Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces group says it has dissolved after merging with the Syrian army

The SDF just folded itself into the new Syrian army, and that's a bigger deal than one paragraph can carry. This is the same force that did the actual dying to destroy ISIS's territorial caliphate, the force American troops fought alongside block by block in Raqqa and Baghuz. Now it's gone, absorbed into a national army run out of Damascus by people who, a year ago, were still on terrorism watchlists in Washington.

Nobody should pretend this is a clean happy ending. Kurdish fighters spent a decade building something like self-governance in the northeast, and Turkey spent that same decade trying to bomb it out of existence. Ankara got its wish through diplomacy instead of airstrikes, and Washington mostly stood by and watched it happen. If you're wondering why American allies keep asking whether our promises have an expiration date, this is a good place to look.

There's also a practical question nobody in this administration wants to answer out loud: who's guarding the ISIS prison camps now? The SDF ran that security apparatus for years, often with limited resources and limited thanks. Dissolving the command structure that did that job doesn't make the thousands of detained fighters and their families disappear.

We'd like to believe Damascus's new leadership can hold this country together without turning on the people who did the fighting Washington wanted done. Recent history in that part of the world gives us every reason to be skeptical, and not much reason to be surprised if it goes badly.