentation and force the Syrian government into a costly counterinsurgency campaign, stretching an already thin security apparatus across an even wider front.
Damascus also faces challenges translating battlefield gains into stable governance in Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, formerly held by the Syrian Democratic Forces. Although many tribal factions defected from the Syrian Democratic Forces, driven by longstanding economic and political grievances and catalyzed by a shifting balance of power, their realignment with the central state is largely tactical and shadowed by mutual mistrust. One point of friction is the absence of a unit-based framework to integrate tribal fighters. The current process requires disarmament and a return to civilian status, with the possibility of later entry into state security forces. Another revolves around oil revenues, which Damascus has placed firmly under central state control with little provision for local revenue-sharing. Recent crackdowns by state security forces have also moved to dismantle makeshift refineries, which, despite legitimate environmental and safety concerns, have provided a crucial source of income in areas with few viable economic alternatives. This is unfolding as new government electricity tariffs take effect, driving steep increases in household energy bills — in some cases up to 6,000 percent. Iran’s disruption of the Strait of Hormuz and its attacks on regional energy infrastructure are exacerbating these strains.
Current conditions point to a fragmented security landscape in a region structurally vulnerable to the Islamic State’s reconstitution. Territory east of the Euphrates presents distinct challenges due to porous routes into western Iraq, sparsely governed terrain, fragmented tribal politics, and entrenched smuggling networks. It has repeatedly functioned as a jihadist pipeline, from the Iraqi insurgency after 2003 to the Islamic State’s territorial expansion into Syria, movements in which al Sharaa himself participated. The recent upheaval in the northeast has allowed the Islamic State to launch a wave of attacks against Syrian security forces in Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa. It is too early to tell whether this reflects a sustained escalation or short-term opportunism, but fraying containment gives the group greater scope to leverage tribal grievances and smuggling economies to rebuild clandestine support networks.
From Detention to Dispersal
After the coalition-backed Syrian Democratic Forces defeated the Islamic State’s last enclave at Baghouz in March 2019, fighters and their families were placed in a vast detention-and-camp system across northeast Syria. Prior to al Sharaa’s offensive, the Syrian Democratic Forces held roughly 9,000 fighters in detention facilities, while al-Hol housed about 24,000 individuals, primarily women and children, and the smaller al-Roj camp held over 2,000 more. That custody system began to unravel when the Syrian Democratic Forces were forced to withdraw from al-Hol on Jan. 20. While the United States has transferred over 5,700 male detainees to Iraq, mitigating some immediate risk, it addresses only part of the overall caseload. Following the chaotic handover of al-Hol, reports describes masked men and organized convoys smuggling residents out at night, with some of the camp’s population reportedly ending up in Idlib. The foreign nationals’ annex, which held more than 6,000 third-country nationals, was among the first areas emptied, with foreign fighters implicated in facilitating departures. It remains unclear whether the facilitators were linked to Damascus-aligned factions, Islamic State networks, or both, but the speed and scale of the camp’s emptying suggest that elements of the Syrian security forces at a minimum tolerated the process. Al-Hol has since been officially closed, and the smaller al-Roj camp, though still under the control of the Syrian Democratic Forces, is also expected to close soon.
The mass detention of Islamic State affiliates was necessary to prevent the group from reconstituting, but it was never a sustainable long-term solution. A large portion of al-Hol’s population consisted of minors, many born there or arriving as infants and spending nearly seven years in limbo. Dire humanitarian conditions and chronic resource constraints turned the camp into an incubator for radicalization. Women aligned with the Islamic State played an active role in sustaining enforcement networks, spreading ideology and indoctrinating children. The risk is not the closure of the camps per se but the absence of a clear framework for legal accountability, post-release monitoring, and reintegration. This makes mapping residual Islamic State networks far more difficult and increases the likelihood that former residents, especially children shaped by extremist socialization, drift back into the very structures the camps were meant to contain. A further complication is the unresolved status of foreign nationals, as many states continue to resist repatriation on the grounds that returnees pose a security threat at home. Yet leaving them unaccounted for as they disperse across Syria and into neighboring states raises the risk of renewed terrorist plotting with transnational reach.
The Reliability Problem in Damascus
In its first audio message in two years, Islamic State spokesperson Abu Hudhayfah al Ansari called on supporters to target al Sharaa’s government and denounced him as an apostate aligned with Washington. Released shortly after the mass escapes from al-Hol, the message declared a new phase of operations in Syria, signaling that the group is positioning itself to exploit a weakened containment architecture. The rivalry between al Sharaa and the Islamic State dates to 2013. After initially pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, he rejected the Islamic State’s attempt to absorb his Syrian faction and instead aligned with al-Qaeda under Ayman al Zawahiri, ties he later severed in 2016. Since then, he has pursued a pragmatic rebranding away from transnational jihadism and conducted counterterrorism operations in his Idlib fiefdom. After taking power in Damascus, that transformation accelerated and culminated in Syria’s entry into the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, announced during his visit to the White House in Nov. 2025. The question is not whether al Sharaa is hostile to the Islamic State, but whether the security ecosystem he is building can reliably contain it across Syria.
