As Turkey attacks Syrian Kurds, U.S. stays on sideline
WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump met with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at the United Nations in September, he embraced him as a friend and declared, “We’re as close as we’ve ever been.” Five months later, Turkey is waging an all-out assault against Syrian Kurds, America’s closest allies in the war against the Islamic State.
The Turkish offensive, carried out over the protests of the United States but with the apparent assent of Russia, marks a perilous new phase in relations between two NATO allies — bringing their interests into direct conflict on the battlefield. It lays bare how much leverage the U.S. has lost in Syria, where its single-minded focus has been on vanquishing Islamist militants.
As Turkish troops advanced Monday on the Kurdish town of Afrin, in northwest Syria, the White House warned Turkey not to take its eye off the campaign against the Islamic State. But it stopped short of rebuking Turkey, and acknowledged its security concerns about the Kurds, whom Turkey considers terrorists and a threat to its territorial sovereignty.
The inherent conflict of the United States using the Kurds as its on-the-ground partner in fighting the Islamic State could be overlooked as long as that group remained a threat. But with the militants now in retreat, the White House is groping for a way to maintain relations with the Kurdish fighters without further alienating the Turks.
The Trump administration’s response has been to help the Kurds build a border security force in northeast Syria, ostensibly to guard against the resurgence of the Islamic State. But that has only antagonized the Turks, who view it as a staging ground for a future insurgency against their homeland.
“The U.S. has tried to walk a very fine line in Syria,” said Ali Soufan, a former FBI counterterrorism agent who is now chairman of the Soufan Group. But, he said, “as the battlefield shrinks in Syria, the line has become near impossible to maintain.”
Soufan said the United States “would likely have to either dramatically scale back its support of the Kurdish rebels — which would be seen as yet another U.S. betrayal of the few groups that have consistently supported and helped the U.S. in Syria and Iraq — or risk indirect and even direct conflict with Turkey, a fellow NATO member.”
The administration tried to stave off either of those scenarios with carefully worded statements by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Tillerson acknowledged that Turkey has “legitimate concerns about terrorists crossing the border,” while Mattis praised Turkey for allowing the United States to use its air base at Incirlik to fly missions against the Islamic State. Sanders urged Turkey on Monday to use “restraint in its military actions and rhetoric,” and limit the scope and duration of the operation.
As it has so often in Syria, however, the United States seemed mostly a bystander. And as it has receded, Russia has filled the vacuum, gaining influence and rehabilitating its relationship with Turkey.
It is widely assumed in Ankara that the Turkish government received a green light from Russia to launch the attack, even as Russian officials denied it. Erdogan said Monday that Turkey had an agreement with Russia on the operation.
“Russia is managing the tempo of this operation,” said Metin Gurcan, a security analyst and columnist for Al-Monitor, noting that Turkey’s senior security officials had visited Moscow the day before it began.
Though Turkish forces, together with fighters of the Free Syrian Army, captured high ground and three villages near Afrin on Monday, military analysts said the campaign was dependent on Russia’s agreement to open up the airspace to Turkish jets.
Russia controls Syrian airspace in the region west of the Euphrates River, which includes Afrin, while the U.S. controls the skies east of the Euphrates.
For Erdogan, who is seeking the support of nationalists before presidential elections this year or next, the Afrin operation is politically vital.
He has criticized the U.S. over its support of the Syrian Kurd militias, which he says are allied with the outlawed PKK, a Kurdish militant group that has been waging a separatist struggle in Turkey for the past three decades. Russia has joined Turkey in accusing the United States of encouraging the Kurds and aggravating the situation in Syria. “This is either a lack of understanding of the situation or an absolutely conscious provocation,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
The Turkish assault underscores the deepening ties between Russia and Turkey — a relationship that has rebounded from the nadir of November 2015, when the Turks shot down a Russian fighter plane over Syria.
In recent weeks, senior U.S. officials have talked about the need to re-establish security in northern Syria by installing local security forces that reflect the demographics of those areas before the civil war. That would require the return of tens of thousands of Arabs who fled Syria during the fighting.
Tillerson outlined the strategy in a speech last week in which he said the United States would keep troops in Syria for the foreseeable future. “We cannot allow history to repeat itself in Syria,” he said. “ISIS presently has one foot in the grave, and by maintaining an American military presence in Syria until the full and complete defeat of ISIS is achieved, it will soon have two.”