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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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The Danger of Abandoning Our Partners

The Syria policy reversal threatens to undo five years’ worth of fighting against ISIS and will severely damage American credibility and reliability.

By Joseph Votel, Elizabeth Dent | Published October 8, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted October 10, 2019 |

The abrupt policy decision to seemingly abandon our Kurdish partners could not come at a worse time. The decision was made without consulting U.S. allies or senior U.S. military leadership and threatens to affect future partnerships at precisely the time we need them most, given the war-weariness of the American public coupled with ever more sophisticated enemies determined to come after us.

In northeastern Syria, we had one of the most successful partnerships. The Islamic State was using Syria as a sanctuary to support its operations in Iraq and globally, including by hosting and training foreign fighters. We had to go after ISIS quickly and effectively. The answer came in the form of a small band of Kurdish forces pinned up against the Turkish border and fighting for their lives against ISIS militants in the Syrian town of Kobane in 2014.

We had tried many other options first. The U.S. initially worked to partner with moderate Syrian rebel groups, investing $500 million in a train-and-equip program to build their capabilities to fight against ISIS in Syria. That endeavor failed, save for a small force in southeastern Syria near the American al-Tanf base, which began as a U.S. outpost to fight ISIS and remains today as a deterrent against Iran. So we turned to Turkey to identify alternative groups, but the Pentagon found that the force Turkey had trained was simply inadequate and would require tens of thousands of U.S. troops to bolster it in battle. With no public appetite for a full-scale U.S. ground invasion, we were forced to look elsewhere.

I (Joseph Votel) first met General Mazloum Abdi at a base in northern Syria in May 2016. From the start, it was obvious he was not only an impressive and thoughtful man, but a fighter who was clearly thinking about the strategic aspects of the campaign against ISIS and aware of the challenges of fighting a formidable enemy. He could see the long-term perils from the civil war, but recognized that the most immediate threat to his people was ISIS. After a fitful start in Syria, I concluded that we had finally found the right partner who could help us defeat ISIS without getting drawn into the murkier conflict against Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), initially composed of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), was then conceived: a fighting force that eventually grew to 60,000 battle-hardened and determined soldiers. The decision to partner with the YPG, beginning with the fight in Kobane, was made across two administrations and had required years of deliberation and planning, especially given the concerns of our NATO ally Turkey, who regards the SDF as an offshoot of the designated terrorist group the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Eventually, the YPG became the backbone of the fighting force against ISIS in Syria. Without it, President Donald Trump could not have declared the complete defeat of ISIS.

With support from what grew to be the 80-member Coalition to Defeat ISIS, which included air power, advisers on the ground, and equipment, the SDF became a force to be reckoned with and led a string of victories. In August 2016, it liberated the Syrian town of Manbij, which once functioned as a hub for ISIS fighters to cross into Turkey and is believed to be where the attackers who carried out the November 2015 Paris attacks transited. Mindful of the need for credibility as it pushed to liberate Arab-dominated areas, the YPG had succeeded in incorporating Arab units into its structure as a united Arab-Kurd fighting force. That force, the SDF, went on to liberate the so-called capital of the caliphate, Raqqa, and towns in the Middle Euphrates River Valley, culminating in the territorial defeat of ISIS in Baghouz this past March.

Over four years, the SDF freed tens of thousands of square miles and millions of people from the grip of ISIS. Throughout the fight, it sustained nearly 11,000 casualties. By comparison, six U.S. service members, as well as two civilians, have been killed in the anti-ISIS campaign. Key to this effective relationship was mutual trust, constant communication, and clear expectations. The partnership was not without its difficulties. That included working through the December 2018 announcement of our sudden departure and our subsequent agreement with Turkey to pursue a security mechanism for the border areas. But each time, the strong mutual trust built on the ground between our military members and the SDF preserved our momentum. The sudden policy change this week breaks that trust at the most crucial juncture and leaves our partners with very limited options.

It didn’t have to be this way. The U.S. worked endlessly to placate our Turkish allies.

We engaged in countless rounds of negotiations, committing to establishing a security mechanism that included joint patrols in areas of concern to the Turks, and deploying 150 additional U.S. troops to help monitor and enforce the “safe zone.” Yet Ankara repeatedly reneged on its agreements with the U.S., deeming them inadequate and threatening to invade SDF-held areas, despite the presence of U.S. soldiers.

A possible invasion from Turkey against the Kurdish elements of the SDF, coupled with a hasty U.S. departure, now threaten to rapidly destabilize an already fragile security situation in Syria’s northeast, where ISIS’s physical caliphate was only recently defeated. Nearly 2,000 foreign fighters, about 9,000 Iraqi and Syrian fighters, and tens of thousands of ISIS family members are being held in detention facilities and displaced-persons camps in areas under SDF control. What happens if we leave? The SDF has already stated that it will have to fortify defense mechanisms along the Syrian-Turkish border, leaving ISIS detention facilities and encampments with little to no security. This is particularly troubling, given that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of ISIS, recently called on supporters to break fighters out of these facilities. There have also been violent attacks in the al-Hol refugee camp, where tens of thousands of women and children are housed and where ISIS sympathy runs rampant.

