U.S. to stop arming Syrian Kurds
Trump tells Turkish president about change; Turkey is ‘very happy’
The United States will cut off its supply of arms to Kurdish fighters in Syria, President Donald Trump told the Turkish president, in a move sure to please Turkey but further alienate Syrian Kurds who bore much of the fight against the Islamic State group.
In a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday, Trump said he’d “given clear instructions” that the Kurds will receive no more weapons — “and that this nonsense should have ended a long time ago,” said Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. The White House confirmed the move in a cryptic statement about the phone call that said Trump had informed the Turk of “pending adjustments to the military support provided to our partners on the ground in Syria.”
The White House called the move “consistent with our previous policy” and noted the recent fall of Raqqa, once the Islamic State group’s self-declared capital but recently liberated by a largely Kurdish force. The Trump administration an- nounced in May it would start arming the Kurds in anticipation of the fight to retake Raqqa.
The move could help ease strained tensions between the U.S. and Turkey, two NATO allies that have been sharply at odds about how best to wage the fight against IS. Turkey considers the Kurdish Syrian fighters, known by the initials YPG, to be terrorists because of their affiliation to outlawed Kurdish rebels that have waged a three decade-long insurgency in Turkey. Yet the U.S. chose to partner with the YPG in Syria anyway, arguing that the battle-hardened Kurds were the most effective fighting force available. Cavusoglu, who said he was in the room with Erdogan during Trump’s call, quoted the U.S. president as saying he had given instructions to U.S. generals and to national security adviser H.R. McMaster that “no weapons would be issued.”
“Of course, we were very happy with this,” Cavusoglu said.
Yet for the Kurds, it was the latest demoralizing blow to their hopes for greater recognition in the region. Last month, Kurds in Iraq saw their recent territorial gains erased by the Iraqi military after a Kurdish independence referendum.