One would think that the killing of civilians, along with the total demolition of Raqqa’s infrastructure, might risk alienating residents, or turn them against their would-be liberators. For some, surely, this is the case. But others whom I spoke with exhibited a remarkable—and heartbreaking—forbearance from judgment. In South Raqqa, I met Ahmed Almoo, an S.D.F. fighter who had crossed the Euphrates, in a boat, two months earlier. Almoo was fifty-six but looked decades older. I’d noticed him standing guard outside an Arab unit’s position one morning, and was struck by the sight of a man so wizened and fragile wearing a uniform and holding a Kalashnikov. He told me that he’d been a butcher in Raqqa. To pay his smuggler, he’d sold all the equipment from his shop and the furniture from his home. His brother, who couldn’t afford to join him, had been killed by an air strike. All the same, Almoo had not hesitated to join the S.D.F. “I suffered a lot from ISIS,” he explained. He blamed the group for the death of his son. “He started feeling sick, and we took him to a doctor who did some tests and told us he had stomach cancer. But there’s no medicine or anything in Raqqa, and ISIS won’t let people leave to find a hospital. So I just brought him home, and he died.”

This echoed previous conversations I’d had. The day I went to Karama, Farris Horan, the tribal liaison, had pointed out a village on the way. His cousin had lived there with her husband, a sheikh. After they had a son, she invited friends over to celebrate. Horan said that the coalition must have mistaken the party for an ISIS gathering. An air strike hit the house, killing eleven people, including Horan’s cousin and her baby. In the car, Horan brought out his phone and showed me a photograph of the boy, purple-faced and swaddled in white blankets. The sheikh survived. I asked Horan what the sheikh was doing now. “He has a unit in the S.D.F.,” Horan said. “He coördinates directly with the coalition.”

I expressed incredulity.

“All people here want right now is to be finished with ISIS,” Horan told me. “They will accept almost anything if they can just get rid of ISIS.”

The willingness to countenance American crimes because of more egregious ones committed by ISIS, Russia, and the regime, speaks to how tragically tolerant some Syrians have grown of what might once have appalled them. It might also reveal a fear that U.S. involvement in Syria will be short-lived. One day, in a waiting room in Kobanî, a stranger handed me his phone to show me some Kurdish text that he’d typed into Google Translate: “We love Americans so much I hope you do not give up on us.” The sentiment was repeated by many others I met in northern Syria, especially by Kurdish members of the S.D.F.

Their worry is understandable. America’s partnership with the S.D.F. still infuriates Turkey. In July, Turkey’s state news agency published a map identifying ten undisclosed U.S. bases in Rojava, and the Turkish military began shelling a Kurdish district there. Turkish officials announced, “We will never allow the establishment of a terror state along our borders.”

Many Kurdish fighters I met in Raqqa said that they were ready to fight the Turkish Army next. At the graduation ceremony in Kobanî, the conscripts were commanded to stand against “our enemies in Turkey.” From the perspective of U.S. interests, however, once ISIS has been defeated in Syria the utility of Kurdish fighters will diminish significantly. If a direct conflict broke out between Turkey and the S.D.F., it is difficult to imagine the U.S. employing force against its NATO ally. It is equally difficult to imagine the S.D.F. withstanding a Turkish incursion, unless it were supported by U.S. airpower.

In mid-October, ISIS holdouts in Raqqa were granted safe passage out of the city. According to Omar Alloush, the Kurdish senior member of the Raqqa Civil Council, two hundred and seventy-five Syrian ISIS members “turned themselves in to their tribes, in exchange for forgiveness.” (Although some of those who surrendered came from Karama, the home of Abu Jihad, his brother Tobat was not among them.)

This fall, S.D.F. fighters and regime forces have been racing for control of ISIS’s last bastion, the province of Deir Ezzor. The S.D.F. recently captured a large oil field there. The Assad regime, backed by Russian air power, is fighting in the provincial capital. A direct phone line connects the command centers of the U.S. and Russian militaries in Syria, so that they can avoid inadvertent clashes. Nonetheless, the coalition says, Russian planes have targeted S.D.F. positions, wounding fighters.

Even as the Democratic Union Party has embraced the U.S.-led coalition and forged alliances with anti-government rebels, it has tried to reach an accommodation with Assad. Crude from northern Syria’s abundant oil fields, which the Democratic Union Party largely controls, is exported in tanker convoys to Damascus, and an overland route links Rojava to regime-controlled Aleppo. The Kurdish quarter in Aleppo has been granted semi-autonomy, and regime soldiers still guard the administrative buildings that the government was allowed to keep after withdrawing troops from Rojava.

Outside Rojava, Bashar al-Assad’s military position is as strong as it has been in years. He has described the autonomous Kurdish cantonments as “temporary structures,” and he has never equivocated about his intention to bring the entire country back under his control. Robert S. Ford, the former U.S. Ambassador to Syria, recently wrote in Foreign Affairs that Assad “will probably succeed.” Ford continued, “That means the United States will have to abandon any hopes of supporting a separate Kurdish region or securing respect for human rights and democracy.” In his view, “when the Syrian government and Kurdish forces inevitably fight,” it would be “a mistake” for the U.S. to “step in on behalf of old allies.”

On October 19th, in a ceremony at Naim Square, in the center of Raqqa, the S.D.F. announced that the city had been “liberated.” This feels like a misnomer. The coalition’s air campaign has left Raqqa an uninhabitable wasteland. More than three hundred thousand civilians have been displaced. In September, Omar Alloush told me that he’d met with U.S. State Department officials who’d pledged American financial help for the rebuilding of Raqqa’s infrastructure, power plants, schools, and water and sanitation systems. “Until now, this is only words,” he said. “They have given nothing.”

All the same, the event at Naim Square was celebratory. Under ISIS, the square had been the site of beheadings and crucifixions. Now a huge banner showing a smiling Öcalan was unfurled. Y.P.G. flags flew. “My heart was jumping for joy,” Rojda Felat said recently. “We thought it would be much more difficult.” She noted, “One time, on the front lines, the enemy attacked and the men took a step back—but the women didn’t. When the men saw them, they started fighting again.”

Hundreds of female Kurdish fighters, from various units around the city, congregated in the square. Nesrin Abdullah, the commander of an all-female branch of the Y.P.G., gave a speech commemorating the thirty female fighters who had been killed during the offensive. “Women have freed themselves of the exploitative male regime in political, social, cultural, and military aspects,” Abdullah declared. “We dedicate the liberation of Raqqa to all the women of the world.”