The Pentagon and White House later clarified that the U.S. was not abandoning the Kurds and did not support a Turkish incursion into Syria. But the damage may already be done, because it appears the Turks have taken the shift to signal a green light for an attack in the northeast. This policy abandonment threatens to undo five years’ worth of fighting against ISIS and will severely damage American credibility and reliability in any future fights where we need strong allies.

Trump’s Sickening Betrayal

Geopolitics is a contest of bad ideas. Letting Turkey take control of Kurdish territory falls somewhere between “very bad” and “extremely bad.”

Graeme Wood | Published October 7, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted October 10, 2019 10:10 AM ET |

The great virtue of Twitter is that it forces users to be concise. One downside is that when an extremely powerful crazy person—the president of the United States, say—uses it, he can sound a bit like the Abrahamic God in one of his more wrathful moments. “If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!),” Trump thundered today, as House Republicans scrambled to burn offerings in the Rotunda.

The subject of this tweet, Turkey, had just hours before been the unconditional beneficiary of a sickening desertion by the United States. Late last night, the White House issued a statement confirming that the United States would stand by while Turkey asserted control over northern Syria—including territory controlled by the Kurds, who have been integral to the anti–Islamic State coalition. The Kurds were an American ally, but not a natural one: The PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), which runs Kurdish affairs in Syria, fought against Turkey in the 1980s and ’90s and remains cultish in its Maoism. (Whatever Fox News viewers think Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar believe, the PKK actually believes.) Turkey has consistently promised to strangle any Kurdish state before it becomes permanent. Apparently Trump assented to the Turkish position, and in a hurry to extricate America from northern Syria, abandoned the Kurds to the mercies of their most powerful enemy.

Geopolitics is a contest of bad ideas, with winning defined as implementing the least-bad ones. Letting Turkey take control of Kurdish territory falls somewhere between “very bad” and “extremely bad” in this range; the only question is whether the alternatives fell into the rarely visited “shockingly, horrendously bad” portion of the spectrum. To leave the Kurds to Turkey amounts, first of all, to the total betrayal of an American ally, a group whose members have died in the desert by the thousands, so that we Americans didn’t have to revisit our bad dreams of the Iraq War by fighting in large numbers. The Kurds had their own reasons to despise the Islamic State—their ideology is Marxist and atheist, and ISIS would have slaughtered them all—but anyone who prefers Arlington National Cemetery to remain uncrowded owes thanks to the Kurds who died in our soldiers’ place. Letting our allies get annihilated is a fast way to ensure that we never have allies again.

Trump’s advisers (but who can advise Yahweh?) seem to understand this: His Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned in part because he refused to sell American allies downriver; and Eliphaz the Temanite, I mean Senator Lindsey Graham, spoke up this morning to say that if Turkey attacks the Kurds, he will try to sanction it and get it suspended from NATO. The advice seems to have elicited Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Turkey’s economy, and the mysterious, false claim that he had done so before. The complication here, however, is that Trump has saved an American ally (the Kurds) by pledging to devastate, according to his awesome whimsy, another American ally. It may seem odd to refer to Turkey—an autocracy with a theocratic touch—as an ally, but it is literally an ally, in the formal sense that it belongs to NATO, and is therefore in a very elite club, with obligations of mutual defense and neoliberal omertà that the Kurds lack. It is neither simple nor wise to treat that relationship recklessly.

Nor is it possible to implement a foreign policy in Syria without some Turkish cooperation. Recall that when the Islamic State seized Mosul, Turkey had to negotiate for the lives of the dozens of Turkish diplomats kidnapped from its consulate. The terms of that negotiation remain unknown, but we do know that in the next year or so, Turkey and the Islamic State somehow avoided major confrontation, almost as if they had a time-limited armistice. During that time the fight against the Islamic State stalled.

Allies and potential allies will watch this farce of geopolitics and again wonder what an alliance with America is really worth, if it can be flushed away one night and restored the next—or if there’s always the part where Trump says something, then the part where he takes it back. Trump’s signature trait as a real-estate mogul was that a Trump deal was never, ever a deal. His word meant nothing, and if you thought it did, he’d snatch up your money and walk away with it. As president he is no different, and by this afternoon there is not one ally but two who have been reminded never to trust him—to extend him no credit, to assume he’ll reserve the right to rewrite, unilaterally, the terms of your agreement, and force you to accept his new terms. The old diplomatic wisdom was that you should reward your friends and punish your enemies. To act completely undependable, both as an enemy and as an ally, serves no obvious purpose.

