44 MARCH-APRIL 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL strengthen one side in an interagency tussle. I was regularly reminded that policy (made in Washington) trumps reporting. I took refuge in the somewhat comforting corollary that information from the field and diplomatic realities on the ground help inform that policy, while also recognizing begrudgingly that policy was as likely shaped by budget constraints, security considerations, staffing gaps, interagency turf jousting, and domestic concerns tied to congressional and media scrutiny—all centered back in Washington and aloof from the cold mud of Syria. Nonetheless, I continued sharing the information from my many contacts across northeastern Syria with Washington. Among my most important interlocutors was General Mazloum Abdi Kobani, the self-made Kurdish commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who formed and molded the SDF into a formidable fighting force against ISIS in 2015–2016. By the time I arrived in early 2018, ISIS and its accompanying family members were on the run, falling back to the more remote towns of Deir a-Zour province farther east, and over the next year and a half the general and I met often. The Feeling of Betrayal But in the fall of 2019, Türkiye was on the verge of invading Syria’s northeast, and General Mazloum felt betrayed and abandoned by the U.S. At our meeting in October, he was furious. Neighboring Türkiye’s military, with a ragtag Syrian proxy force lending a hand, had invaded and was attacking SDF positions all along the northern border. I was delivering what I knew to be threadbare talking points, noting to Mazloum U.S. diplomatic efforts in Ankara for a ceasefire but offering no U.S. assistance to his forces under attack. “You are leaving us to be slaughtered,” he told me. “We partnered with you in good faith, and this is what we get in return?” I absorbed the blast of his anger in a couple of meetings. I had worked closely with the SDF leadership and knew in detail how valuable their contributions had been to the bloody fight against ISIS. As it happened, there were other meetings. Tempers calmed, and the tough business of diplomacy and cold calculation took precedence for Mazloum. In the end, we weathered the storm. President Donald Trump decided against withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria, and those of us, military and civilian, who stayed behind were able to repair the relationship with the SDF relatively quickly once a U.S.-Türkiye negotiated ceasefire tamped the fighting. Somewhere along the way, however, my conversation with Mazloum had been leaked, with a transcript ending up on CNN. The whole world could read of Mazloum excoriating me and the U.S. government. Separately, an informal dissent message I sent to Washington, objecting to what I perceived as a weak, inconsistent U.S. response to the Turkish military offensive into northeast Syria, was leaked and ended up on the front page of The New York Times. I made clear I had not leaked the message, nor had I made any public comment. The furor over my memo died down fairly quickly, as the relentless U.S. news cycle powered on by. This was secret sharing taken to a new—and uncomfortable—level. Empathy and Craft While I liked General Mazloum and his commanders and the Syrian Kurdish politicians who supported him, it wasn’t always a natural instinct to empathize, to try to see the world as they did and put myself in their shoes. They were heavily influenced by a rigorous ideology, termed “Ocalanist” after its original and still influential proponent, Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish founder of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) who had been imprisoned in Türkiye since the late 1990s. The ideology and the hermetic, somewhat cult-like bureaucratic practices it spawned struck most Westerners who saw it in practice as strange, even jarring. But I knew that empathy makes you a more effective political officer; it is a fundamental aspect of secret sharing. I vividly recall experiencing this during a midcareer posting to Damascus. In a chilly, spartan apartment in Douma, on the outskirts of Damascus, in winter 2006, I was talking quietly with Yassin, a well-known Syrian dissident who had spent 16 years as a political prisoner of the Assad government. He was analyzing the brutal, organized, relentless nature of the Assad regime and making clear there was no serious difference between the rule of the father, Hafez al-Assad, and the son, Bashar, who replaced him when he died in 2000. In a matter-of-fact tone, Yassin As invading Turkish-supported forces closed in in October 2019, a fire at the Lafarge Cement Factory compound, a U.S. military base in northeastern Syria, forced the precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. personnel. U.S. forces bombed the compound the following day to prevent its ammunition cache from being seized by the Turkish-backed forces. COURTESY OF WILLIAM ROEBUCK
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