Turkey slams U.S. move to arm Kurdish soldiers
Ally demands Washington reverse decision
BEIRUT — Turkey slammed the Trump administration’s decision to supply Syrian Kurdish fighters with weapons against the Islamic State group and demanded Wednesday that it be reversed, heightening tensions between the NATO allies days before the Turkish leader heads to Washington for a meeting with President Donald Trump.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the fight against terrorism “should not be led with another terror organization” — a reference to the Syrian Kurdish militia, known as the YPG, which Turkey considers an extension of the decades-long Kurdish insurgency raging in its southeast. “We want to know that our allies will side with us and not with terror organizations,” he said.
Turkey has even threatened to step up military action against the YPG in response to the Trump administration’s decision, Turkish officials said.
The warning was delivered to senior U.S. national security officials in a series of closed-door meetings this week, after the Trump administration expressed its intent to arm the Kurds after months of deliberations, the Turkish officials said.
“Turkey’s message to the Trump administration was that Turkey reserves the right to take military action,” a senior Turkish official said.
Turkey has already conducted limited strikes against the U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in northern Syria in recent weeks, but it could increase the tempo of those strikes, Turkish officials said. American officials have complained bitterly to Turkey, a NATO ally, about the airstrikes.
Any further military action could also potentially complicate the offensive on Raqqa, the Islamic State group’s symbolic capital and its last major stronghold after the Iraqi city of Mosul, which is besieged by U.S.-backed Iraqi forces. U.S. officials are concerned that Turkey could send forces into northern Syria and draw the Kurdish fighters away from the Raqqa battle.
Turkey, which has sent troops to northern Syrian in an effort to curtail Kurdish expansion along its borders, has for months tried to lobby Washington to cut off ties with the Kurds and work instead with Turkishbacked opposition fighters in the fight for Raqqa.
But the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, of SDF, which has driven the Islamic State group from much of northern Syria over the past two years with the help of U.S.-led airstrikes, are among the most effective ground forces battling the extremists. In announcing the decision on Tuesday to arm the Kurds, the Pentagon’s chief spokeswoman, Dana White, called the militia “the only force on the ground that can successfully seize Raqqa in the near future.”
On Wednesday, the SDF said it captured the country’s largest dam from the Islamic State group. The fighters, which are Kurdish-led but also include some Arab fighters, said they expelled the extremists from the Tabqa Dam and a nearby town, also called Tabqa.
It was the latest Islamic State stronghold to fall to the Kurdish-led fighters as they advance toward Raqqa. The fall of Tabqa leaves no other major urban settlements on the road to Raqqa, about 25 miles away.
Ankara maintains that the Kurdish militia, which forms the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces, is an extension of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, which has been waging a decades-old insurgency in Turkey and is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the U.S. and other Western countries.
Erdogan said he would take up the issue during a planned meeting with Trump on Tuesday. “I hope that they will turn away from this wrong,” he said.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu also denounced the U.S. move, saying “every weapon that reaches the (Kurds’) hands is a threat to Turkey.”
The spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State, Col. John Dorrian, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that the weapons would be delivered soon. The weapons will not be reclaimed by the U.S. after specific missions are completed, he added, speaking by teleconference from Baghdad, but the U.S. will “carefully monitor” where and how they are used.