Many bad decisions are made in moments of frustration, and the acute reasons for the White House’s frustration are clear from last night’s statement. It remarked on the continued failure of “France, Germany, and other European nations” to repatriate and prosecute their citizens who joined the Islamic State and are now imprisoned by the Kurds. “Turkey will now be responsible for all ISIS fighters in the area,” according to the statement. They include some inmates of al-Hawl refugee camp, swollen with about 70,000 inhabitants. The administration’s anger is wholly justified: Wild-eyed, murderous Frenchmen and Germans are in that camp, and the countries whose passports they carried owe the rest of us (most of all the Syrians and Iraqis whose territory they terrorized) an attempt to prosecute them. Instead the ISIS fighters and sympathizers are kenneled together with victims and, according to all reports, are still killing people and plotting from within the camp. Eventually the people in it will rebel, break out, and get the old jihadist bands back together—maybe in Syria, maybe in Europe, maybe somewhere else.

Unfortunately, to declare with a booming voice from the heavens that Turkey is now in charge does not solve the problem at all. Indeed, the Kurds now know that their efforts to secure the foreign fighters is getting them little respect from the United States or anyone else, and they’re likely to divert their resources away from detainment of terrorists and toward the more pressing matter of not being invaded and killed by Turkey.

The White House’s very brief statement twice mentioned that the United States had finished off the Islamic State’s “territorial ‘Caliphate.’” The triumphal tone is unmistakable: We won, and now we get to go home and leave the Turks to clean up the mess. But we never really won, because the territorial caliphate never constituted more than a part of the mess—and the solution to the mess created, as most political solutions do, a mess of its own. The Syrian war is not over, and leaving it behind won’t make it stop, though abandonment will limit our say over how it continues, and who gets killed or terrorized along the way.

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

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JACOBIN MAGAZINE

In northeastern Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are spearheading a final military campaign against the Islamic State — attempting to defeat the organization once and for all. Their effort is part of Operation Roundup, a military mission backed by the United States.

According to US officials, the Syrian Democratic Forces have cleared the Baghuz and Dashisha areas in eastern Syria and are now conducting a final push into the Middle Euphrates River Valley. “Victory by the Syrian Democratic Forces there,” US colonel Sean Ryan announced in a September 18 press briefing, “will mean that ISIS no longer holds territory.”

The Syrian Kurdish fighters that form the core of the Syrian Democratic Forces are well-known on the international left. Over the last several years, they’ve led a remarkable social revolution in Rojava, the northern part of Syria, where they are seeking to establish an autonomous, anticapitalist territory that secures Kurdish self-determination while overturning gender-based hierarchies.

The revolutionary goals of the Syrian Kurds make them unlikely partners for the United States. Although US officials have repeatedly praised the SDF as the most effective anti-ISIS fighters in Syria, Washington has made no secret of its opposition to the revolution in Rojava.

Earlier this year, US officials gave Turkey the green light to invade and conquer Afrin, one of Rojava’s three cantons. More recently, the US has been pressuring Kurdish military leaders to leave Manbij, an area that the SDF liberated from the Islamic State in 2016.

It’s unclear what President Trump thinks about all of this. He recently praised the Kurds as “great fighters” and “great, great people,” but he previously expressed little concern about their fate. The values that Trump personifies — American capitalism, plutocratic governance, anti-feminist reaction — are sharply at odds with those of the Rojava revolution.

Still, a number of high-level administration officials have insisted that the United States will continue to support the SDF. “We will not simply cast that organization aside,” Secretary of Defense James Mattis promised in June. “It is critical . . . to defeating the ISIS caliphate now” and “preventing the rise of ISIS 2.0.”

During a congressional hearing the same month, Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to pledge “that you’re not going to be bullied by Turkey or President [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan to throwing the Syrian Kurds under the bus.” Pompeo replied that “there’s no administration intention to hurl any large yellow objects whatsoever.” And then last month, the Trump administration reversed the president’s earlier decision to withdraw US forces from Syria.

While Trump continues to oscillate, leaving many observers wondering what he will do next, Syrian Kurdish fighters remain determined to not only liberate the final areas of the region still in ISIS’s hands but to achieve their social revolution in Rojava.

The machinations of the various powers active in the region will largely determine whether the Syrian Kurds will have the chance. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has vowed to retake Rojava. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has repeatedly threatened to annihilate the Kurds’ radical experiment. And American support has been contingent at best, always subordinated to the greater concerns of US empire.

Triumphs and Setbacks

The experience of Afrin and Manbij have confirmed the Syrian Kurds’ worst fears about the Trump administration’s sincerity.

In January, Turkish troops, with the approval of the US, invaded Afrin. They pummeled the canton until March, wreaking devastation and causing mass exodus. About five hundred civilians and more than eight hundred Kurdish fighters died during the Turkish offensive. More than one hundred thousand residents fled the area, and by the end of May, more than 134,000 people remained displaced. Those still in Afrin are suffering material deprivation and surging violent crime under the new Turkish-backed leadership.

The Syrian Kurds are also facing a major challenge in nearby Manbij. After Erdoğan threatened to extend his invasion of Afrin into Manbij, US and Turkish officials made a deal that requires the Syrian Kurdish fighters to withdraw from the area. Rather than coming to the defense of the Syrian Kurds, US officials opted for appeasement. US and Turkish military forces are set to begin joint patrols of the area.

