Thousands of ISIS prisoners may now be released after the U.S. stepped aside and Syrian government forces swept through northeast Syria, seizing territory once guarded by the Kurdish-led SDF. Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, explains how Washington’s withdrawal and the collapse of the Syria–SDF ceasefire allowed forces loyal to President Ahmad al-Sharaa to crush Kurdish control through brute force, fueling fears of massacres, repression, and renewed ISIS chaos. Landis warns this power shift, driven by an increasingly Arab Sunni–supremacist project, marks yet another U.S. abandonment of Kurdish allies and threatens Syria with deeper instability, violence, and fragmentation. #breakthroughnews

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