The Obama administration has remained determined not to deploy regular land forces in the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, forcing the Pentagon to work out creative solutions in a battlefield that is growing more complicated, more crowded and more entangled by the day. The most remarkable of those solutions recently has been the use of the American flag, very much in the way a maestro would use his baton to prevent a cacophonic band from descending into full chaos.

The United States had to put this motley band together to advance its political agenda, which, in Syria, is topped by the priority to degrade and destroy the Islamic State (IS). The “musicians” who produce the cacophony, however, have their own agenda and political objectives. And who are they?

First, there are the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). True, they are fighting IS, but they are doing so in the hope of obtaining an “autonomous Kurdistan” at the least.

Then, there is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. True, Turkey has finally begun to fight IS, but Erdogan’s essential goal in rolling tanks into Syria and pushing IS to the south is less to degrade and destroy IS and more to prevent the Kurds from securing territorial contiguity and ultimately autonomy in Syria. He might also believe that thanks to Operation Euphrates Shield, he has regained a place for himself in the Syrian equation after being shut out by Russia’s intervention last year.