Trump’s retreat in Syria turns into a mess
Aweek ago, President Donald Trump shocked the nation and announced he wouldn’t impede an imminent Turkish invasion of northeastern Syria. Now, in the space of just a few days, his administration is already reaping what it sowed.
Turkey’s incursions at various points along its border with Syria began Wednesday and, by the weekend, had already plunged the region into chaos. Turkish artillery pounded Syrian Kurdish positions, while footage emerged appearing to show Turkish-affiliated militiamen carrying out grisly roadside executions of Kurdish fighters allied to the United States. Tens of thousands of panicked civilians attempted to flee the Turkish-led advance, raising fears of an eventual exodus into Iraqi Kurdistan, where more than a million people displaced by conflict still live in camps.
Trump, who spent part of the weekend at one of his own golf courses, insisted on Twitter that his country ought to be rid of its commitments in the “quicksand” of the Middle East. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday that the United States was now in “a very untenable situation” and would evacuate its roughly 1,000 troops in northeastern Syria entirely.
“The order to remove troops came Saturday, toward the end of a chaotic day in which the viability of the U.S. mission in Syria rapidly unraveled after Turkish troops and their Syrian rebel proxies advanced deep into Syrian territory and cut U.S. supply lines,” my colleagues reported. It flew in the face of the Pentagon’s assurances last week that the United States would not “abandon” its Syrian Kurdish partners, who have been on the front lines in the war against the Islamic State and borne the brunt of the casualties in a U.S.-led campaign.
But security headaches have only mushroomed amid American maneuvers to withdraw. Hundreds of Islamic State detainees may have escaped a prison camp run by beleaguered Syrian Kurdish fighters. Separately, in the late hours of Sunday, reports indicated that Syrian regime forces were also converging on areas once guarded by the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led alliance now in Turkey’s crosshairs.
Hung out to dry by the United States, the SDF turned to Syrian President Bashar Assad for protection. A senior Syrian Kurdish politician told Reuters that SDF officials met counterparts in the Assad regime at a Russian air base in Syria to hash out a deal. By Sunday evening, the SDF confirmed that, to repel or stall the Turkish invasion, it had invited the regime into areas it had formerly controlled with U.S. protection.
Turkey’s thinly veiled goal in launching the invasion was to smash Rojava, the name for the autonomous enclave in northeastern Syria carved out by the SDF over the past few years. Ankara views the main Syrian Kurdish faction as a direct outgrowth of the PKK, an outlawed Kurdish separatist group that has fought a bloody decadeslong insurgency in Turkey. If northeastern Syria falls back under the security umbrella of Damascus, that may in and of itself be a satisfying outcome for the Turks. Russia’s role in brokering the rapprochement between Assad and the Syrian Kurds after the Turkish invasion may be a sign, analysts suggested, of a tacit Syrian endgame being thrashed out by the Turks and the Russians.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration painted itself as a somewhat helpless bystander. “We have American forces likely caught between two opposing advancing armies,” Esper told CBS. In his Sunday tweets, Trump seemed to wave away any interest in the battle and reiterated his position that it’s “very smart not to be involved in the intense fighting” along the SyrianTurkish border. This followed reports Friday that Turkish artillery appeared to be firing multiple “bracketing” rounds near positions manned by U.S. special forces, an astonishing act by a NATO ally that U.S. officials believed was deliberate.