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Donald Trump draws worldwide attention as he threatens to make war on Iran, but few notice that he has already let loose a savage ethnic cleansing against two million Kurds in Syria.

Previously allied to the US in fighting Islamic State (Isis), the Kurds have been abruptly dropped by Trump and now face a future similar to the Palestinians in Gaza.

In the last few weeks, Syrian government and Turkish-backed Arab militias have pushed the Kurds out of a great swathe of territory they once held with US backing in north-east Syria. Trapped in smaller and smaller enclaves, they are surrounded by enemies and have no means of escape.

Trump is as dismissive about their fate as he is about that of the Palestinians. “They were paid tremendous amounts of money, were given oil and other things,” he says, inaccurately. “So they were doing it for themselves more so than they were doing it for us.” He vaguely said that the US might protect the Kurds, but he left no doubt that the US has abandoned its old allies.

Tom Barrack, the US Special Envoy for Syria, put it brutally, saying that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – the mainly Kurdish armed force of which 11,000 were killed fighting Isis over a decade – were no longer the “primary anti-Isis force on the ground”, and their usefulness had “largely expired” because the new pro-American Syrian government has taken over security responsibility.

Beginning in 2014, when the US Air Force helped the Kurds defend the besieged city of Kobani, on the border with Turkey, against ferocious assault by Isis, the alliance went from strength to strength until Isis was defeated by 2018. Yet today Kobani is besieged once again, this time by the Syrian army and Turkish-backed Arab militias.

Its water and electricity are cut off and there is a shortage of bread. A UN convoy of 24 trucks was able to deliver supplies in the last few days during a ceasefire, but few Kurds expect this to last.

Accounts that have been provided to The i Paper might all have come from Gaza during its bombardment by Israel. Mustafa Osman Kajo, from the village of Kharab Ashq near Kobani, has grim experience of the fragility of ceasefires. With his family, he had gone to stay with relatives in another village he believed to be safer.

“This was about 10 days ago, but when we heard that there was a ceasefire agreement, we returned to our house,” he said.

Kajo went into Kobani to buy some goods, but when there, he heard shelling and returned to find that his house had been hit. “My........

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