America sends its delegate team to Turkey

A US delegation is pressing Turkey to accept a ceasefire in northern Syria hours after Donald Trump declared the US has no stake in defending Kurdish fighters who died by the thousands as America’s partners against so-called Islamic State extremists.

Vice President Mike Pence, heading a delegation that includes Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien, arrived in Turkey on yesterday, a day after Mr Trump dismissed the very crisis he sent his aides on an emergency mission to douse.

Mr Trump suggested

“Syria may have some help with Russia, and that’s fine”

on Wednesday that a Kurdish group was a greater terror threat than the Islamic State group, and he welcomed the efforts of Russia and the Assad government to fill the void left after he ordered the removal of nearly all US troops from Syria amid a Turkish assault on the Kurds.

“Syria may have some help with Russia, and that’s fine,” Mr Trump said. “They’ve got a lot of sand over there. So, there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.”

He added: “Let them fight their own wars.”

The split-screen foreign policy moment proved difficult to reconcile and came during perhaps the darkest moment for the modern US-Turkey relationship and a time of trial for Mr Trump and his Republican Party allies.

Severe condemnation of Mr Trump’s failure to deter Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s assault on the Kurds sparked bipartisan outrage in the US and calls for swift punishment for the Nato ally.