U.S. ally says it will attack Turkish forces if they enter Syria

The commander of the U.S.-backed militia in Syria said Tuesday that it would attack Turkish forces if they enter northeastern Syria, while Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, indicated that such an operation was imminent.

“We will resist,” Mazlum Kobani, commander of the Kurdish-led militia, said in an interview with The New York Times. “We have been at war for seven years, so we can continue the war for seven more years.”

The escalating challenge came after President Donald Trump agreed to let the Turkish operation go forward and to move U.S. troops out of the way. On Monday, U.S. troops withdrew from posts near two Syrian towns near the border. The threat of resistance from the militia, a force trained and armed by the U.S., raises the risks for Turkey as it weighs sending troops into Syria, and for the U.S., which could find itself on the sidelines of a new front in Syria’s war — this time between two of its allies.

There was still confusion among allies and U.S. officials about the administration’s policy as set out in seemingly contradictory statements by Trump and administration officials, and U.S. officials said Tuesday that some senior Pentagon officials had been blindsided by the decision to pull American forces back from the border. The Kurdish-led militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), partnered with the U.S. to defeat the Islamic State in Syria. Since then, the militia, with American backing, has retained control of a large swath of northeastern Syria.

Turkey considers the militia part of a Kurdish guerrilla movement that threatens Turkey, and Erdogan has demanded a 20-mile-deep buffer zone that Turkey would control to keep back any Kurdish forces.

Speaking by telephone from Syria, Kobani said he had been frustrated by the White House’s announcement on Sunday that the U.S. would stand aside for a Turkish incursion, and that the lack of clear, predictable policies from Washington had made it hard to plan.

“There should not be any ambiguity,” he said.

He spoke of U.S. troops who had helped his forces as comrades-in-arms and said any rupture in that partnership could destabilize the region. “We fought with U.S. forces to get rid of terrorism, and we are still in this continuing battle,” he said.

He called on Americans to “put pressure on their political and military leaders to stop the Turkish attack,” which he said would lead to “big massacres.”

Trump said Sunday that the U.S. would not block a Turkish advance. But on Monday he said that he would “obliterate” Turkey’s economy if its military did anything “off limits,” without defining what that meant, and his aides insisted that he had not given a green light to an invasion. On Tuesday, he said that he had invited Erdogan to visit the White House next month.

Two U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that given the apparently contradictory statements by Trump, the Turks might be rethinking what to do next.