The deal is a major setback to the revolution in Rojava. Since expelling the Islamic State from Manbij, the Syrian Kurds have overseen a transformation so striking that even US officials have praised it. After visiting Manbij in July, Defense Department official John Rood marveled at how he had walked freely and safely through neighborhoods that had previously been under ISIS control. “It was really remarkable to see,” Rood said.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #rojava #syrian civil war #socialism #kurdistan #kurds #foreign policy #imperialism

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newsmakersyria · 3 years

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IAC and SDF hide the rise of protests against them

On September 25, according to Telegram channels, the Syrian Democratic Forces arrested local residents under the pretext of their links with ISIS in the Jadid Akidat region of Deir Ez-Zor province. Local residents report that the increased raids are associated with the struggle of the Kurdish forces and the anti-terrorist coalition against the civilian population, which, in addition to organizing protests, is conducting an armed struggle against illegal arrests and oil production. The Euphrates Post Telegram channel reported that the commander of one of the SDF units, Abdul Karim al-Awaid, was wounded as a result of the shelling of a car by local self-defense units in Abu Hammam. The Americans chose the forceful method of resolving the conflict. Telegram channels yesterday reported that the Kurds had concentrated about 1,500 militants in the Al-Omar area. Totalitarian control over the population has been introduced in the region. Local residents of Shkil note that American air flights were heard at night. The population of northeastern Syria opposes the activities of the Kurdish administration and the Americans, aimed at plundering Syrian resources and obtaining income from oil smuggling. The US government's assertion of the reason for its presence in Syria to combat ISIS is undermined by a series of not widely reported admissions. In statements and briefings, U.S. officials have revealed that U.S. forces are virtually non-combatant against ISIS in Syria. They use their troops, along with sanctions, to divide the state and make its reconstruction impossible.

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omgstupendousbouquetbasement · 4 years

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US Trying 'Urgently' to Stave Off Coronavirus Outbreak in NE Syria

Pleas by the predominantly Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria for more help to contain a possible coronavirus outbreak and a resurgent Islamic State are being heard, even if some of the requested aid has been slow in arriving.

The region, home to tens of thousands of refugees and internally displaced persons — many of them crowded into packed detention camps since the defeat of Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate — has been gripped by fear as the virus has spread around the world.

Disease and sickness are already common, but humanitarian groups and officials say the coronavirus pandemic has sparked outright panic, even blaming a riot at a prison holding captured IS fighters on concerns about the pandemic.

FILE - Women line up for aid supplies at the al-Hol camp in Hassakeh province, Syria, March 31, 2019.

While there has yet to be a confirmed case of coronavirus at the camps or in the prisons, U.S. officials say they understand the need to act quickly.

“We're working desperately and urgently to find ways to get assistance to the northeast,” a senior State Department official told reporters Wednesday.

“There has been no significant outbreak so far,” the official added, admitting that was unlikely to last.

"It's one thing that does cross the lines of conflict, disease," the official said. "It will get into the northeast. It will get into the northwest.”

Already, the U.S. has sent $1.2 million in medical supplies and other assistance to the coalition-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, hoping that will help mitigate the spread of the virus and also reinforce security at a series of prisons holding about 10,000 captured IS fighters.

US Moves to Bolster Prisons Holding Captured Islamic State Fighters

Delivery of aid comes less than a week after a prison riot allowed some IS fighters to break free and as overcrowded conditions have many worried about a coronavirus outbreak

However, officials with the SDF’s political wing say that what has arrived is far short of what is needed.

“Whatever we got, it is not enough and not sufficient,” Sinam Mohamad, the U.S. representative for the Syrian Democratic Council, said during a videoconference Wednesday.

“We expect the U.S. to give us assistance, but so far, the assistance that we are getting is only to control ISIS,” she said.

Some steps taken

Mohamad said the SDC has made efforts to sterilize detention camps like al-Hol, which holds about 65,000 IS women and children, and has run education campaigns as well.

But in such cramped and often hostile conditions, “we are not able to have all the [health] precautions,” she said.

Aid from other sources, such as the United Nations, has also had a hard time reaching northeast Syria.

Both the SDC and the U.S. accuse Russia of blocking a convoy in January. And the SDC says it is still waiting for some of the coronavirus test kits given to the Syrian government in Damascus to reach medical officials.

“How many of these come to our region? Nothing. Zero,” Mohamad said.

A member of the Syrian civil defense sanitizes a tent at the Bab al-Nour internally displaced persons camp, to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Azaz, Syria, March 26, 2020.

There have also been allegations that the government in Damascus has refused to test samples for suspected coronavirus cases sent from the autonomous administration.

Asked about the allegation, the WHO told VOA there had been a delay in collecting samples, but that rapid response teams were now ready.

“The epidemiological surveillance team in al-Hasakah governorate would be on call and ready to collect the sample from the suspected case at the entrance of the camp,” the WHO’s Inas Hamam said in an email.

“The health workers there are highly prepared to carry out investigation measures about possible coronavirus infections and able to provide the necessary help based on the outcome,” she added.

