How they see us: Betrayal of Kurds will reverberate
Turkey’s “patience and determination” have paid off, said Burhanettin Duran in the Daily Sabah (Turkey). Following a persuasive phone conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly announced last month that he would withdraw the roughly 2,000 American troops stationed in Syria. For the past two years, that force has been arming and training the YPG, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units. These militants—affiliates of the PKK terrorists who have killed thousands of Turks in their decades-long quest to establish a Kurdish nation in southeast Turkey—have been trying “to establish a Syrian Kurdistan in imaginary cantons along the Turkish border.” Turkey will never let that happen. In early 2018, Turkish tanks crossed the border to seize the region of Afrin from the YPG. “With the U.S. out of the way, Ankara will finish the job” and drive the Kurdish fighters out of all of northern Syria. Turkish troops are currently massing along the border, ready to enter once the Americans are gone. The Kurdish militants’ “dreams of autonomy and recognition are dead in the water.”
The Kurds, who did America’s grunt work in routing ISIS, are “reeling from the American betrayal,” said Gwynne Dyer in
The London Free Press (Canada). At least 4,000 Kurdish fighters were killed and 10,000 more wounded so that Trump could declare mission accomplished against ISIS in Syria. “Deprived of U.S. air support,” this brave people now faces a grim choice: to be conquered by the Turks or by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Since the Turks want to cleanse them from the region, Assad is the less horrible option. Indeed, with a “Turkish invasion” imminent, Assad may be willing to strike a power-sharing deal with the Kurds—offering them some autonomy in return for the YPG forces’ joining the Syrian army—if only to keep their fertile, oil-rich region “in Syrian hands.” The one bright spot for the Kurds, said Arnab Neil Sengupta on the Iraqi-Kurdish news site Rudaw.net, is that being abandoned by Washington has triggered a “massive outpouring of moral support” from other Western capitals. Syrian Kurds have appealed to Paris for help, and it’s possible that the small French and British forces already present in Kurdish-controlled territory “will act as a deterrent” against the designs of Erdogan and Assad, and the Syrian regime’s Iranian and Russian backers.
Still, this “breach of faith” will rattle other U.S. allies, said Leslie Fong in The Straits Times (Singapore). We know Trump resents the U.S. troop presence in South Korea. How can Koreans be sure that he won’t, “in a moment of impetuosity,” announce another American pullout via a 3 a.m. tweet? And the Taiwanese “are no doubt put on notice” that they should not “allow themselves to be used as pawns by the U.S. in its bid for strategic dominance over China.” The abandonment of the Kurds proves that those who trust American promises “do so at their grave peril.”