US in a jam over Syrian Kurds

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.

Ali Soufan, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, 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.”