The Empire’s Recycled ISIS in Syria

When the headlines tell you that ISIS is resurfacing in Syria, that prison breaks are accelerating, and that American forces are “withdrawing,” you are supposed to read it as a chaotic but ultimately familiar story: terrorism comes back, the international community reacts, and the U.S. reluctantly adjusts its posture to keep the region safe.

But if you have followed Syria closely, you recognize something else: the timing is too synchronized, the incentives are too clear, and the outcomes are too useful for the very actors who claim they are trying to prevent them.

What is happening now is a strategic transition. And like most strategic transitions in our region, it is being sold to the public with a language that does not match the mechanics on the ground.

For years, Syrians—and many of us who warned about this—kept saying the same thing: you cannot warehouse thousands of ISIS-linked detainees in improvised prisons, under proxy management, without a political settlement, without serious trials, without repatriations, and without a durable security architecture, and then pretend this won’t explode in your face.

The Americans “managed” those prisons through their proxy structure in the northeast. But they were never serious about solving the ISIS problem in Syria as a problem of social reintegration, deradicalization, and justice. They treated it as leverage. Something you keep on ice, something you can thaw when you need pressure, something you can point to when you need a justification for a base, a convoy, a new airstrike, or a new “mission.”

This is not a radical claim. It is, at this point, a pattern, and the most disturbing part about the Epstein email revelations is that they match what has long been said from the Syrian side. In one widely circulated email attributed to Jeffrey Epstein, he describes the U.S. giving ISIS a “pass” to advance on Palmyra, and that aligns uncomfortably with an old, now infamous point that John Kerry was recorded making: that U.S. officials watched ISIS expand and believed it could be used as leverage against the former President Bashar al-Assad.

The strategic logic is undeniable: ISIS was not treated primarily as an enemy to be eradicated; it was treated as a pressure instrument to be managed.

Then the map shifted. Western intelligence services and their regional allied networks finally got what they had been trying to engineer for years: Assad was removed, the Syrian state was hollowed out, and now we arrive at the heart of the danger. Syria is being repackaged for the world under a new ruler who, not long ago, was known as an al-Qaeda emir, and is now being presented with a straight face as the country’s “president.”

Abu Mohammad al-Julani struck a deal with Washington and Ankara in Paris, allowing him to capture large swaths of territory previously held by Kurdish-led forces, which were rapidly transferred or captured, and inside those swaths were facilities holding ISIS detainees. In the fog of transition, infighting, and security fragmentation, militants fled. Some escaped. Some were moved. Some simply disappeared into the terrain.

So now we have a Syria where the most combustible human material on earth—trained, ideologically hardened, internationally networked militants—has been reintroduced into a country that is already exhausted, polarized, and newly governed by a coalition of forces whose own ideological history overlaps with the jihadist universe.

And this produces two possible outcomes, both dangerous, both useful to outside powers.

On one hand, some of these ISIS elements may find it convenient to cooperate with the new security structures in Damascus, because survival often produces alliances that ideology would normally forbid. On the other hand, and arguably more dangerous, ISIS itself is already signaling the opposite direction: that Julani has “gone too far” in collaboration with the United States and has been too passive toward Israel. In that scenario, the betrayal narrative becomes a recruiting tool, and disillusioned militants inside Julani’s own camp can defect to ISIS, strengthening it with experienced fighters who know the terrain, the networks, the weapons routes.

That is when Syria stops being a Syrian problem and becomes a regional one again.

Because a revived ISIS is not just a threat to Damascus. It is a threat to Jordan. It is a threat to Lebanon. It is a threat to Iraq. It is a threat to minorities everywhere: Christians, Yazidis, Shia villages, and anyone outside the takfiri worldview. And it is also, crucially, a convenient “boogeyman” that can be used to justify escalations by Israel, which is already operating freely in Syria with a different strategic logic than Washington.

Washington’s preferred end state, as it is being implemented, is a unified Syria under a single address: the new leadership that can be integrated into American regional management, can claim to “fight terrorism,” and can align Syria’s posture toward the U.S. camp.

