There are five factions in Syria:

- Assad. Crushed insurrections. Has conditional backing from Russia, Iran and therefore Hizbollah.

- The rebels. Crushed. Has conditional backing from the US and therefore Britain, and France.

- The Salafists. Various and sundry jihadis. Has conditional backing from other jihadis. Isis goes here.

- The Rojava. An ethnic group with territory that would like to be a country please. Kurds, basically, with all the enemies of Kurds, IE Turkey, Iraq, Syria, jihadis. Also Kurds, which means no friends.

- CENTCOM. US Spooks and rambo-types doing their black-book kinetic best out in the land beyond accountability. In a reasonable world they'd back the rebels but they only do that sometimes. Sometimes they're against them.

Assad would have fallen if it had been "Assad vs. not-Assad" but "not-Assad" is still four factions. Rojava gives no fucks about non-Rojava Syria. Salafists give no fucks about infidels. CENTCOM is pursuing its own fucked up strategy which, frankly, is to mess with Russia (and Turkey to a lesser extent) but ostensibly Turkey is an ally and ostensibly we support the freedom of Rojava and meanwhile the President has been sitting on the fact that Russia's been putting a bounty on our troops for three months and fucking Erik Prince and Rudy Giuliani are extralegal ambassadors of who-the-fuck-knows-what so shit be murky.

The '90s and '00s were characterized by "US Troops to X" at which point we imposed order for better or worse and there were two sides to every battle. The '10s were characterized by "US Troops from X" at which point whatever drama cracked loose from the Arab Spring was left to sort itself out into whatever multifaceted catastrophe was most likely from whatever weak response the incumbents had and whatever disorganized skirmishes any given group of rebels felt like putting up.

We wanted globalism without imperialism. This is what it looks like.