There is a specific, grim hilarity to the way the Western powers manage the collapse of the Middle East. It is not the chaos of a battlefield, nor the unpredictable fury of revolution, but rather the tedious, bureaucratic shuffling of papers—and human beings—while the building burns down around them. We are witnessing the geopolitical equivalent of a desperate housewife sweeping dust under a rug, except the dust is composed of hardened religious fanatics and the rug is the sovereign territory of Iraq, a nation that has historically handled foreign-imported instability with the grace of a frantic drunk in a glass factory.

Western officials, those paragons of foresight who have spent the last two decades turning the Levant into a live-fire exercise in futility, have announced their latest masterstroke. Amid the crumbling architecture of north-east Syria, where the Kurdish-led administration is currently being dismantled by the encroaching reality of the Damascus government, the United States military has decided to engage in a bit of light logistics. They have “transported” 150 Islamic State fighters from Syria to Iraq. One must appreciate the sterility of the language. They were not fled, they were not unleashed; they were “transported,” like Amazon packages or nuclear waste, moved from one precarious containment facility to another, presumably with a tracking number provided to the Pentagon.

This tactical genius is born from the sudden, shocked realization that the Kurds—whom the West utilized as disposable shock troops against the Caliphate only to abandon them the moment the political winds shifted—might no longer be able to run the world’s most dangerous daycare centers. The prisons are changing hands. The guards are fleeing or fighting for their lives against Turkish incursions or Assad’s forces, and the thousands of IS militants sitting in these camps are looking at the unlocked gates with the enthusiastic gaze of a wolf staring at an open coop. The West’s response? A panic-induced bus service.

The absurdity lies not just in the action, but in the destination. Iraq. We are moving the contagion back to the patient zero of regional destabilization. The logic seems to be that since Iraq is already a fractured mosaic of sectarian tension, Iranian influence, and corruption, a few hundred—or potentially 7,000, if the US threat to expand the program holds true—battle-hardened jihadists won’t make much of a difference. It is the logic of a hoarder moving piles of old newspapers from the living room to the kitchen to make space for a new pile of trash. It solves nothing; it merely changes the coordinates of the inevitable explosion.

One cannot help but marvel at the cynical transactionality of it all. For years, we were told the defeat of the Islamic State was a total victory, a triumph of Western resolve and Kurdish bravery. We held parades. We pinned medals on generals. And yet, the actual human remnants of that war were never dealt with; they were merely stored. We treated the captors, the Syrian Democratic Forces, as unpaid storage unit managers. Now that the lease is up and the landlord (Assad) is returning, the West is scrambling to salvage the “high-value assets”—a euphemism for the monsters they created or failed to destroy—while leaving the Kurds to face the consequences of their alliance alone.

The US military says it is “willing to move up to 7,000” prisoners. Pause for a moment to consider the logistics of transporting a small army of terrorists across a hostile border in the middle of a three-way war. This is not strategy; it is a farce. It is an admission that there was never a plan for the day after the victory. There was only the hope that if we ignored the prisons in north-east Syria long enough, perhaps they would simply evaporate. Instead, as is the tendency of ignored problems in this region, they festered.

Western officials claim they are “closely monitoring” the situation. Of course they are. They are monitoring it with the same impotent concern one might have while watching a car crash in slow motion from a safe distance. They speak of “fears that Islamic State militants could re-emerge,” phrasing it as a possibility rather than a certainty. But let us be honest: they are not re-emerging from the ether; they are being let out by the vacuum we helped create. The collapse of security in north-east Syria was not an unpredictable act of God; it was the direct result of a foreign policy that treats alliances as temporary inconveniences and nations as sandboxes.

So, we watch the Great Jihadist Shuffle begin. The trucks roll across the border, carrying their cargo of hatred from one failed state to a fragile one, guided by a superpower that long ago lost the plot but refuses to leave the stage. It is a theater of the absurd, written in Washington, performed in the Levant, and destined to be reviewed poorly by history. The security of the world is now dependent on a transit schedule. One can only hope the traffic is light.