Betraying the Kurds risks an Islamic State revival

The thousands of foreign Isil fighters held in north Syria could be released if the Turkish army invades

Betrayal is an ugly word. But if you are a Kurdish fighter who has spent the past few years risking your life fighting at America’s behest against Islamist fanatics in Syria, you are going to feel that US President Donald Trump has completely abandoned your cause with his announcement that the US is to undertake a unilateral withdrawal of its forces from Syria.

In an age when the major western powers no longer have any appetite for overseas military interventions, the new paradigm is to get local forces to do the dirty work of fighting and killing on their behalf. The main contribution made by the US and its allies is confined to providing air support and technological know-how, particularly in intelligence-gathering, as well as small groups of special forces.

Otherwise all the hard yards of conducting ground operations are undertaken by local forces which, in the highly successful recent campaign to defeat Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), fell to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

It is largely due to their heroic efforts that Isil’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria has been destroyed, and thousands of Isil fighters taken into captivity.

So the SDF and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) which commanded its anti-isil campaign have every right to expect that, at the very least, their American backers would continue to protect their interests once the fighting ended.

Instead, they find themselves having to prepare their defences to deal with a possible Turkish invasion after Mr Trump announced that he was withdrawing American forces from Kurdish-controlled territory in northern Syria in order to allow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to establish what the Turks have euphemistically termed a “safe zone”.

It will, of course, be nothing of the sort if Mr Erdogan has his way. His primary objective is to remove the Kurds and their SDF allies and replace them with a significant proportion of the millions of Syrians who have sought refuge in Turkey during Syria’s long-running civil war. It is a policy that amounts to little more than ethnic cleansing.

The Turks’ obsession with consolidating their hold over the border territory with Syria is borne of their long-running conflict with Kurdish separatists who, prior to the civil war, supported the PKK, a neo-marxist organisation that is designated as a terrorist group by the US, Britain and other Nato member states.

The YPG, so far as the Turks are concerned, is just another manifestation of the PKK, whose leader, Abdullah Ocalan, is currently languishing in a Turkish jail where he is serving a life sentence.

The YPG’S problematic provenance begs the question why, given its terrorist links, it became an ally of Washington in the first place. The answer lies somewhere in the old Arabic adage: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Mr Trump certainly regards the relationship as being based on mutual benefits, rather than shared interests, pointing out in one of his tweets that “The Kurds fought with us, but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so.”

Nevertheless, the prospect of Washington abandoning an erstwhile ally that has played a central role in defeating an anti-american organisation like Isil does not look good, as it gives the impression that the White House is prepared to ditch its allies the moment they outlive their usefulness.

Fortunately, the president appears belatedly to have grasped the implications of his pledge to allow Mr Erdogan the freedom to create his “safe zone” along the Syrian border, and has subsequently threatened to “obliterate” the Turkish economy if Ankara oversteps the mark with the Kurds.

There is, though, a wider consideration that needs to be taken into account for countries like Britain, which regard themselves as close allies of the US, but must now contend with a president whose conduct can appear capricious, to say the least.

Britain, too, has worked closely with the Kurds and the SDF in the fight against Isil, and continues to support them over the vexed issue of what to do with the estimated 70,000 Isil fighters – several hundred of whom are said to originate from Britain – who are living in the squalor of Kurdishrun prison camps.

One option that has been mooted is that Turkey assumes responsibility for the Isil fighters in return for being allowed to establish its safe zone, a suggestion that needs to be treated with caution as Ankara stands accused of funding several Isil-related groups during the Syrian conflict.

A better option would be to allow the Kurds to continue holding the captives while the outside world works out how to deal with them. Otherwise there is a very real possibility that they might end up being released and allowed to rejoin terror groups, Isil among them, which really would be a betrayal of all those who fought to destroy the Islamist caliphate.

read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion