Syria’s Lucifer effect

A claim attributed to a former senior SDF official that the Revolutionary Youth are to the SDF what the al-Qaeda-linked Hurras al-Din was to HTS does not stand up to scrutiny, as a month-long research trip to northeastern Syria in October 2026 reveals. The Revolutionary Youth may serve as a convenient explanation for Kurdish protests against the integration process, allowing political grievances to be dismissed as driven by external interests. But if Kurdish leaders themselves do invoke the Revolutionary Youth to maintain plausible deniability as part of a carrot-and-stick approach to negotiations, they may find themselves wielding a double-edged sword.

Assad is gone and the Geneva process is history. Yet the international governance system that failed Syria for more than a decade has largely survived by adapting itself to a new diplomatic script while leaving its underlying incentive structures intact. Beneath the rhetoric of a new beginning, its business as usual, with many of the shortcomings that characterised international engagement before Assad’s fall persisting, regardless of where one stands on Syria’s new authorities.

Israel’s conduct in Syria since the fall of Assad is commonly described as a “strategy,” or at least a “policy.” It is neither. It is a disorganised product of several impulses, some of them in tension with one another: the trauma of October 7th, a near-total ignorance about the group now ruling Damascus, hubris, genuine solidarity with the Druze, Netanyahu’s domestic political needs, and practices of occupation imported from the West Bank. Distinguishing between these drivers matters, because successfully handling Israeli conduct requires understanding its internal logic, and recognising which motivations are fixed and which may shift with a new government in Jerusalem.