Murad, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work, pointed to the key role Kurdish forces played in the defeat of IS, which they achieved with the backing of a US-led coalition

"Now, at a critical moment, those who stood on the front lines against evil are being abandoned. What the international community is doing in Syria -- and across the broader region -- is chaos, and innocent people will pay the price," she wrote on X.

Murad is a prominent member of the Yazidi community of Iraq, a group whose distinct religious beliefs made them the target of IS in their 2014 onslaught across the Syria-Iraq border.

During their offensive, which UN investigators and several countries went on to condemn as a genocide, jihadists killed men en masse and abducted thousands of women and girls as sex slaves.

Murad set up an initiative to support survivors of sexual violence after she escaped captivity in 2016, and went on to win the Nobel two years later.

She won the award along with Denis Mukwege, a doctor from the Democratic Republic of Congo who has treated tens of thousands of women raped or mutilated by militias.

Murad helped shed a light on the terrible plight of women and girls at the hands of jihadists who at the height of their power held swathes of Syria and Iraq.

IS went on to be defeated in Iraq and then Syria with the backing of the United States, though isolated cells still operate in the Syrian desert.

In Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) carved out a de facto autonomous region under their control in areas populated by Kurds and which had been battlegrounds with IS.

This month, the SDF has suffered major blows at the hands of Syria's military, which is pushing to establish Damascus's authority across the country.

On Tuesday, the army was deploying reinforcements to flashpoint areas in the north.