The U.S., however, remains skeptical, calling help from the government of Bashar al-Assad “unlikely.”

Effect on IS

In the meantime, there are indications the coronavirus pandemic may be affecting IS itself.

“We have not seen any significant expansion of their activities — that is, their attacks, their intimidation of local officials and populations — since COVID-19,” the State Department official said.

The official cautioned that IS still seems intent on “waiting out” the U.S. and its partners in Syria and Iraq.

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paulbenedictblog · 5 years

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%news%

New Post has been published on %http://paulbenedictsgeneralstore.com%

Fox news Syrian Kurdish forces call for all hands on deck as Turkish troops reportedly cross border - Fox News

Fox news

President Trump called Turkey's ongoing defense force assault in Syria a "rotten thought" Wednesday as activists and war video show reported now not lower than seven civilians killed in the strikes.

Trump's comments come hours after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched the initiate of Operation Peace Spring -- a mission that will "neutralize dread threats against Turkey and lead to the establishment of a safe zone, facilitating the return of Syrian refugees to their homes," escalating the long-standing feud between Ankara and Kurdish forces.

Trump used to be closely criticized for the length of the week following his decision Sunday to drag American troops out of northern Syria, leaving the Kurdish forces -- who had been longtime U.S. allies in the wrestle against ISIS in Syria -- in threat. Ankara views the Syrian Kurdish forces as terrorists allied with a Kurdish insurgency within Turkey.

"The United States would now not endorse this attack and has made it particular to Turkey that this operation is a rotten thought," Trump acknowledged in an announcement launched by the White Condominium. "Turkey has committed to keeping civilians, keeping non secular minorities, including Christians, and guaranteeing no humanitarian crisis takes dwelling—and we will retain them to this commitment."

"There are no American troopers in the dwelling," he added.

TURKISH INCURSION INTO SYRIA WOULD FORCE KURDS TO FLEE, FREEING CAPTURED ISIS MEMBERS, GEN. KEANE SAYS

A spokesperson for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces acknowledged Turkish warplanes on Wednesday indulge in "started to retain out airstrikes on civilian areas," inflicting a "enormous dismay among other folks of the dwelling."

The Kurds requested air give a eradicate to from American forces in accordance with the strikes. But U.S. defense force officers show Fox News that Trump has ordered them to now not gain engaging.

A tiny neighborhood of Turkish forces first entered northeastern Syria Wednesday morning discontinuance to the cities of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, Bloomberg reported. Turkey's say-sail Anadolu data company later acknowledged Turkish artillery objects had been shelling suspected Syrian Kurdish targets in Tal Abayd, while two mortar shells fired from Ras al-Ayn struck the Turkish border city of Ceylanpinar.

The Britain-based entirely Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says one fighter from the Syrian Democratic Forces has been killed to this level and 6 others had been wounded. An SDF spokesperson furthermore says two civilians had been killed as a outcomes of the "Turkish bombardment" of the village of Mashrafa and 4 civilians were killed in Tirbespiye.

The trends come after the Kurds called on their other folks Wednesday to jog toward the border with Turkey and “carry out acts of resistance."

"We call upon our other folks, of all ethnic teams, to jog toward areas discontinuance to the border with Turkey to retain out acts of resistance for the length of this appealing historical time," read an announcement from the local civilian Kurdish authority identified as the Self sustaining Administration of North and East Syria.

A Turkish Military tank is driven to its unusual dwelling, on the Turkish aspect of the border between Turkey and Syria, in Sanliurfa province, on Tuesday. (AP)

In its demand “frequent mobilization,” the Kurds furthermore urged the worldwide neighborhood to stay up to its responsibilities as "a humanitarian peril may per chance doubtless per chance doubtless befall our other folks" in the dwelling.

The stark message used to be unlike what used to be being acknowledged Wednesday north of the border.

Fahrettin Altun, the Turkish presidency's communications director, called on the worldwide neighborhood in a Washington Post op-ed "to rally" on the support of Ankara, which he acknowledged would furthermore purchase over the wrestle against Islamic Reveal terrorists.

Turkey furthermore is aiming to "neutralize" Syrian Kurdish militants in northeast Syria and to "liberate the local population from the yoke of the armed thugs," Altun added.

SEN. McSALLY SAYS US SHOULD STAND WITH KURDS

Turkish officers who spoke to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity narrate the offensive will purpose Syrian border cities first to lower any probability of a Kurdish say rising discontinuance to its territory.

Expectations of a Turkish invasion rose after Trump on Sunday with out be aware launched that American troops would step aside sooner than the Turkish push — a shift in U.S. policy that genuinely abandoned the Syrian Kurds.

But Trump has furthermore threatened to "entirely homicide and obliterate" Turkey's economy if the Turkish push into Syria went too some distance, and cast his decision to drag support U.S. troops as fulfilling a advertising and marketing campaign promise to withdraw from the "unending war" in the Middle East.

FRENCH OFFICIALS CRITICIZE US OVER ANNOUNCED MILITARY PULLBACK

The strikes had been met with criticism from politicians on all aspects of the aisle.

