Death in Palmyra, Cologne in the Oval Office

ISIS ambushes a joint patrol while Trump treats Syrian diplomacy like a department-store fragrance counter.

The news out of Syria broke like a gut punch: two U.S. soldiers and a civilian interpreter killed near Palmyra, three more wounded, and two Syrian security officers hit as well. CENTCOM says it was a lone ISIS gunman who ambushed a joint U.S.–Syrian patrol during what the Pentagon insists was a routine “key leader engagement,” a phrase that evokes polite conversation over weak tea rather than the burst of gunfire that ended three American lives. The attacker is dead, though that does little for the families now bracing for a knock at the door or for the wounded still bleeding in a desert the United States likes to pretend it has somehow graduated from.

To understand why this moment feels especially destabilizing, you have to rewind just a few days to the international victory lap Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has been taking. The man who once led Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadist movement with an unmistakable al-Qaida pedigree, has spent the past year reinventing himself as the Middle East’s most overbooked frequent flyer. Twenty-one diplomatic trips, thirteen countries, a parade of summits, and even David Petraeus cheerfully interviewing his former prisoner on a New York stage. The world, astonishingly, has been warming to Syria again. The UN Security Council showed up in Damascus last week, all fifteen members, for the anniversary of Assad’s fall, an image so improbable that you half expect someone to admit later it was an AI-generated hallucination.

There has been real investment too. Gulf money is pouring in. Sanctions are poised to be lifted before Christmas. Sharaa has been conducting joint intelligence operations with the U.S., helping track ISIS weapons caches. The White House has even embraced him, with Donald Trump hailing him as a “tough guy” and brushing off his al-Qaida past as if it were the regional equivalent of youthful indiscretion. “We’ve all had rough pasts,” Trump said, an interesting statement from a man currently drowning in Epstein photographs.

Beneath the ribbon-cuttings and photo ops, Syria remains a pressure cooker. Israeli airstrikes continue to batter the south, nearly a thousand in the last year alone. Turkey is growing impatient with the Kurdish SDF’s still-unintegrated force of 70,000 fighters in the north. External actors still treat Syria as a chessboard, not a nation. Sharaa is expected to miraculously stabilize all of this while convincing Gulf investors he is no longer the extremist they once hunted and convincing his own population that they are safe from both Israel and Turkey. One misstep, one vacuum, one resurgence of ISIS, and the entire edifice of goodwill could collapse.

And then came the ambush near Palmyra. It is hard to overstate how jarring it is to watch U.S. troops die in a country whose leader is currently enjoying a global honeymoon and whose government is supposedly conducting joint operations with Washington to hunt ISIS remnants. Harder still when you remember that the President of the United States recently greeted Sharaa in the Oval Office by spraying him with men’s cologne like a rogue mall kiosk employee, giggling as he demonstrated the “best fragrance” and offering a bottle “for your wife.” This was not parody. This was American diplomacy, performed by a man now spending his Saturday complaining that Epstein estate photos are making him “look bad.”

So we land in the dissonance of the moment: a Syria the world is tentatively trying to rehabilitate, a president in Damascus walking a political tightrope over a pit of regional anxieties, a United States claiming a renewed partnership after a decade of proxy battles, and an ISIS fighter who needed only seconds to remind everyone that goodwill tours and joint press conferences don’t make a country stable, much less safe.

The tragic part is not that the attack happened. Syria is still a battlefield stitched together by hope and duct tape. The tragic part is that this attack underscores how fragile the entire narrative of “post-conflict Syria” truly is. One gunman, one patrol, one burst of fire, and the myth that ISIS is merely a lingering nuisance collapses. The myth that U.S. soldiers are merely “advisors” collapses. The myth that Sharaa can govern without the ground shifting beneath him collapses.

Through all this, the President of the United States seems determined to behave in ways that trivialize the stakes, sniffing foreign leaders, denying foreign wars exist, and insisting the real crisis is that Democrats released unflattering Epstein memorabilia.

So here we are: Americans killed in Syria just as the world was beginning to imagine a new chapter for the country; a president in Damascus struggling to prove Syria can regain sovereignty; a president in Washington struggling to prove he understands what sovereignty even is; and a war that, despite every press release to the contrary, has not ended at all.

It would be funny, I suppose, if it weren’t so lethal. It might even be hopeful, if it weren’t also so fragile. It is, in its way, the truest snapshot of Syria’s present: a nation trying to reassemble itself while the ghosts of the last decade, ISIS, Israel, Turkey, the Kurds, Washington, continue to rattle the table.