The United Nations had just opened its general assembly in late September last year when President Donald Trump gave a rare, 81-minute press conference. Kurdish journalist Rahim Rashidi, who was born in Iran and had fled to Iraq, then Turkey, then claimed refuge in Sweden before settling into a new life in Washington, raised his hand to ask a question of the free world’s leader.

“Yes please, Mr. Kurd,” Trump responded flippantly, raising eyebrows and cackles across the world. But Rashidi didn’t miss a beat, asking Trump about U.S. relations with the Kurds and American commitments against regional powers—Iran and Turkey—that always seemed to want to steamroll the ethnic minority into oblivion. “We do get along great with the Kurds, we’re trying to help them a lot,” Trump answered:

Don’t forget, that’s their territory. We have to help them. I want to help them. They fought with us, They fought with us, they died. We lost tens of thousands of Kurds [who] died fighting ISIS. They died for us and with us. And for themselves, they died for themselves. But they’re great people, and we have not forget [sic].

It was the rare moment in which Trump’s brand of blather matched longstanding U.S. rhetoric about the Kurds, who, as “the world’s largest stateless nation,” number 20 to 40 million Middle Eastern people living mostly in enclaves spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. For three decades, Kurdish nationalists have been Our Men In The Middle East, reliable proxies and allies in U.S. struggles against Saddam Hussein, Tehran’s government, and Islamist terrorists.

Given that history, Rashidi said last year that he was proud to receive the “Mr. Kurd” moniker from Trump, an obvious ally in his people’s plight for recognition and a homeland. “I loved it, because all the time our identity is ignored by the Turkish government, by the Iranian government,” he told The Washington Post. “We are proud of our struggle for democracy, for justice, for freedom.”

That struggle took an unrecoverable blow Sunday night, when, after a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—a fellow embattled strongarm “populist”—Trump announced that the United States was withdrawing its troops from Northern Syria to permit a Turkish military incursion, giving Erdoğan a free hand to smash America’s Kurdish allies there. (The U.S., the White House said, would also force its Kurdish now-ex-partners to turn ISIS prisoners over to the Turks.) By Monday afternoon, Turkish jets were already dropping bombs at the Syrian border.