Another blow for US policy
ON SUNDAY, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan crowed that Turkish troops and their rebel allies had “liberated” the northern Syrian city of Afrin and were in “total control” of its environs. After two months of grinding warfare, they had driven out fighters belonging to the YPG, a faction of Syrian Kurds loathed by Ankara because of its links to an outlawed terrorist group operating on Turkish soil.
As the Kurdish fighters withdrew, tens of thousands of civilians followed. “We sat this out for the past seven years,” a Kurdish resident of Afrin told reporters. “We bothered no one and watched the storm pass all around us. Then the Turks came for us.”
Reports suggest that rebel militias allied with Turkey are ransacking abandoned shops and homes in Afrin. There are fears of reprisal attacks and a new influx of Islamist militants, shielded by the Turkish advance. Erdogan has vowed further advances against Syrian Kurdish positions. “Basically, anything goes,” a Western official based in the Middle East told the Guardian’s Martin Chulov after Afrin’s capture. “There is no right or wrong anymore. The international order is dying in the ruins of Syria.”
But the fall of Afrin does offer a particularly gloomy snapshot of Washington’s confused role in the Syrian war. Both the Trump and Obama administrations courted the YPG and backed their fight against Islamic State – much to the chagrin of Turkey. The YPG is the most important fighting force within a coalition known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, which led the anti-jihadist fight in eastern and northeastern Syria and helped drive IS from its de facto capital, Raqqa. The group has won bipartisan sympathy on Capitol Hill and is celebrated by some columnists and intellectuals in the West as a secular, “liberal” outfit operating in a world of extremists. (Critics point to the YPG’s own alleged abuses and crimes.)
Meanwhile, Turkey views such moves as tacit support for a de facto Kurdish state on its borders, and that disagreement has helped fuel the decline of US-Turkey relations. When Operation Olive Branch – Turkey’s Orwellian name for its campaign in Afrin – got underway, the United States had little influence to wield in trying to stop it. The entreaties from President Trump urging Turkey to “de-escalate” went unheeded. Turkey, once at odds with Russia, even won Moscow’s cooperation before launching its offensive.
So when the going got tough, the Kurds in Afrin – like their ethnic brethren at other moments in the history of the Middle East – realised they were alone. Reports suggested that even as Trump denounced the Turkish offensive, administration officials were indicating to Ankara that the US would be reconsidering its support for the YPG.
“The Afrin crisis shows how difficult it is for US policymakers to walk and chew gum when it comes to Syria,” Nicholas Heras of the Washingtonbased Center for a New American Security said in late January. “This is shoot-from-the-hip policymaking.”
A bit more than a month later, the effects of this ad hoc policymaking were seen, with reports SDF fighters were withdrawing from battles against IS to help reinforce their beleaguered comrades in Afrin. “The international coalition let us down,” Aldar Xelil, a Kurdish official in Afrin, said. “They did not do what we expected them to do for us after a very long partnership.”
“There’s an erosion of trust in the American ability to protect its allies in Syria,” Hassan Hassan, a fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, said to Today’s WorldView. Hassan argued that the US could have headed off this latest crisis by more delicately handling Turkish grievances.
But that would require a deftness and coherence of vision the White House demonstrably lacks, particularly when it comes to Syria. As the Washington Post has reported, there are vast divides within the Trump administration over the US commitment to the war effort. Trump himself is desperate to get out after having “knocked the hell out” of IS, while other officials are keen to deepen the US presence in Syria, hoping to eventually force President Bashar al-Assad from power.
“One senior official said the SDF should cut a deal with the Syrian regime, given that Assad is ascending and there is little US appetite to expand the military mission. The SDF shares Assad’s goal of ridding Syria of opposition rebels, IS and Turkish forces,” the Washington Post’s Paul Sonne wrote. “A second senior administration official, however, completely rejected the notion that Assad is winning, saying the regime is ‘weaker than it has ever been, certainly in this half of the civil war’.”
These divisions will dog the administration’s efforts. “The United States now faces a crisis of confidence in Syria. Its policy, which seemed to be going well in the fall of 2017 as anti-ISIS operations moved to stabilization, is now compromised,” wrote Seth Frantzman in the National Interest. “Plans to increase diplomatic personnel and increase aid, to remove IEDs and train security forces, are now unclear. Turkey, Russia, the Syrian regime and Iran all want Washington to close up shop in Syria.”
Even if it’s not about to close up shop, Washington is in a position where it’s constantly on the back foot as other regional powers take the initiative. “Turkey threw a stone in the lake,” said Hassan, “and the ripple effect isn’t going to stop any time soon.”