RUTHFULLY YOURS

I’m in the northeastern corner of Syria, at a modern prison in Derik (known in Arabic as Al-Malikiyah), in a cell that smells like an old basement and is filled with stale, garishly colored bedding. A Turkish missile just landed close by, as if to warn the detainees to flee.

I find myself face to face with a dozen French jihadists who were, I was told, among the most vicious assassins of Raqqa. Here they look like poor wrecks in dirty sweatpants and polo shirts—except for one, who was wounded when his legs got caught in a scrap-metal trap. “We know who you are!” he shouts at me in his northern French accent. This is followed by a general clamor of pitiful complaints along the lines of, “Do you know who is going to try us and when?”

These monsters who terrorized the world are now cut off from it. Deprived of daylight, of cellphones, of the single television set that was taken away when the Turkish offensive began, they don’t even know that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, their leader, is dead, killed in an Oct. 26 U.S. air raid. They have but one thing in mind: not to end up in Baghdad to face capital punishment, and instead to return to France, the homeland of the rights of man, including the right to a legal defense.

A few miles away is a cloister lined with arcades and only recently converted into a detention facility for the minor children of terrorists. One, a New Yorker named Nelson, says he’s never committed any crime except to have a father who was a terrorist.

I’m led to a closed room where two French boys await. One, an 8-year-old, tells how he cut the throat of a neighbor who showed disrespect for his sister. The other, who has an angelic face, would gather the heads that his father, an executioner in Raqqa, would cut off. Might ISIS’ worst crime be that of having attempted to make these “lion cubs” the transmitters of a plague of villainy down the generations?

I visit a Kurdish militia compound where I meet a female fighter whose nom de guerre is “Kurdistan.” As she begins her account, a handful of her comrades sit around her beside their Kalashnikovs, on a rug laid over the cement floor to keep out the morning cold. In a measured, musical voice, she tells of the moment when she realized that the Americans really were going to leave and that the unit would have to fall back to save what it could of Rojava and buy time to plan a counterattack.

It is said of the Kurds that they have no friends but the mountains. In Syria, they don’t even have mountains. Does that mean that they have no friends at all? In Qamishli, Rojava’s capital, in the overheated offices of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, I put the question to Fawza Youssef, writer, feminist and member of the collective leadership of Rojava.

“Not at all,” she says, and now I’m paraphrasing her response: Democracies are our friends. Civil society is our friend. And this society, our society, is another friend. It’s an egalitarian society. It doesn’t draw religious or racial distinctions. In opposition to the old patriarchy revived by radical Islam, it puts women and men on the same footing. This blend of egalitarianism and Spartan zeal, of libertarian spirit and revolutionary discipline, of ecological communalism and internationalism, is the core of Rojava and the soul of its resistance.

Aldar Khalil holds no official position. He assures me with a gesture of his remaining hand that he is only one of many who inspired the coalition of Kurdish parties. But from the respect everyone shows him, I understand the story is more complicated. Unlike Ms. Youssef, he received Marxist training. He is the only one of our Kurdish interlocutors to acknowledge (proudly) the link with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a militant group that opposes the Turkish state.

When he mentions, and justifies, the switching of alliances that Syria’s Kurds had to accept after being abandoned by the Americans, he makes me think of Isaac Babel’s description of “the mysterious curve of Lenin’s straight line.” Mr. Khalil has the same unbendable will, the same cold analysis of the mechanics of events, and the same dialectical flair in rationalizing the bitter compromise with Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.

“Hello, General, what is the situation on the ground?” Through the static on the phone, President Emmanuel Macron spends 40 minutes worrying about what the Kurdish forces need from France. The general, Mazlum Abdi Kobani, is commander in chief of the Kurdish army. Turkish drones, I’m told, track and target him wherever he is reported to be.

We crowd around my iPhone in the best-connected corner of the half-disused hotel where the meeting had to be held. I will not summarize the substance of the exchange between Mr. Macron and Ankara’s Public Enemy No. 1. But if Mr. Aldar is the Lenin of Rojava, Gen. Mazlum is its Trotsky, its military chief. Gen. Mazlum is at pains to emphasize to Mr. Macron that among the points under discussion with Mr. Assad’s regime, one is nonnegotiable: the autonomy of his army, the maintenance of its chain of command, the assurance that it will not become involved in any dirty battle—in Idlib, for example—organized by Damascus. Of that essential condition, imposed as a point of honor, France took note that night.

