As stakeholders in Syria’s seven-year conflict remain glued to US President Donald Trump’s tweets, one group has remained noticeably silent: Turkey’s biggest bugbear and the United States’ top ally, the Kurds.

Ever since the American leader vowed via Twitter to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over a suspected chemical attack on Douma, the dominant Kurdish political group in Syria, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and its armed affiliate the People’s Protection Units (YPG) have refrained from airing views on whether or how the United States should respond.

Pro-PYD media outlets displayed similarly scant interest in a potential confrontation. Among the top stories on the popular Hawar news agency today was one about dozens of mothers gathering in Aleppo to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the death of Oweish, the mother of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned Kurdish leader exalted by the PYD and the YPG as the shepherd of Kurds worldwide. Another lead item was about the YPG’s sister organization the People’s Defense Forces carrying out an attack against Turkish soldiers in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The PYD-friendly Syrian Democratic Council did issue a statement on April 8 about “the massacre of Douma [in] which chemical gases that are internationally banned were used and caused the martyrdom of dozens and civilians.” But it refrained from pointing the finger of blame at the regime. “We in Syria's Democratic Council condemn whoever participated in this ugly massacre against our people in Douma,” the statement read. The cautious tone is very much in keeping with what the Kurds label “the third way,” which is maintaining a transactional peace with the regime and focusing on cementing autonomy in the estimated 20% of Syria under their control.