USA TODAY International Edition
Accounts differ over state of cease- fire
President Donald Trump once again took to Twitter to defend his decision to pull U. S. troops out of northeastern Syria, opening the door to a Turkish assault on Kurds who had helped America combat the Islamic State, but in the process, he incorrectly identified his secretary of defense.
On Sunday, Trump quoted “Mark Esperanto, Secretary of Defense” as saying, “The ceasefire is holding up very nicely” aside from “some minor skirmishes that have ended quickly.”
But the man the president put in charge of the Pentagon is named Mark Esper, not Esperanto. And many observers do not share Esper/ Esperanto's certainty that the cease- fire the Trump administration helped broker between Turkey and the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces is holding up as well as he and other White House officials have implied.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told ABC News on Sunday that his “senior leaders” had just informed him that “there is relatively little fighting” consisting of “little sporadic small arms fire and a mortar or two.”
And Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has emphatically denied his forces were not abiding by the agreement, which Turkey has characterized as a “pause.”
“I don't know where you're getting your news from. According to the news I received from my defense minister, there is no question of clashes,” he told reporters in Istanbul on Friday, according to Turkey's official Anadolu news agency. “These are all speculation, disinformation.”
But SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali said, “Turkey is violating the ceasefire agreement by continuing to attack the town since last night.”
And soon after the deal was announced Thursday, a U. S. official who is not authorized to speak publicly told USA TODAY that the cease- fire was not holding.
The SDF announced Sunday that their fighters had finished evacuating the northern town of Ras al- Ayn as they had agreed to do under terms of the cease- fire.
Though Trump has touted the fiveday cease- fire as a foreign policy triumph, declaring its start to be a “great day for civilization,” many critics have condemned it as a capitulation that ceded Kurdish territory to Turkey while giving the U. S. little in return.
Pompeo said it was a “hard fought negotiation” that “lasted hours” and “achieved the outcome that President Trump sent us to achieve.”
Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence were dispatched to Ankara late Wednesday for talks with Erdogan.
Trump has stressed the need to bring the troops home as one of his rationales for pulling them out of Syria. At the end of his tweet on Sunday, he declared, “Bringing soldiers home.”
But Esper told reporters that all U. S. troops leaving Syria will go to western Iraq.
“We have secured the oil,” Trump also stated in his tweet, apparently referring to oil fields in eastern Syria that had been under Kurdish control before the Turkish military incursion.