US, Turkey in faceoff in Syria
TWO senior US generals came to the front line outside the Syrian city of Manbij on Wednesday flying outsized American flags on their vehicles, in case pro-Turkish forces just the other side of the no man’s land, 20 metres away, did not realise who they were.
“We’re very proud of our positions here, and we want to make sure everybody knows it,” said Major General Jamie Jarrard, the Special Operations commander for the US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria.
If the message to Turkey was not clear already, the overall coalition commander accompanying Jarrard, Lieutenant General Paul Funk, elaborated. “You hit us, we will respond aggressively. We will defend ourselves.”
The trip was the first by such senior US military officers to the front in northern Syria since Turkey’s president threatened to attack the city of Manbij, calling it a bastion of terrorists and demanding that US forces leave.
But the Americans have refused, creating the potential for an unprecedented armed conflict between two NATO allies, the United States and Turkey – the latest twist on the seven-year-old war in Syria.
This part of Syria’s north was once overrun by Islamic State militants. The US and its allies, Syrian Kurdish fighters, collaborated more than a year ago to evict them.
But in the effort, the US angered Turkey, which has long regarded the Kurds as enemies. Now the Turks are turning their guns on the Kurds, setting up a possible fight with the Americans.
Funk had an automatic pistol slung across his vest. His three uniform stars would have been easily visible with binoculars to the Syrian militias aligned with Turkey on the other side of the front line, as he stood on a sandbagged roof. He was surrounded by Special Forces soldiers, and Arab and Kurdish fighters from the Manbij Military Council, the government authority in the region.
The two generals arrived at the border post in unarmoured cars, in an entourage that included several mine-resistant armoured personnel carriers, as well as Land Cruisers for Special Forces soldiers, with antennas, spare tires and jerrycans on their roofs.
Manbij is the farthest west that the Americans, aligned with the Syrian Democratic Forces insurgent group in the fight against the Islamic State, are stationed Standing on the front-line rooftop, Funk addressed the military council’s commander, Muhammed Abu Adel: “The lasting defeat of ISIS is the most important mission for this group,” he told Adel, a Kurd, although the majority of his fighters are local Arabs. “It’s in your hands now and you’re doing a good job. One team, one fight.”
Adel thanked him, and said he hoped US air power would continue to assist his forces. The general did not respond directly.
The American support for Manbij has particularly alarmed Turkey. It is waging a military campaign to take the Kurdishheld city of Afrin, 130 kilometres west, while pursuing an unusually outspoken public relations campaign to threaten Manbij and make the Americans depart, so that Syrian militias aligned with Turkish forces can take it from America’s Kurdish-led allies.
On Tuesday, once again, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey criticised the American support of Manbij. “They tell us, ‘Don’t come to Manbij.’ We will come to Manbij to hand over these territories to their rightful owners,” Erdogan said in a speech to his party. The Turkish deputy prime minister went so far as to suggest US troops in Manbij are wearing uniforms of the Kurdish People’s Protection Forces, or YPG, and said they could become targets.
The YPG dominates Kurdish areas of northern Syria and is the main component of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the American allies in the fight against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and Daesh.
But in Manbij, both the Americans and the Kurds insist, the defending force is the Manbij Military Council, an ally of the Syrian Democratic Forces, but independent and composed mostly of Arab fighters.
The Turks depict the YPG as a version of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, a separatist group regarded as a terrorist organisation by the United States and Europe.
The Americans have vowed to stay in Manbij and support their allies. But the US forces in Manbij number only a few hundred out of a total of 2,000 in all of northern Syria, mostly Special Operations troops. The Turks and their allied militias, the Free Syrian Army fighting around Afrin, are estimated at 20,000 in all. Both Turks and Americans have substantial air forces in the area.
Even if the Turks do not carry out their threats, the fight in Afrin has indirectly hurt the US-led fight against ISIS. As the Syrian Democratic Forces shift fighters to the battle in Afrin, they have weakened the Islamic State campaign far to the east.
“It’s illogical that while we are fighting ISIS, the enemy of the world, over there, the Turks attack us in Afrin,” said Shervan Derwish, the spokesman for the Manbij Military Council. “Our fight against ISIS has had to be minimised as we reduce our power there to defend Afrin.”
The military council, supported by American Special Operations troops and air power, defeated ISIS in Manbij in August 2016, and then established a local government administration that has controlled the area since. “Before they got here, this was a highway for Islamist terrorist fighters into the physical caliphate from all over the world,” Jarrard said.
The council remains an important part of the effort to fight IS, with many of its fighters alongside US forces in the eastern part of the country, where the last pockets of IS control remain.
US policymakers worry that the Afrin conflict, and the threat against Manbij, will degrade their Kurdish and Arab allies.
“I think our main concern is that anything that disrupts everybody’s focus on ISIS and eliminating the complete physical caliphate – and we’re close, we’re very close – something people couldn’t have imagined a year ago – anything that disrupts us or takes our eye off that prize, is not good,” Jarrard said.