Israel’s preferred end state is not a unified Syria at all. Israel wants a weaker Syria, a divided Syria, a Syria fragmented into manageable zones, a Syria that can never again function as a coherent state capable of resisting Israeli expansion or imposing costs.

And if you want to understand how ISIS can become useful again, even after all this blood, you look at the way threats are instrumentalized. Mike Huckabee went on Tucker Carlson and spoke openly about a “Greater Israel” vision extending from the Nile to the Euphrates. Whether you treat that as ideology, fantasy, or policy aspiration, what matters is that in the real world, expansion projects require justification, and ISIS provides the perfect justification: a permanent security menace that allows occupations to be framed as defense.

This is why I have always resisted the fairy tale that ISIS is a fully independent actor. It behaves, repeatedly, like an entity that becomes stronger when certain intelligence and regional ecosystems allow it to breathe, and weaker when those ecosystems decide it must be suffocated. It is “terrorism,” yes, but terrorism that often functions as an asset, directly or indirectly, in wider strategic games.

So when people ask: why would the U.S. withdraw from Syria now, at a moment when ISIS is announcing a new phase?

The answer is simple: because the U.S. mission in Syria was never primarily counter-terrorism.

The mission was oil, wheat, and leverage.

It was occupying oil fields and key agricultural zones to choke the former Syrian government after sanctions—especially the Caesar Act—made reconstruction and normal economic life impossible. It was holding al-Tanf to block trade routes between Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, strangling regional connectivity. And once those goals were achieved and the map was “solved” through a new regime in Damascus that can be sold as “legitimate,” Washington can relocate assets and re-prioritize.

And the new priority, increasingly, is Iran.

This is the part that should make Gulf states—and frankly everyone in the region—think twice. Because the removal of Syria as a functioning state and the stripping of Syria’s air defenses after the takeover of Damascus have effectively opened Syria’s airspace to Israeli operations, creating new pathways for escalation toward eastern Syria, into Iraqi Kurdistan air corridors, and potentially toward Iran. Syria has been made toothless, defenseless, unable to protect its skies, which is exactly what a regional escalation architecture requires.

If a major confrontation with Iran erupts, the blowback will not stay in Iran. It will rebound across the entire region, and Syria—already shattered—will become one of the easiest surfaces for that shock to crack.

Meanwhile, we are told to trust the new Damascus leadership to “keep security,” but its own internal cohesion is questionable. Many of its fighters fought for transnational jihadism, and they were promised Jerusalem, not normalization with Israel. Once that myth collapses, factional defection becomes a real risk. And in that scenario, Israel can use the excuse of ISIS threats to push deeper, faster, and more decisively, because the military geography is already in its favor.

There is one potential stabilizing variable that keeps being dangled in front of the public: the idea that Damascus and the Kurdish SDF can come to an agreement that integrates the Kurds into governance structures and creates a stronger internal front against ISIS. This, too, is reportedly being encouraged by Washington, with promises of Kurdish quotas in ministries and parliament, because a unified internal order is the best antidote to ISIS’s favorite fuel: vacuum.

But even here, the “deal breakers” remain Turkey and the American preference for centralized control under the new authority, which means the arrangement may be less about Kurdish rights and more about stabilizing a map for the next phase of regional confrontation.

And that returns us to the central point.

ISIS is not returning in a vacuum.

It is returning at the precise moment when Syria has been politically transformed, when prisons have been destabilized, when American assets are being repositioned, and when Israel is expanding its strategic footprint and speaking more openly about long-term territorial and security ambitions.

This is not “post-ISIS.” It is recycled ISIS, reintroduced into a more fragile region, under conditions that make it more dangerous and more useful.

If you want to prevent another 2014, you don’t do it with slogans about fighting terror while enabling the structural conditions that allow terror to regenerate. You do it by dismantling the incentive system that turns militants into tools, and by ending the geopolitical games that treat Syria as a chessboard rather than a nation.

Because the price of these games is always paid first by Syrians, and then, inevitably, by everyone else.

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—Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis.