U.S.-Turkish ties reach new low
Call between nations’ leaders to ease discord stokes disagreement over Syria offensive.
ISTANBUL, Turkey — Since the start of the Cold War, Turkey has been one of the United States’ top allies in a region not known for pro-American sentiment.
It joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1952, helping the U.S. build a bulwark against the Soviet Union. It opened its bases to U.S. warplanes during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the more recent fight against Islamic State. Its progressive Muslim democracy was once touted as a model for other Middle Eastern countries.
Now, the two sides can’t even agree on what was said in a phone call.
That call, held Wednesday between President Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was the Trump administration’s most recent attempt at repairing a relationship that reached a new nadir this week, with Ankara accusing Washington of establishing what it called a “terror corridor” in northern Syria.
Turkey also threatened military action against American soldiers standing in the way of an offensive, dubbed “Operation Olive Branch,” to rout a Syrian Kurdish militia that Ankara regards as a terrorist group — but which the U.S. has fashioned as its on-theground vanguard against the militant group Islamic State. (Ankara insists the Syrian Kurds have ties to a Kurdish separatist movement it has fought at home for decades.)
The offensive, which began late last week, developed into a no-holds-barred assault on the Syrian Kurdish enclave of Afrin with ground troops and Syrian rebels fighting to breach Kurdish defensive lines.
The White House said Trump had “urged Turkey to de-escalate, limit its military actions, and avoid civilian casualties and increases to [the numbers of] displaced persons and refugees.” It went on to say that the president “urged Turkey to exercise caution and to avoid any actions that might risk conflict between Turkish and American forces.”
That last reference was to U.S. troops who patrol the Syrian city of Manbij, about 60 miles east of Afrin.
It was at least the third time the administration has complained about Turkish attacks, to no apparent effect, even as the Turkish military said two soldiers and more than 260 “terrorists” had been killed so far in the operation.
“We will not leave the blood of our martyrs on the ground and will continue our struggle until we root out terror,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said.
The White House said that Trump also “expressed concern about destructive and false rhetoric coming from Turkey,” eliciting a truculent rebuke from Ankara, which insisted that the American president did not raise objections to the Turkish military operation and that the two men merely “exchanged views.”
Also on Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with Nechirvan Barzani, the prime minister of Iraq’s Kurdish region, on the sidelines of the Davos, Switzerland, economic conference. To a reporter’s question, Tillerson denied he had proposed creating a roughly 18-mile-wide safe zone along the Turkish-Syrian border in an earlier conversation with Cavusoglu.
“We spoke about a number of possible options, but we did not propose anything,” Tillerson said.
Afrin has long been the site where the United States’ knotty policy toward the Kurds was most evident. In the earlier years of the Syrian war, Kurdish troops were trained and equipped by the Pentagon and fought against CIA-backed rebel factions in areas around the Kurdish enclave.
Then, as now, U.S. officials maintained they would support the Kurds in areas east of the Euphrates River as well as Manbij against Islamic State, but considered Afrin and the Kurdish militiamen stationed there to be a separate entity.
Those contradictions could be ignored as long as Islamic State was a factor. But the group’s defeat, not to mention the creation of a Kurdish-led Border Security Force, put the U.S. on a collision course with Ankara.
The Border Security Force was the last straw for Turkey’s leadership, which touted the operation in Afrin as a war not just against Kurdish forces, but also against the United States.
“Obviously this is a tense situation,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said this week. “We are calling on the Turks to de-escalate the situation.”
Yet there is little evidence that Ankara is in the mood for a de-escalation, especially before a Turkish public that views the operation as proof of a newfound bravado.
The country appears to be gripped by a patriotic frenzy. The Turkish religious affairs directorate organized special prayers for the soldiers in the operation, with verses from the Koranic chapter titled “Conquest” read out at mosques the evening the operation began and the morning after.
tracy.wilkinson@latimes.com Special correspondents Farooq and Bulos reported from Istanbul and Aleppo, Syria, respectively, and Times staff writer Wilkinson from Washington.