The blast in the busy marketplace of Manbij has claimed several American and many Syrian civilian lives. It's a marked change from February last year, when I walked through the city with US special forces. At the time, they were relaxed in the market and wore no body armor, despite geopolitical tensions brewing just a few kilometers away.
Manbij was the complicated center of Syria's new post-war reality then, and it still is today. The Syrian Kurds who control the city are US allies in the fight against ISIS. To their west are Syrian Arab rebels, backed by Turkey, who considers the Syrian Kurds to be terrorists.
When we visited the front line separating the beleaguered Kurds and Arabs of Syria last year, US troops monitoring the area spoke of the occasional pot shot fired over their trenches by the Syrian rebels. In the months since then, tensions have grown as regime forces approach the town, backed by the Russian military.
But none of these forces claimed today's attack on US personnel. Instead, it was ISIS who claimed the deadly blast on social media, even as US Vice President Mike Pence declared at the US State Department that "the caliphate has crumbled." While there is no current evidence that the terror group is really responsible, the timing is troubling.
Last month, President Donald Trump surprised many with the announcement that he would withdraw US troops from Syria, declaring "we have won against ISIS" in a video on Twitter.
In Washington, US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis soon resigned. In Manbij, visions of an imminent power vacuum appeared.
The timeline and conditions for Trump's promised withdrawal are murky. Various senior US officials have since suggested that other tasks must be accomplished in Syria before a complete departure: Iran's influence must be lessened, and Syria's Kurds must be made safe from attack by Turkey.
But the Syrian regime and Syrian Arab rebels have each begun to stake claims in northern Syria, backed by their respective foreign powers. And the Kurds are pondering future partners to replace the US, their longtime ally in the fight against ISIS.
ISIS has already been reduced territorially in Syria, controlling just a fraction of the land they used to rule. But their diehards and leadership are holding out in key areas of eastern Syria, and the Syrian Kurds have been moving fast to wipe out those pockets of resistance.
Trump's declaration of withdrawal came at the worst possible time for that endgame. It may even have given ISIS hope, suggesting that within just a few months, the fearsome US airpower that had largely defeated them would be gone.
In truth, ISIS would likely never be entirely defeated, as territorial loss alone would not stop them from going back to their roots as an insurgent force scattered across Syria and Iraq, supported by extremists in the Sunni populations there. And if ISIS is behind Wednesday's blast, they may well remain a threat.
The question now is whether today's ghastly death toll on civilians and elite US troops will force Trump to commit to finishing the job in Syria, or push him to withdraw even faster.
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