Although al Sharaa’s forces have proved effective in dismantling Islamic State and al-Qaeda cells in Idlib, scaling this to the national level presents a fundamentally different challenge. Idlib is a more religiously conservative province where al Sharaa spent years consolidating control in a relatively contained environment, enforcing ideological conformity within a largely homogeneous constituency. Syria is far more diverse in its ethno-religious makeup and lived religiosity. The same Islamist governance model cannot be applied without generating new frictions and security gaps, including the risk of armed resistance.
That problem is compounded by the composition of the nascent security apparatus. Minority communities and potential rival power centers have been largely excluded, while religious instruction embedded in military training reinforces loyalty and ideology over professionalism. The apparatus is dominated by hardline Islamist factions, many of whom continue to share an ideological affinity for Salafi jihadism. This is evidenced by repeated instances of fighters displaying Islamic State insignia and by sectarian war crimes, most notably the massacres against Alawites on the coast in March and Druze in Suweida in July of last year, as well as recent attacks against Kurds. The nature of the violence, often filmed and disseminated by perpetrators, bears chilling echoes of the Islamic State’s methods of intimidation and sectarian mobilization. Yet the authorities have done little to impose meaningful accountability or curb sectarian incitement, in part because a crackdown would risk alienating hardliners that al Sharaa still needs to consolidate power.
This climate of impunity normalizes sectarian coercion and fuels wider radicalization, creating openings for the Islamic State to recruit sympathizers and gain access to state institutions. In Dec. 2025, a member of the Syrian security forces, who was reportedly a sympathizer of the Islamic State, attacked a Syrian–American convoy near Palmyra, killing three Americans. Concerns over further insider attacks likely strengthened the case for U.S. withdrawal. This underscores the limitations of relying on Damascus as the principal counterterrorism partner, where unit-level sympathies and uneven vetting can compromise operations and intelligence sharing. A further risk stems from potential defections by disillusioned hardliners who see al Sharaa’s cooperation with the West and strategic moderation as a betrayal of the movement’s original objectives. The recent emergence of Saraya Ansar al Sunnah, founded by former members of al Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and reportedly aligned with the Islamic State, illustrates this dynamic. The group has claimed responsibility for the Mar Elias church bombing and vowed further attacks against minority communities. It remains limited in scale but could gain momentum through recruitment, particularly among foreign fighters who travelled to Syria for an Islamic caliphate rather than to participate in Syrian state-building.
Damascus’s counterterrorism approach treats co-optation as the core mechanism of containment, folding extremist factions into state structures to secure manpower and control while pursuing the Islamic State operationally through cooperation with the global coalition. However, this strategy entrenches these factions inside the security sector and sustains ideological permissiveness that tactical operations alone cannot dismantle. Once embedded in institutions, that influence can outlast any single leader and create persistent pathways for infiltration and facilitation. Al Sharaa faces a trade-off between consolidating power and combating extremism. A serious crackdown on radical factions and sectarian abuses would require broader inclusion, tighter discipline, and credible accountability — but that would also dilute his power and risk backlash from a segment of his base. Al Sharaa’s trajectory suggests his overriding incentive is power consolidation, with counterterrorism pursued insofar as it serves that end.
Conclusion
Although the Islamic State is unlikely to restore its territorial caliphate, it is well positioned to expand as a diffuse insurgency. Rather than attempting to govern, it will likely rely on mobile cells operating across Syria and conducting terrorist attacks, ambushes, and assassinations. In Syria’s northeast, contested control, local tensions, and overstretched forces, compounded by the mass escapes from al-Hol, are creating a rare opening for the group to rebuild networks and recruit fighters. All this is unfolding amid a widening regional war that risks further straining the fragile security environment. If Iran enters a prolonged period of instability, Iraq is likely to absorb the first-order shock, potentially re-opening long-standing vulnerabilities in its western provinces that have historically served as terrain for Sunni insurgent mobilization. Meanwhile, Israel is escalating its military campaign across Lebanon, raising spillover risks that Syria is poorly positioned to absorb. Regional ruptures have repeatedly acted as accelerants for jihadist movements, from the invasion of Iraq to the Syrian civil war, and this conflict risks reproducing that dynamic.
Washington’s priority should be preventing Syria’s transition from sliding back into renewed conflict, because stabilization is the only durable foundation for containment. That requires sustained pressure on Damascus to move beyond coercive consolidation toward genuinely inclusive governance, including a workable degree of decentralization to strengthen local security. Washington played an instrumental role in providing al Sharaa with international legitimacy. It still retains enough leverage to ensure the ceasefire in the northeast is respected and to press for accountability inside the security forces, including curbing sectarian incitement and sidelining the most extreme elements rather than absorbing them. That means maintaining Syria’s State Sponsor of Terrorism designation and advancing measures such as the proposed Save the Kurds Act to reimpose targeted sanctions in response to violations. Without enforceable conditions, Syria risks a transition that either fractures, allowing the Islamic State to expand its operating space, or consolidates into an exclusionary Islamist order. Either way, the consequences will not be confined to Syria.
Kelly Kassis is a geopolitical analyst covering the Middle East and Russia, with a focus on Syria. She is director of international relations at the Center of Political and Foreign Affairs.
Image: Y. Boechat (VOA) via Wikimedia Commons
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