As the world focuses on Venezuela after the removal of President Nicolas Maduro, and the anti-government protests in Iran, the Damascus government under Ahmed Al Sharaa launched a strategic armed assault on the city of Aleppo in Northern Syria resulting in deaths and massive displacement.

While the United States has focused its response on ISIS with strikes in Syria in coordination with US partner, pluralist security forces securing Northeast Syria – the Syrian Democratic Forces – it is yet to condemn the devastating state-sanctioned assault on the Kurdish people of Aleppo. Frank US and international condemnation, military response, humanitarian aid and support needs to take place.

(The US strikes on ISIS were retribution for two US troops and one civilian US interpreter killed by ISIS in Palmyra on December 13, 2025.)

Syria’s actions have displaced over 200,000 Kurds from Aleppo, and the remaining 300,000 civilians besieged face expulsion orders. While some media reports deceptively refer to Kurdish-Syrian ‘clashes’, what has actually transpired is a deliberate Syrian state-sanctioned genocidal Islamist assault, forced displacement, and targeted military operation on an unarmed civilian Kurdish population now facing annihilation.

This deliberate targeting, murder, and siege of the Kurdish population of Aleppo comes as the March 10 agreement seeking integration of the Syrian Democratic Forces into the Syrian Military defence approaches its one-year deadline for fulfilment.

As an expert on Islamism, familiar with the Islamist jihadist persecution of the Kurdish people since witnessing the persecution of Kurds and Yazidis by ISIS in 2018 and 2019 in Northern Iraq, I see the nature and timing of this operation has precedence and context.

Syria’s actions represent the lethal pattern of rank Islamist jihadist extremism characterising Ahmed Al Sharaa’s origins as an Islamist jihadist, ideologies which his subordinate forces are unwilling to lay to rest.

In October of last year, I travelled from Iraq by land to meet with Syrian Democratic Forces Commander General Mazloum Abdi, responsible for the security and stability of Northeast Syria. The area is home to Syria’s pluralist minorities; Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, secular non-Islamist Syrian Arab Muslims, and Druze fleeing Suwayda in Southwest Syria. That flight followed the July 2025 genocide of Druze at the hand of Al Sharaa’s troops.

What many feared then has come to pass: Ahmed Al Sharaa is failing to guarantee the safety, integrity, and lives of Syria’s Kurdish minorities, especially in the wake of the earlier Alawite and Druze genocide. Many fear Syria’s Christians will be next.

Earlier this month, I received detailed reports directly from the Syrian Democratic Forces command about the specific imperilment of the Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh neighbourhoods within the city of Aleppo, northern Syria. These areas are home to over 500,000 residents (including approximately 55,000 Kurdish families) as well as displaced Kurdish Syrians. All of them were ordered evacuated.

As is well-reported, January 6, Al Sharaa’s Syrian Ministry of Defence-affiliated forces targeted civilians in these areas via suicide drones, initially injuring three unarmed civilians. Soon after a sustained shelling campaign was launched, targeting the civilian Aleppo neighborhoods of Kurds. Then the 60th Division deployed a convoy of tanks and armoured military vehicles seeking to forcibly occupy these Kurdish neighbourhoods.

This assault on Aleppo’s Kurdish people was led by veteran Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamist jihadist commanders, some sanctioned for war crimes and extremism. The ranks of the 60th and 80th Divisions are known hardliner jihadists, formerly HTS-affiliated, the latter under the command of Abu Qutaiba al-Manbiji, also formerly a prominent HTS commander.

Other divisions joining the assault on the Kurdish people were led by the 76th Division, established from the Turkish-backed Hamzat faction, led by Saif al-Din Bolad (Abu Bakr) – currently subject to US sanctions.

Saif al-Din Bolad is a known genocidal jihadist: in May 2025, the Council of the European Union sanctioned him and his faction for his involvement in the March 2025 genocidal massacres of Syrian Alawites and by year-end 2025, the UK also sanctioned both him and his faction for extreme violence in the Syrian civil war and the genocide of the Alawites.

The 72nd Division under the lead of a former HTS commander known as ‘Khattab al-Albani’ also joined the siege and assault of the Kurdish neighbourhoods of Aleppo, a division comprising fighters from an array of Turkish-backed factions- Turkey being the main sponsor of HTS.

With the Kurdish neighbourhoods in their crosshairs and under aerial and artillery assault, the Syrian Ministry of Defence forces forcibly evicted civilians from the surrounding neighbourhoods – isolating the besieged Kurdish civilian targets and declaring a military zone.

In the attack, seven civilians were initially killed, the death toll now increased to a dozen, including women and children, one child as young as two years old, the eldest casualty above 85. Fifty-two were wounded at the time of writing.

The Kurdish people of Aleppo have long been under siege. Since December 23, 2025, the Ahmed Al Sharaa government severed electricity to the Kurdish neighbourhoods within Aleppo. Now, more than half a million are ordered to evacuate.

Since December, General Mazloum Abdi and the Syrian Democratic Forces have conducted multiple discussions with the Ahmed Al-Sharaa government regarding the essential provision of diesel fuel for heating within the besieged neighbourhoods. Yet Syrian Ministry of Defence security checkpoints continue to impede the entry of fuel tankers into these areas- both residents and schools are yet to receive diesel fuel for heating, denying Syrian Kurdish children education.

Immediately before the January 6 assault, General Mazloum Abdi and Syrian Defence Minister Marhaf Qasra in Damascus had met on January 4. General Mazloum requested Minister Qasra permit the entry of fuel tankers, only to be met with an emphatic denial on the pretext that the fuel would be used for SDF military vehicles.

Qasra doubled down on the siege, targeting unarmed Syrian Kurdish civilian minorities, declined to participate in further dialogue and allowed the buildup for the military assault to continue. This amounts to state sanctioned collective punishment expressly prohibited under international humanitarian law, particularly the Geneva Convention.

As Damascus remained mute to their appeals, the SDF still sought to meet with the Syrian state military commanders in Aleppo to stop the assault. These appeals were met with silence. The campaign leaders doubled down, and by nightfall January 7 the Syrian Ministry of Defence brought in ‘the Red Headbands’. These are direct Al Qaeda extremist affiliate factions; violent jihadists, and in tandem with heavy reinforcements from Idlib, (the original HTS stronghold of Ahmed Al Sharaa) have added military pressure to the murder and displacement of the Kurdish people of Aleppo.

Instrumentalising Syria’s civilians through lethal genocidal violence in an effort to intimidate or pressure the Syrian Democratic Forces and other entities working for Syria’s stability and diversity and peace at any time, let alone during these highly fraught politically sensitive moments in the nascent Syria is reckless, destabilising and worthy of both international condemnation and reprisal.

The Syrian government’s actions in Aleppo are further deterrent to international investment in the new Syria and should trigger suspension of the Caesar sanctions repeal.

Ahmed Al Sharaa must be held accountable for the genocidal assault of the Kurdish people of Aleppo. The Kurdish people of Aleppo must be sheltered by UN peacekeeping troops or other international forces, and the international community must demand Turkish retreat from its occupation of Aleppo.

Turkey is complicit in the genocide and forcible displacement of the Kurdish people in Aleppo and punitive action must be taken to convey the international communities’ expectation that Syria’s minorities be safeguarded from ethnic cleansing, genocide, displacement and eradication at all costs.

Only then can Syria be truly seen to be part of the legitimate international order.

Qanta A. Ahmed MD, Senior Fellow, Independent Women’s Forum; Life Member, Council on Foreign Relations @MissDiagnosis