Why the West needs Turkey.
Turkish troops rolling into Syria to take on the Islamic State is a deeply worrying idea — and also our best option
It’s been almost a century since T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt kicked the Ottomans out of Syria. Now the Turks are coming back, this time with U.S. air support, in a plan to establish a 60-milelong buffer zone on the Syrian side of the border between the two countries.
If the creation of a new ministate within the borders of a Middle Eastern state seems worrisome, that’s because it is. As the Israelis learned to their detriment in Lebanon in the 1980s and ‘90s, such semipermanent security zones are costly to maintain and produce strange unintended consequences — like the birth of Hezbollah.
But, as crazy as it sounds, the buffer zone might be better than the alternatives, because it could be a first step toward boots on the ground capable of defeating Islamic State.
Since the collapse of Syria began, the Turkish government has been focused on two competing objectives. One is to weaken and ultimately defeat Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which has meant supporting the Free Syrian Army militias.
The other Turkish goal is to push back within Syria the Kurdish militias, which have both participated in the fight against Assad and taken advantage of the vacuum to expand their territory. Turkey fears and loathes the rise of Kurdish national feeling in the region, because Kurds in Iraq and Syria sympathize with the PKK, a militia that seeks to control majority-Kurdish territor y within Turkey.
A buffer zone in Syria, backed by U.S. air power, serves both these Turkish interests. If executed properly, it’ll weaken Syrian sovereignty by establishing a piece of Turkey inside Syria. And it’ll give Turkish troops a zone to push Kurdish militias farther to the east.
Until now, the Turks haven’t been prepared to enter Syrian territory and stay there — partly because it would involve them in head-to-head combat with Islamic State. But that’s changed after a bold suicide attack last week against Kurdish volunteers in Turkey who were headed over the border to fight Islamic State. Now Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan needs to show the Sunni militant group — and his domestic constituency — that he won’t tolerate the Islamic State taking the fight to Turkey.
The other actor in all this is the U.S., which until recently would’ve been horrified by the idea of Turkey carving out a piece of Syria, much less by the notion of facilitating the land grab from the air. President Barack Obama’s Syria strategy (if it can be dignified with that word) has from the start been plagued by a deep ambivalence about Assad’s fate. And the Hamlet-like indecision — should the Assad regime be or not be? — hasn’t been quelled by the passage of time.
What’s more, in Iraq, the Kurdish minority has been a steadfast U.S. ally, and in truth the only set of actors in that troubled country on whom the U.S. has been able to rely since 2003. Turkey is a close ally, too, of course. The U.S. hasn’t embraced dreams of Kurdish statehood in Iraq or more broadly, but it also has no deep interest in the Turks weakening the Kurdish forces in Syria.
The U.S. nevertheless has a pressing need for the buffer zone, because it’s desperate to make inroads — any inroads — against Islamic State. The only way to do that is with local ground troops. No Sunni Arab ground force has emerged to fight the militants. That leaves Iranian-trained and Iranian-officered Shiite militias in Iraq. And in Syria, where the Free Syrian Army hasn’t managed any meaningful victories, it leaves only Kurdish fighters.
Turkish troops would be another matter altogether. From the U.S. perspective, getting Turks to fight the Islamic State is good news — a major development in the slow process of assembling an effective coalition.
That’s why it makes sense for the U.S. to back the buffer zones, despite the risks. Those risks are significant. The zone may be administered by Syrian militias who have ties to antiAmerican jihadis. It might conceivably be the first step to the fall of Assad — at least that’s what the Turks want. And it also might be another step toward the dismemberment of Syria, which would further destabilize the region.
But a statelet where the Islamic State has been defeated, even if backed by Turkey, will also be a counterpoint to the militant group. And at this point, the U.S. is begging for allies to take on Islamic State. It can’t afford to be choosy.