Republican critics included Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona, who acknowledged she hopes the president's thought is "reconsidered."

"I have faith President Trump's purpose to now not be bogged down in the Middle East, to bring our girls and males folks dwelling, and we no doubt can indulge in to be taking a look on the rising threat of China," McSally acknowledged on "The Story with Martha MacCallum" Tuesday.

"Nonetheless, we indulge in a generational war and wrestle against Islamic terrorism,” she added.

Within the interim, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused Washington of playing "very dreadful video games" with the Syrian Kurds announcing that the U.S. first propped up the Syrian Kurdish "quasi-say" in northeastern Syria and is now withdrawing its give a eradicate to.

"Such reckless perspective to this extremely appealing subject can dwelling fire to your entire dwelling, and we should always stay faraway from it at any label," he acknowledged for the length of a focus on to to Kazakhstan.

Turkish forces artillery pieces are viewed on their unusual positions discontinuance to the border with Syria in Sanliurfa province on Sunday. (AP/DHA)

Earlier on Wednesday, ISIS militants centered a put up of the Syrian Democratic Forces in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, which used to be as soon as the de facto ISIS capital on the peak of the militants' energy in the dwelling.

The SDF, which is preserving hundreds of ISIS warring parties in different detention amenities in northeastern Syria, has warned that a Turkish incursion may per chance doubtless per chance doubtless lead to the resurgence of the extremists. The U.S. allied Kurdish-led force captured the ideal ISIS dwelling controlled by the militants in eastern Syria in March.

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In Wednesday's attack, ISIS launched three suicide bombings against Kurdish positions in Raqqa. There used to be no immediate be aware on casualties.

Also Wednesday, Iranian say tv reported a shock defense force drill with particular operations forces discontinuance to the nation's border with Turkey, in Iran's Western Azerbaijan province. The TV did now not mention the anticipated Turkish offensive into Syria or elaborate on the explanations for the drill.

Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin, Lucas Tomlinson, Victor Garcia, Dom Calicchio and the Linked Press contributed to this document.

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ritchiepage2001newaccount · 8 months

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#CorpMedia #Idiocracy #Oligarchs #MegaBanks vs #Union #Occupy #NoDAPL #BLM #SDF #DACA #MeToo #Humanity #DemExit #FeelTheBern #JinJiyanAzadi #BijiRojava

Christian militia in Syria defends ancient settlements against Isis [UPDATES]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/christian-militia-syria-defends-ancient-settlements-isis

Fighters try to protect last pockets of Assyrian Christians after Islamic State kills dozens, captures 300 hostages and forces thousands into exile...

RELATED UPDATE: Christian female fighters take on ISIS in Syria

RELATED UPDATE: Syriac-Assyrian Christians in Syria warn: we will defend ourselves against a Turkish invasion

RELATED UPDATE: Syrian Kurds outraged over mutilation of female fighter

RELATED UPDATE: Christian Leaders Say Turkish Invasion Of Syria Raises Risk Of 'Genocide'

RELATED UPDATE: Video shows abuse of slain female fighter by Turkish forces

RELATED UPDATE: America’s Abandonment of Syria - Many Syrians thought that the U.S. cared about them. Now they know better

RELATED UPDATE: Assyrian Christian commander: Turkey is a threat to security and stability in Syria

RELATED UPDATE: How a small but powerful band of women led the fight against ISIS

FURTHER READING:

#CorpMedia #Idiocracy #Oligarchs #MegaBanks vs #Union #Occupy #NoDAPL #BLM #SDF #DACA #MeToo #Humanity #DemExit #FeelTheBern #JinJiyanAzadi #BijiRojava

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dariuskamaliblog · 7 years

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US meddles in other countries elections just like Russia did here? Don’t believe it!

I read somewhere that the US has no right to complain about Russian interference in its election and domestic affairs because it has interfered in the internal affairs of other countries itself. I don’t really believe this to be true... except of course for that thing with the...

1846 U.S.–Mexico War The Mexican–American War was an armed conflict between the United States of America and Mexico from 1846 to 1848 in the wake of the 1845 U.S. annexation of Texas, which Mexico considered part of its territory despite the 1836 Texas Revolution. American forces occupied New Mexico and California, then invaded parts of Northeastern Mexico and Northwestern Mexico; Another American army captured Mexico City, and the war ended in victory of the U.S.The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo specified the major consequence of the war: the forced Mexican Cession of the territories of Alta California and New Mexico to the U.S. in exchange for $18 million. In addition, the United States forgave debt owed by the Mexican government to U.S. citizens. Mexico accepted the loss of Texas and thereafter cited the Rio Grande as its national border. and that thing with the...

1887 Samoa The Samoan crisis was a confrontation between the United States, Germany and Great Britain from 1887–1889 over control of the Samoan Islands during the Samoan Civil War.The Samoan Civil War continued, involving Germany and the Americans, eventually resulting, via the Tripartite Convention of 1899, in the partition of the Samoan Islands into American Samoa and German Samoa and that thing with the...

