Right Diagnosis, Failed Cure: Tom Barrack's Plan for the Levant

Opinion

Tom Barrack has diagnosed the Levant correctly and then prescribed the cure that has failed it for a century. As US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, he has said there is no Middle East in the European sense, only tribes and villages, and that the nation-states on the map were drawn by Britain and France in the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement. He has also said federalism does not work in Syria or Iraq, that Washington does not owe the Kurds a state, and that the only workable formula is "one nation, one people, one army, one Syria," under the government of Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus. Those two claims cannot both be true. If the states are artificial, forcing minorities back into a single armed center is not state-building. It is the next round of the same war.

Sources: Grabien Rudaw

The Barrack Doctrine

Barrack's public line, set out in his October 2025 essay "Syria and Lebanon Are the Next Pieces for Levant Peace" and in interviews with Asharq and Rudaw, is that the fall of Bashar al-Assad opened a path to a centralized, investable Syria, a disarmed Hezbollah, and eventually a northern security deal with Israel. Sanctions relief, he argues, is strategy rather than charity. Kurdish rights, he says, are best secured by citizenship, language protections, and individual absorption into the national army, not by the Syrian Democratic Forces remaining a separate force.

In January 2026 he wrote that the SDF's original purpose as the main anti-ISIS force on the ground had "largely expired," because Damascus was now willing and positioned to take over security. By late summer 2026, SDF commander Mazloum Abdi had announced the dissolution of the force as an independent command, under an integration deal signed under heavy pressure.

Sources: Enab Baladi L'Orient Today US Lead Inspector General for Operation Inherent Resolve ETANA Syria

A Record That Does Not Support the Bet

The record since December 2024 does not support the bet.

Sources: Reuters Associated Press Human Rights Watch, Syrians for Truth and Justice and Syrian Archive Al-Monitor

Who Took Damascus

The new government in Damascus is not a neutral civil service. Al-Sharaa led Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the successor to Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate. Rebranding and a White House visit do not erase the composition of the forces that took the capital: Sunni Islamist factions, including foreign fighters, now wearing the uniform of the state.

Sources: Rudaw Human Rights Watch, Syrians for Truth and Justice and Syrian Archive

The Alawite Coast

In March 2025, after attacks by Assad loyalists on the coast, government-aligned units swept Latakia and Tartus. A Syrian investigative committee later confirmed 1,426 dead, most of them Alawite civilians; Reuters documented nearly 1,500 killed across some forty sites and traced chains of command toward Damascus. The presidency blamed rogue elements and opened an inquiry. For Alawites, the distinction between a rogue militia and the new state is academic. The community that staffed the old regime was collectively punished, and the promise of an inclusive transition was broken in the first hundred days.

Sources: Reuters Associated Press Human Rights Watch, Syrians for Truth and Justice and Syrian Archive

Suwayda and the Druze

The Druze lesson followed within months. In July 2025, fighting in Suwayda between Druze armed groups, Sunni Bedouin clans, and intervening government forces showed that "restoring order" from Damascus is read locally as conquest. Barrack himself called Suwayda an unfortunate early speed bump on the road to a centralized architecture. Speed bumps do not usually leave sectarian front lines. Israel has treated the Druze of the south as a constituency it will not abandon; Damascus treats them as a province to be folded in. That is not a misunderstanding. It is two incompatible maps of the same hills.

Sources: Rudaw Al-Monitor

The Kurdish Bargain

Kurds have been told the same story in cleaner language. Barrack's January 2026 post offered them "the greatest opportunity" they have had: full citizenship, cultural rights, and a seat inside a recognized nation-state, in exchange for oil fields, dams, border crossings, and the ISIS detention system. Kurdish leaders do not hear opportunity. They hear the end of the autonomy they built after 2014, negotiated away by an envoy who is also ambassador in Ankara, and who has described the SDF as the YPG, "an offshoot of the PKK."

Turkey's security interest and Washington's desire for a single address in Damascus have been aligned. Kurdish survival has not. Clashes in Aleppo's Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh in early 2026, followed by stalled integration and a paper dissolution that left local formations largely intact, are the predictable result. A deal signed under bombardment is a ceasefire, not a constitution.

Sources: Rudaw US Lead Inspector General for Operation Inherent Resolve ETANA Syria US Lead Inspector General for Operation Inherent Resolve

Assyrians: Outside the Bargain Entirely

Assyrians and other Syriac Christians sit even further from the bargain. They have no militia on the scale of the SDF or the Druze of Suwayda, and no neighboring patron on the scale of Turkey or Israel. Their experience of both Baathist nationalism and Sunni insurgent rule is disappearance: villages emptied, churches desecrated, demographic replacement presented as liberation. A policy that measures success by whether Damascus holds a monopoly of force has nothing to say to a people whose survival has depended on not being fully inside that monopoly.

Sources: Associated Press

An Anthropology That Defeats Its Own Policy

This is why Barrack's own anthropology defeats his policy. He is right that loyalty in this region runs individual, family, village, tribe, sect, and only then state. He is right that a hundred ethnic groups were not waiting to become twenty-seven Westphalian nations. He is wrong to conclude that the answer is a harder center.

