All-female Syrian Kurdish fighting force the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) achieved worldwide fame in 2014 as they began to win a series of unlikely victories against ISIS, launching an equally unexpected partnership between the US-led International Coalition to Defeat ISIS and the Leftist Kurdish movement. Ten years later, the Syrian crisis has suddenly roared back into global prominence, as al-Qaeda offshoot Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched a blitzkrieg assault beginning late November of last year that culminated in the December 8 ouster of hated dictator Bashar al-Assad. The celebration was short-lived, however, as Turkey has sought to take advantage of a post-Assad power vacuum to ramp up attacks which it hopes will bring an end to the progressive Kurdish-led autonomous region on its southern border. “Thousands of our forces were killed and wounded to protect the world from ISIS,” said YPJ spokesperson Ruksen Mohammed, speaking to The Nation from de facto Syrian Kurdish capital Qamishlo a week after Assad’s fall. “But now the world is silent in the face of attacks by Turkey and its proxy militias, allowing ISIS to strengthen once again.”

There was no love lost between Assad and the Kurds. Father and son both repressed the Kurdish identity and jailed, tortured, and killed many Kurdish activists over the years. Yet the Kurdish movement also suffered at the hands of the Islamist forces, which rapidly captured the pro-democratic Syrian revolution. The Kurds’ project long claimed to offer a third-way alternative in Syria, beyond both authoritarian Islamist forces like ISIS and HTS and the yet more brutal Assad regime. “We are the only example of a secular, multi-ethnic governing structure in Syria, and we have proven our model over the last ten years,” Sinam Mohammed, the top Syrian Kurdish diplomatic representative in Washington, told The Nation in a statement.

Spearheaded by the YPJ, the broader social and political movement has spent the past decade patiently building a tentative multiethnic coalition of millions of Arabs, Kurds, and other minorities in the so-called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). The coalition is guided by principles of municipal democracy, women’s autonomy, and minority representation. While not without its flaws, the project has weathered attacks by ISIS, Assad loyalists, and Turkey to guarantee relatively high standards of humanitarian provision, rule of law, and community self-determination.

As the dust settles on a half-century of rule by the Assad family, it might seem the perfect opportunity for the AANES to link up with other opposition forces throughout Syria and continue the pragmatic approach it has demonstrated through reaching unexpected accommodations with conservative tribal forces in rural Arab regions which were previously ISIS strongholds. But Turkey—which has long repressed the Kurdish identity and fought a bloody war against militant Kurdish guerrillas, and is bitterly opposed to the project in Kurdish-led autonomy on its southern border—is determined to see the Kurdish-led administration reduced to dust.

Throughout HTS’ advance, Turkish airstrikes pounded not Assad’s retreating army but rather the Syrian Kurds and their allies, killing whole civilian families and creating room for Turkish-funded, Turkish-directed, Turkish-armed militias united under the banner of the Syrian National Army (SNA) to seize territory from the AANES.

Militias in the SNA have long been accused of war crimes by the United Nations, US government, and Amnesty International, including raping women; committing mass killings against Kurdish civilians; and torturing, electrocuting, and executing civilians. During prior Turkish military campaigns, these militias killed hundreds—and displaced hundreds of thousands—of civilians.

Now, Turkey sees an opportunity to finish what it started. In the city of Manbij, which Turkey captured in the days after Assad fell, “militiamen are storming civilian homes, particularly the homes of former employees of the AANES,” says a local still in the city, speaking anonymously for fear of armed reprisals. Many of these militiamen have never fired a shot in anger against Assad. Rather, key NATO ally Turkey has emerged as the dominant state power in a new Syria, and is seeking to press its advantage by bombing and occupying more Kurdish territory in the country’s north, in parallel with Israel’s land-grab over the southern border. Sixty-nine civilians have been killed and tens of thousands displaced in the ongoing offensive, with fighting currently concentrated at crossings over the Euphrates river including the Tishrin Dam, a key piece of hydroelectric energy infrastructure that provides power to much of Syria’s northeast.

The Syrian Kurds have long relied on a fragile power-balance between the US, Russia, Turkey, and Iran to retain their autonomous project in the north-east. But there’s now only a small US presence stationed in the region as part of the ongoing anti-ISIS mission keeping Turkey from sweeping through the region and cementing its occupation. During his last presidency, Donald Trump greenlit a prior Turkish invasion in a sop to Turkey’s autocratic President Tayyip Erdoğan, and is understood to have little interest in preserving the US mission on Syrian soil.