Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: America’s partner in the ISIS fight, now desperately seeking clarity

The ghost of the 2003 Iraq war has haunted every decision that the United States has made on the Syrian civil war, which this week marked its tenth anniversary.  Iraq’s memory also shaped America’s efforts to defeat ISIS.  

It is time for the American public to know the forces who lost 10,000 of their own to keep the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world safer by taking away the physical terrain held by ISIS. We should continue to support them, as they continue to hold in prison roughly two thousand foreign ISIS fighters whose home countries will not take them back.  In October 2019, then-candidate Joe Biden gave a speech in Iowa in which he talked about the Syrian Kurds, America’s partners on the ground in the battle against the Islamic State. "They helped us smash ISIS, a direct threat to the United States of America and our friends all around the world ," Biden said to applause just days after Turkey backed an incursion into the northeastern Syria that targeted those same partners who fought alongside America to stop the Islamic State.