Throughout decades of often disastrous American military interventions abroad, Washington has also claimed to support affected populations through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), promising some baseline level of survival. This relationship of dependency has served as a way for the United States to avoid accountability for its interventions. Yet now Donald Trump’s administration is pulling this support, with often devastating results.

One notable case is Syria. According to United Nations estimates, some 16.5 million people in this country need some form of humanitarian aid. Now the likely withdrawal of funds threatens one of the worst crises in decades. To speed up the process, Trump met with de facto president Ahmed al-Sharaa — formerly Mohammed al-Jolani — in Riyadh this month to agree that the new authorities would be involved in fighting terrorism in Syria and take responsibility for detention camps, implicitly in exchange for lifting economic sanctions.

In the latter half of the 2010s, the international coalition against the Islamic State (ISIS) was centered on the US alliance with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). After the defeat of ISIS in 2019, a site was set up in northeastern Syria to contain the enduring threat it posed because of its disbanded or perhaps still-organized fighters: al-Hawl. Approximately 50,000 people live there in what is officially a refugee camp, but in practice it has become an open-air prison. These families are arbitrarily detained by the Kurdish- but also Arab-led SDF for having any links — real or suspected — with the Islamic State.