1893 Hawaii The overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii refers to an event of January 17, 1893, in which anti-monarchial elements within the Kingdom of Hawaii, composed largely of American citizens, engineered the overthrow of its native monarch, Queen Lili'uokalani. Hawaii was initially reconstituted as an independent republic, but the ultimate goal of the revolutionaries was the annexation of the islands to the United States, which was finally accomplished in 1898. and that thing with the...

1898 Cuba and Puerto Rico as part of the Spanish–American War, U.S. invaded and occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in 1898. Cuba was occupied by the U.S. from 1898–1902 under military governor Leonard Wood, and again from 1906–1909, 1912 and 1917–1922; governed by the terms of the Platt Amendment through 1934.The Puerto Rican Campaign was an American military sea and land operation on the island of Puerto Rico during the Spanish–American War. The United States Navy attacked the archipelago's capital, San Juan. Though the damage inflicted on the city was minimal, the Americans were able to establish a blockade in the city's harbor, San Juan Bay. The land offensive began on July 25 with 1,300 infantry soldiers.All military actions in Puerto Rico were suspended on August 13, after U.S. President William McKinley and French Ambassador Jules Cambon, acting on behalf of the Spanish government, signed an armistice whereby Spain relinquished its sovereignty over the territories of Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines and Guam. and that thing with the...

1899 Philippines the Philippine–American War was part of a series of conflicts in the Philippine struggle for independence against United States occupation. Fighting erupted between U.S. and Filipino revolutionary forces on February 4, 1899, and quickly escalated into the 1899 Battle of Manila. On June 2, 1899, the First Philippine Republic officially declared war against the United States.The war officially ended on July 4, 1902 and that thing with the...

1900 China The Boxer Rebellion was a proto-nationalist movement in China between 1898 and 1901. The US was part of an Eight-Nation Alliance that brought 20,000 armed troops to China, defeated the Imperial Chinese Army, and captured Beijing. The Boxer Protocol of 7 September 1901 ended the uprising. and that thing with the...

1903 Panama In 1903, Panama seceded from the Republic of Colombia, backed by the U.S. government, amidst the Thousand Days' War. The Panama Canal was under construction by then, and the Panama Canal Zone, under United States sovereignty, was then created. The zone was transferred to Panama in 2000. and that thing with the...

1903 Honduras where the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company dominated the country's key banana export sector and associated land holdings and railways, saw insertion of American troops in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924 and 1925.[12] Writer O. Henry coined the term "Banana republic" in 1904 to describe Honduras. and that thing with the...

1912 Nicaragua

which, after intermittent landings and naval bombardments in the previous decades, was occupied by the U.S. almost continuously from 1912 through 1933. and that thing with the...

1914 Mexico US troops occupied Veracruz and that thing with the...

1915 Haiti Haiti was occupied by the U.S. from 1915–1934, which led to the creation of a new Haitian constitution in 1917 that instituted changes that included an end to the prior ban on land ownership by non-Haitians. Including the First and Second Caco Wars. and that thing with the...

1916 Dominican Republic, actions in 1903, 1904, and 1914; occupied by the U.S. from 1916–1924 and that thing with the...

1918 Russia. The Allies intervened in the Russian Civil War. About 250,000 foreign troops entered Russia during the Russian civil war fought by the White Army against the new Soviet government. Western and imperial Japan government forces included 13,000 American troops invading through Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok, whose mission after the end of World War I was to topple the Soviet government. and that thing with the...

1941 Panama

The United States government used its contacts in the Panama National Guard, which the U.S. had earlier trained, to have the government of Panama overthrown in a bloodless coup. The U.S. had requested that the government of Panama allow it to build over 130 new military installations inside and outside of the Panama Canal Zone, and the government of Panama refused this request at the price suggested by the U.S. and that thing with the...

South Korea 1945-1950 As the Empire of Japan surrendered in August 1945, under the leadership of Lyuh Woon-Hyung committees throughout Korea formed to coordinate transition to Korean independence. On August 28, 1945 these committees formed the temporary national government of Korea, naming it the People's Republic of Korea (PRK) a couple of weeks later.[15][16] On September 8, 1945, the United States government landed forces in Korea and thereafter established the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGK) to govern Korea south of the 38th Parallel. The USAMGK staffed the governing administration with Japanese governors and many other Japanese officials who had been part of the brutal Japanese imperial colonial government and with Koreans who had collaborated with it, which made the government unpopular and engendered popular resistance.[17] USAMGK refused to recognize the PRK government, which had been formed to self-govern the country, and the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, which had been based in China during WWII and had fought against the Japanese, and then the USAMGK by military decree outlawed the PRK government.[18][19] In October 1948, USAMGK sent units to attack Koreans who were seeking Korean independence, and carried out several mass atrocities, including the killing hundreds of Korean civilians on Jeju Island who were suspected of supporting those in favor of independence. and that thing with the...

1950-1953 Korean War and that thing with the...