Across the Tigris in Iraq, we stand on the ridge of the Qara Chokh range, 25 miles north of Erbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. This has been the Peshmerga’s highest position since October 2017, when, in the wake of the Kurds’ referendum on self-determination, Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani’s militias pushed the Kurds out of the “disputed” territories. The caliphate has been destroyed, but below us, a mere half-mile away, a few hundred ISIS fighters have regrouped.

A mortar shell landed here an hour ago, followed by a sniper shot that grazed the roof of the bunkers. The Peshmerga’s Gen. Sirwan Barzani doesn’t seem all that surprised. He reminds us of his prediction after the September 2017 referendum that the jihadists would fill the void left by the Kurds’ forced retreat. Here he is again—the tycoon turned soldier, founder and president of an Iraqi telecommunications company—spending his days and nights here in the rough with his men, standing guard against the barbarians. It is this civic heroism that I have always admired among the Peshmerga, a corps of citizen-soldiers in which the lords of the Barzan hills commingle with the simplest farmers.

When I made my 2016 documentary, “Peshmerga,” Masoud Barzani was Kurdistan’s president. He passed the torch to his nephew Nechirvan after the referendum. I find the elder Mr. Barzani in the same palace where I had come in the summer of 2015 to urge him to get the green light from the U.S. to enter ISIS-occupied Mosul.

Mr. Barzani displays the same silent authority he always has, the same imposing presence despite his small stature. He wears the same Peshmerga uniform and cap. But a new touch of bitterness tinges his account of the battle of Altun Kupri, near Kirkuk, where one of his commanders was able, like Leonidas at Thermopylae, to hold back for several days an Iraqi force assisted by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and commanded in person by Soleimani.

I admire Mr. Barzani for being able to stand up to the rest of the world. In this he reminds me of the generals of the French revolutionary army, of the Israel Defense Forces and of the early Soviet revolutionaries. He has the quality of the magnificent loser, wandering his deserted palace like an old, fallen king, with nothing left but his glory. He remains the father of his nation.

Three hours east of Erbil, close to the Iranian border, I find exiled Peshmerga fighters from Iranian Kurdistan, known as Rojhelat. Scattered over a landscape of craggy, menacing rock, stationed in stone shelters tirelessly refortified, and equipped with weapons repeatedly refurbished with a patience worthy of Sisyphus, a handful of women and men stand on perpetual alert. For 40 years they’ve prayed for the fall of the ayatollahs. These rearguard guerrillas, among the most hardened of the Peshmerga, never stop preparing for a liberation that never comes. This life of waiting, of stalled heroism, this anticipation of a confrontation constantly deferred, this motionless time—all that makes one desperate.

Suddenly last year, IRGC troops on the other side, fed up with these tireless resisters and their clandestine incursions, decided to strike. Three missiles fell on the headquarters here in Koya and killed most of the political bureau of the party.

On the road back to Erbil, in a village at the foot of a mountain, we come upon a makeshift bazaar piled high with odd lots of goods. There are computers, canned food, medications, hardware, diapers—everything Iranian Kurds across the border, deprived by the regime, need to stay alive.

Men of all ages pile these goods into rattletrap trucks that will set off up the mountain road. Because they then must traverse the Zagros ridge, carrying their bundles of misery and survival on their backs, these smugglers are called kolbars: kol meaning “back” and bar meaning “to carry.” Because they risk their lives, defying icy paths and Iranian soldiers who fire on sight, I see them as resisters of a different sort.

One of them is a 70-year-old man mourning his eldest son, shot by an Iranian sniper, who had been his companion on the trail and whom he had to leave up on the mountain, frozen in snow, as the winter set in. Before setting out, he asked: “Are my children’s children, and their children, condemned to live like human ants? Will they continue to live life, to give life, and to die for these pieces of plastic and cardboard? How many generations will it take before their hope becomes something more than another burden to bear?”

Mr. Lévy is author of “The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World” (Henry Holt, 2019). This article was translated from French by Steven B. Kennedy.