Azad Murad is the kind of person who will pay the price for President Donald Trump’s decision to endorse a Turkish offensive against Kurds in Syria.

He is a 40-year-old civilian who lives with his three young daughters, his wife and his parents, 75 and 65, in the city of Qamishli, right on the border with Turkey. Murad has already talked to his family about whether to join the thousands of their neighbors who are fleeing as Turkey continues to bomb their hometown.

“We decided to stay here,” Murad told HuffPost. “We will face our destiny.”

Murad’s daughters ― ages 13, 10 and 7 ― are among the more than 2 million residents of Kurdish-held Syria who are now at the mercy of the mission that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan calls “Operation Peace Spring.”

For many of them, including Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmens and the region’s other minorities, this moment may shape the rest of their lives.

The brutal assault by the second-largest army in NATO and allied militias, and world leaders’ failure to stop Erdogan, is an especially potent lesson for the Kurds in taking little for granted ― and realizing your life can be radically changed by massive forces you neither control nor fully trust.

“These areas were the safest areas for a long period of time,” Murad said.

To the younger generation of Kurds, a worldwide community that numbers more than 30 million, this is a defining period in history.

“It feels like it’s determining our future, about belonging and where we come from and our ability to go and experience our homelands, especially as people who live as part of a diaspora,” said Elif Sarican, a British-born Kurd active in the international Kurdish women’s movement. “We genuinely see this as a turning point of literally either existence or extermination.”

Young Kurds in Syria and in neighboring Iraq have spent more than five years fighting alongside the U.S. and its allies against the Islamic State, seeing peers’ lives cut short and their futures denied. Young Kurds around the world, in Turkey, Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere, have led loud, powerful international movements for solidarity in a way that’s unprecedented, given how borders have separated the stateless Kurds for generations.

The Syrian Kurdish community, known as Rojava, offered to many Kurds an example of a confident, empowering and radically different future. Now it could be crushed over Turkey’s insistence that it is a threat because of its links to a militant group called the PKK.

And whatever Rojava’s fate, America is deeply implicated. That means the consequences of Trump’s action won’t be measured just in the fighting and likely human rights abuses of the days and weeks ahead. Its real resonance will only become clear years from now, in ways that are crucial to the Kurds and quite possibly worrying for the United States.

A community that has experienced crisis after crisis over the past century, Kurds have come to deeply value their collective memory. They honor it not just with commemoration but with respect: Like other groups that have repeatedly faced persecution from larger enemies, they’re especially committed to looking to their past to decide what’s next. Whatever the history books make of Trump and Erdogan, Kurds will remember the bloodshed, fear and desperate strategizing they are now causing.