Every previous attempt to run roughshod over that map — the Assad state's Alawite core ruling a Sunni majority, Saddam's Arab-nationalist center ruling Kurds and Shia, the post-2003 attempt to invent an Iraqi republic on top of three armed societies — produced dictatorship, militia government, or both. Calling the SDF a temporary expedient and the Druze and Alawites a speed bump does not make them temporary. It tells them the window for a political settlement is closing, and that arms are the remaining vote.

Sources: Grabien Rudaw Rudaw Human Rights Watch, Syrians for Truth and Justice and Syrian Archive

Who Will Take Up Arms

The groups that will take that vote are not hypothetical.

Alawite armed remnants did not disappear after March 2025. They ambushed the new security forces and then watched their villages answer for it. A community that has been massacred once under the new flag has a clear incentive to build the networks that prevent a second sweep: coastal cells, former officers, smuggling routes into Lebanon. That is an insurgency in embryo, whether or not it ever adopts a name.

Druze fighters in Suwayda already exist as an armed community. If integration means disarmament without a real veto over who enters the province, they will not hand in the weapons that kept the July fighting from becoming a second coast.

Kurdish commanders who have not been absorbed — ETANA's reporting in September 2026 put genuine integration well below Damascus's claims, against an SDF payroll once estimated at 20,000 to 25,000 — have the same choice. Women's Protection Units, told there is no agreed place for them inside the interior ministry, are a specific refusal waiting to become a general one.

Assyrian local guards, where they still exist in the northeast and the Khabur, will not volunteer for a security architecture run by factions that spent a decade razing Christian towns.

Sources: ETANA Syria Human Rights Watch, Syrians for Truth and Justice and Syrian Archive Associated Press Al-Monitor

The Islamic State's Opening

The beneficiary of that fracture is the Islamic State, and Barrack's timetable has already improved its position. For seven years the SDF held the largest concentration of Islamic State prisoners on earth: on the order of 9,000 men and boys in prisons and tens of thousands of women and minors in al-Hol and Roj. In early 2026 that system collapsed into transfers, a breakout at al-Hol, and a hurried American airlift of thousands of male detainees to Iraq.

The group had already raised its attack tempo inside Syria — 294 claimed attacks in 2025, more than double the 2023 figure — and is assessed to still field roughly 2,500 to 3,000 fighters in the two countries. Five reported plots against al-Sharaa and his ministers in a year are not the signature of a finished enemy. They are the signature of an organization that reads a security handover as a vacancy.

Islamic State does not need Damascus to fail completely. It needs the gaps that a forced centralization produces: Kurdish units demobilized but not trusted, Arab tribal auxiliaries paid by Damascus and unpaid by it, Alawite villages outside the law, desert roads between Deir ez-Zor and the Iraqi border with no one clearly responsible for them. A jihadist group whose ideology treats the nation-state as idolatry will recruit exactly from the men Barrack's settlement leaves armed and unemployed.

The same is true, on a smaller scale, of any successor to HTS that decides al-Sharaa has compromised too far with Americans, Turks, and Israelis. Centralizing Syria under a former al-Qaeda commander does not end the market for purer versions of the same idea. It advertises it.

Sources: US Lead Inspector General for Operation Inherent Resolve The National Asharq Al-Awsat

Lebanon: The Same Design, a Longer History

Lebanon, the second "piece" in Barrack's architecture, is the same design with a longer history. He is right that Hezbollah's armed wing is a state within a state and a standing threat on Israel's border, and that a government which cannot monopolize force cannot be reconstructed. He is wrong to treat the Lebanese Armed Forces as a neutral vessel into which that monopoly can be poured. Lebanon's army is a confessional compromise, not a nation in uniform.

Disarming Hezbollah without a settlement the Shia community will accept does not produce sovereignty. It produces the next militia, or the same militia under a new name, and it tells Sunni, Christian, and Druze factions to rearm in case the bargain fails. Barrack has warned that if Beirut hesitates, Israel may act unilaterally. That warning is also an instruction to every armed minority in the country: the political track is short, and the military track is already priced in.

Sources: Enab Baladi L'Orient Today

A Mosaic in Name Only

None of this requires a conspiracy. It follows from the policy as stated. Recognize the states as artificial, then demand that Kurds, Druze, Alawites, and Assyrians disarm into them. Declare the anti-ISIS mission expired, then transfer the camps and the desert to an army still absorbing factions that massacred civilians on the coast. Call the result a mosaic of peace.

The mosaic Barrack invokes was an Ottoman device for governing difference by admitting it. "One army, one Syria" is the opposite device. The communities that have already been shot at under the new flag will not wait to see whether the slogan softens. They will arm, because the last decade taught them what an artificial capital does when it is strong enough, and the last eighteen months taught them that Washington's envoy has chosen the capital.

Sources: Rudaw Rudaw US Lead Inspector General for Operation Inherent Resolve Human Rights Watch, Syrians for Truth and Justice and Syrian Archive US Lead Inspector General for Operation Inherent Resolve