For Syria's Kurds, the Real Battle Is Just Beginning
It was early February, and the main thoroughfare through Hajin was a mess of concrete and rebar. Structures were toppled, and children played in the wreckage, surrounded by unexploded artillery shells poking from the earth like daisies.
The small town in the Euphrates River Valley in southeastern Syria had long been a Kurdish outpost and, until recently, a battlefield amid the death rattle of the Islamic State militant group. American and French munitions and warplanes, backing
Kurdish-led militias, repeatedly blasted ISIS forces here, reducing the extremists' self-declared caliphate to a tiny sliver of territory—and then to nothing.
But as Kurdish civilians began returning from displaced-persons camps, there was a deep sense among locals that victory was far from assured and peace far from secure. ISIS was not so much falling as transforming. Instead of an occupying army, it was becoming a stateless insurgency, directing suicide bombings, setting up roadside bombs and installing random checkpoints to trap unsuspecting civilians into pledging continued allegiance.
More concerning for the Kurds, though, was another development: the U.S. exit from
