Read: The Kurds are right back where they started

It was not to be. Just over a year ago, the U.S. refused to come to the aid of Iraqi Kurds when the president of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, Masoud Barzani, ignored Washington’s insistence that he not stage a referendum on Kurdish statehood. The plebiscite itself, along with the warnings from the United States, gave Baghdad an opening to retake territories in northern Iraq long claimed by the Kurds, thereby setting back Kurdish aspirations for independence by years.

A second warning signal came in 2018, when the United States stood by as Turkish forces overran the majority-Kurdish district of Afrin, in northern Syria, pushing out fighters of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian manifestation of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey. The YPG had taken control of northern Syria in 2012, when Syrian government forces were tied down fighting rebels elsewhere in the country. Lacking manpower, Damascus was resigned to letting them do so. It also remembered its relationship with the PKK dating back to the 1980s; if faced with the choice, it preferred the secular YPG, which harbors ambitions only for the Kurdish north, over Islamist rebels seeking to overthrow the regime.

Both Barzani’s Peshmerga fighters in Iraq and the YPG in Syria proved outstanding and reliable assets in the anti-ISIS coalition’s drive to defeat the group. Yet neither would receive the reward to which they deemed themselves entitled. They might have lived with that knowledge, while quietly continuing to build their relationship with Western states in the faint hope that the future might bring greater returns.

But what hurt was that Washington appears to have gone further, turning its back on them and leaving them at the mercy of the post-Ottoman states. They should be excused, perhaps, for now believing that the United States has simply used them essentially as if they were private security companies, part of a tactical alliance in pursuit of its own, eventually diverging, strategic agenda. Now the contract with the YPG seems to have expired.

Read: Mattis always understood Trump’s severe defects

Iraqi Kurds have the advantage of controlling a federal region that has been on reasonably good terms with Baghdad, and of having representatives in the central government that can help moderate Iraq’s approach toward the Kurds. The YPG, by contrast, is surrounded by enemies—Turkey, the Syrian regime, and even Barzani’s Kurds, who view them with suspicion.

So what is next for the YPG? It could choose to put up a fight, but the low-lying terrain does not favor them, especially against armies. It has two other options: withdraw into the mountains of northern Iraq, where the PKK has long had its stronghold and where it could yet survive fire from Turkish forces; or strike a deal with the Syrian regime to preserve some of its post-2012 gains.