“Everyone is pursuing their own interests, not Syria’s.”

If there has been a more accurate and pithy description of the problem in Syria, I have not seen it. Saadeddine Somaa, a former major in the Syrian Army, has identified in an interview with the New York Times the core issue in the Syrian Civil War–the greatest humanitarian and strategic catastrophe of our time. Syria has been torn apart by various factions intent on pursuing a power grab, and, despite John Kerry’s ceaseless diplomacy, there is no sign of the fighting abating.

If anything, this war of all against all is only getting more ferocious and more absurd. Turkey recently launched an armed incursion into northern Syria that was billed as an offensive against Islamic State conducted with U.S. support. The reality, as the Wall Street Journal uncovered, is rather different: Ankara was still consulting with Washington over a possible incursion when it sent its troops charging into Syria, and their primary goal was not to defeat ISIS but rather to push back the Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG, which is aligned with the PKK rebels fighting within Turkey.

Turkey views the emerging YPG-run state in northern Syria, known as Rojava, as a far greater threat to Turkish interests than ISIS is. Hence, the absurd spectacle of Turkey, a NATO ally with U.S. support, fighting against Kurdish fighters armed and also supported by the United States.

Major Somaa, who is aligned with the Free Syrian Army, was caught in the middle of this conflict. He and other Syrian Arab rebels are intent, with Turkish help, on evicting the Kurds from Manbij, the Syrian town recently seized by the YPG with U.S. air cover and other support.

Rather than straightening out this mess, the U.S. is only contributing to it, because, like everyone else, we are only pursuing our narrow self-interest–or what President Obama judges to be our self-interest–at the expense of the larger stakes in Syria.  Obama believes that our only interest is in defeating ISIS, and never mind that there are other Islamist terror groups active in Syria, from the Iranian-backed Hezbollah to the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front (which has recently rebranded itself as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, the Front for the Liberation of the Levant). In the process, however, the U.S. has become caught in the sectarian struggle between the Kurds and the Turks, with the ridiculous results described above.

It is understandable that the U.S. would want to train and arm the YPG, which is one of the few secular fighting forces in Syria, but Obama has made a major miscalculation by becoming so reliant on a group with its own links to a terrorist organization, the PKK, that is understandably seen by Turkey as a deadly foe. It will be hard to end the Syrian Civil War without more support from Turkey, but the U.S. support for the Kurds has alienated the Turks.

The larger problem is that the U.S. has all but ceased to make any serious efforts to end the fighting and engineer a political solution, which is the only way to truly defeat not only ISIS but the other extremist groups. As long as violence continues, extremists of various stripes will find a safe haven in Syria. But to end the fighting would require the U.S. to do more to train and arm a non-sectarian fighting force–and support it with no-fly zones and other measures that have been anathema to the Obama administration. Instead of taking the hard but necessary steps to try to bring peace to Syria, the U.S. has been contributing to the chaos along with Iran, Turkey, Russia, Qatar, and other outside powers that are all backing “their” militia at the expense of the Syrian people.