US ENVOY SLAMS WASHINGTON’S STANCE ON SYRIA
Turkish attack on Kurds could have been avoided, says searing memo.
The top American diplomat on the ground in northern Syria has criticised the Trump administration for not trying harder to prevent Turkey’s military offensive there last month — and said Turkish-backed militia fighters committed “war crimes and ethnic cleansing.” In a searing internal memo, the diplomat, William V Roebuck, raised the question of whether tougher US diplomacy, blunter threats of economic sanctions and increased military patrols could have deterred Turkey from attacking. Similar measures had dissuaded Turkish military action before.
“It’s a tough call, and the answer is probably not,” Mr Roebuck wrote in the 3,200-word memo. “But we won’t know because we didn’t try.” He did note several reasons the Turks might not have been deterred: the small US military presence at two border outposts, Turkey’s decades-long standing as a Nato ally and its formidable army massing at the Syrian frontier.
In an unusually blunt critique, Mr Roebuck said the political and military turmoil that upended the administration’s policy in northern Syria — and left Syrian Kurdish allies abandoned and opened the door for a possible Islamic State resurgence — was a “sideshow” to the bloody, years-long upheaval in Syria overall.
But, he said, “it is a catastrophic sideshow and it is to a significant degree of our making.”
Mr Roebuck, a respected 27-year diplomat and former US ambassador to Bahrain, sent the unclassified memo on Oct 31 to his boss, James F Jeffrey, the State Department’s special envoy on Syria policy, and to about four dozen State Department, White House and Pentagon officials who work on Syria issues. Mr Roebuck is Jeffrey’s deputy.
The New York Times obtained a copy of the memo from someone who said it was important to make Mr Roebuck’s assessment public.
Morgan Ortagus, the State Department spokeswoman, also declined to comment on Mr Roebuck’s memo. “That said, we have made clear that we strongly disagreed with President Erdogan’s decision to enter Syria and that we did everything short of a military confrontation to prevent it,” Ms Ortagus said.
“No one can deny that the situation in Syria is very complicated, and there are no easy solutions and no easy choices,” she said. “There will always be a variety of opinions on how this complex situation should be managed. This administration’s job is to do what is best for US national security and the American people. That is what we have done in Syria and what we will continue to do.”
Mr Roebuck’s memo appears to be the first formal expression of dissent on Syria from a Trump administration official to be made public. Pentagon officials voiced alarm by the sudden shift in Syria policy, but top officials never made their views public.
Mr Roebuck’s memo also comes as the president already has expressed disdain for some State Department officials because of their testimony in Congress during the impeachment inquiry over Ukraine policy.
For nearly two years, Mr Roebuck has worked on the ground in northern Syria with Syrian Kurdish and Arab military and civilian officials who make up what is called the Syrian Democratic Forces. Mr Roebuck has been an important interlocutor with Mazlum Kobani, the Syrian Kurdish military commander whose fighters have worked closely with American Special Operations forces to combat the Islamic State.
Mr Roebuck focused his harshest criticism on Turkey’s military offensive and specifically on Turkey’s deployment of Syrian Arab fighters in its vanguard force. He added his voice to accusations by human rights groups that these fighters have killed Kurdish prisoners, including one of them lying on the ground with his hands bound behind his back, and committed other atrocities as they emptied major Kurdish population centres in northern Syria.
“Turkey’s military operation in northern
Syria, spearheaded by armed Islamist groups on its payroll, represents an intentioned-laced effort at ethnic cleansing,” Mr Roebuck wrote, calling the abuses “what can only be described as war crimes and ethnic cleansing.”
By acting now, Mr Roebuck wrote, “we have a chance to minimise the damage for us and hopefully correct some of the impact of Turkey’s current policies, as we seek to implement the president’s guidance for our presence in northeastern Syria.”
A senior State Department official said the US had immediately raised the reports of atrocities with the Turkish government. Kurdish forces in Syria have made allegations of atrocities, which the Turkish government has denied.
But the senior official acknowledged that the Turkish-based Syrian force included ill-disciplined Arab fighters — the Arabs and Kurds have a history of sometimes bloody rivalry in the region — and that some embrace radical Islamic ideology.
Mr Roebuck’s memo comes at a tumultuous time on the ground in northern Syria and at a delicate moment for the administration’s Syria policy. Mr Jeffrey is scheduled to travel to Ankara and Istanbul for meetings at the weekend with senior Turkish officials and members of the Syrian opposition to the government of President Bashar Assad of Syria.
The memo came two weeks after Vice President Mike Pence agreed to a deal with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey that accepted a Turkish military presence in a broad part of northern Syria in exchange for the promise of a five-day ceasefire, completing an abrupt reversal of US policy in the Syrian conflict. Mr Pence hailed the agreement as a diplomatic victory for President Donald Trump, calling it a “solution we believe will save lives”.
The memo also came after President Vladimir Putin of Russia met Mr Erdogan in Sochi, Russia, to discuss how their countries and other regional players would divide control of Syria, devastated by eight years of civil war.