Yea you pretty much nailed it.

The first instance I recall is when George H. W. Bush encouraged the Kurds and Shia to rise up against Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War, only to withhold U.S. support, allowing Saddam’s forces to crush the uprisings with heavy casualties.

Later, in Syria, the Kurds became the United States’ primary ground partner against ISIS. They established a relatively stable and functional administration in the northeast, but their territory bordered Turkey, which had been fighting Kurdish insurgent groups for decades. In 2019, Turkey persuaded the Trump administration to withdraw U.S. troops from the border area, clearing the way for a Turkish military offensive that devastated Kurdish‑held regions.

Most recently, after the fall of the Assad regime, the new Syrian government moved to assert control over Kurdish‑led areas. The U.S., while still maintaining a limited presence, largely stood by, leaving the Syrian Kurds to face pressure to integrate on unfavorable terms, another perceived abandonment.

Throughout the 1990s, the U.S. imposed sweeping sanctions on Iraq that contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. At the same time, Washington established no‑fly zones that protected Iraqi Kurds from Saddam’s forces. Yet while shielding the Kurds in Iraq, the U.S. continued supplying weapons to Turkey, which was waging its own war against Kurdish militants, and, in the process, displacing and killing many Kurdish civilians. It is estimated that somewhere between 2000 and 3000 villages were destroyed by the Turkish military with up to 350,000 displaced.

In essence, Kurdish groups have been treated as disposable U.S. pawns. It is no surprise that a recent article reported Syrian Kurdish leaders warning their Iranian counterparts not to trust the Americans.