March 1949 Syrian coup d'état: The democratically elected government of Shukri al-Quwatli was overthrown by a junta led by the Syrian Army chief of staff at the time, Husni al-Za'im, who became President of Syria on 11 April 1949. The exact nature of US involvement in that coup is still highly controversial. However, it is well documented that the construction of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, which had been held up in the Syrian parliament, was approved by Za'im just over a month after the coup. and that thing with the...

1953 Iranian coup d'état (known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup) was the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom (under the name 'Operation Boot') and the United States (under the name TPAJAX Project).[24][25][26] The coup saw the transition of Mohammad-Rezā Shāh Pahlavi from a constitutional monarch to an authoritarian one who relied heavily on United States government support to hold on to power until his own overthrow in February 1979. and that thing with the...

1954 Guatemala In a CIA operation code named Operation PBSUCCESS, the U.S. government executed a coup d'état that was successful in overthrowing the democratically-elected government of President Jacobo Árbenz and installed the first of a line of brutal right-wing dictators in its place.The perceived success of the operation made it a model for future CIA operations because the CIA lied to the president of the United States when briefing him regarding the number of casualties. and that thing with the...

1958 Lebanon crisis. The President of the United States, Eisenhower authorized Operation Blue Bat on July 15, 1958. This was the first application of the Eisenhower Doctrine under which the U.S. announced that it would intervene to protect regimes it considered threatened by international communism. The goal of the operation was to bolster the pro-Western Lebanese government of President Camille Chamoun against internal opposition and threats from Syria and Egypt and that thing with the...

1961 Cuba Bay of Pigs Invasion The CIA orchestrated a force composed of CIA-trained Cuban exiles to invade Cuba with support and encouragement from the US government, in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The invasion was launched in April 1961, three months after John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency in the United States. The Cuban armed forces, trained and equipped by Eastern Bloc nations, defeated the invading combatants within three days and that thing with the...

1960s. Operation MONGOOSE was a US government effort to overthrow the government of Cuba. The operation included economic warfare, including an embargo against Cuba, “to induce failure of the Communist regime to supply Cuba's economic needs,” a diplomatic initiative to isolate Cuba, and psychological operations “to turn the peoples' resentment increasingly against the regime.” The economic warfare prong of the operation also included the infiltration by the CIA of operatives to carry out many acts of sabotage against civilian targets, such as a railway bridge, a molasses storage facilities, an electric power plant, and the sugar harvest, notwithstanding Cuba’s repeated requests to the United States government to cease its terrorist operations.In addition, the CIA orchestrated a number of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, head of government of Cuba, including attempts that entailed CIA collaboration with the American mafia. and that thing with the...

1965 Dominican Republic. U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, convinced of the defeat of the Loyalist forces and fearing the creation of "a second Cuba"[37] on America's doorstep, ordered U.S. forces to restore order. The decision to intervene militarily in the Dominican Republic was Lyndon Johnson's personal decision. All civilian advisers had recommended against immediate intervention hoping that the Loyalist side could bring an end to the civil war.President Johnson took the advice of his Ambassador in Santo Domingo, W. Tapley Bennett, who suggested that the US interpose its forces between the rebels and those of the junta, thereby effecting a cease-fire. Chief of Staff General Wheeler told a subordinate: "Your unannounced mission is to prevent the Dominican Republic from going Communist."[38] A fleet of 41 vessels was sent to blockade the island, and an invasion was launched. Ultimately, 42,000 soldiers and marines were ordered to the Dominica and that thing with the...

1973 Chilean coup d'état was the overthrow of democratically elected President Salvador Allende by the Chilean armed forces and national police. This followed an extended period of social and political unrest between the right dominated Congress of Chile and Allende, as well as economic warfare ordered by US President Richard Nixon.[39] The regime of Augusto Pinochet that followed is notable for having, by conservative estimates, disappeared some 3200 political dissidents, imprisoned 30,000 (many of whom were tortured), and forced some 200,000 Chileans into exile.[40][41][42] The CIA, through Project FUBELT (also known as Track II), worked to secretly engineer the conditions for the coup. The US initially denied any involvement, and though many relevant documents have been declassified in the decades since, a US president has yet to issue any apology for the incident. As a prelude, see the 1970 assassination of the Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army, Rene Schneider and that thing with the...

1979-1989 Afghanistan. In what was known as "Operation Cyclone," the U.S. government secretly provided weapons and funding for the Mujahadin Islamic guerillas of Afghanistan fighting to overthrow the Afghan government and the Soviet military forces that supported it. Supplies were channeled through the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan.[44][45][46] Although Operation Cyclone officially ended in 1989 with the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, U.S. government funding for the Mujahadin continued through 1992 and that thing with the...

Destabilizing Nicaragua 1982-1989. The U.S. government attempted to topple the government of Nicaragua by secretly arming, training and funding the Contras, a terrorist group based in Honduras that was created to sabotage Nicaragua and to destabilize the Nicaraguan government.[48][49][50][51] As part of the training, the CIA distributed a detailed "terror manual" entitled "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War," which instructed the Contras, among other things, on how to blow up public buildings, to assassinate judges, to create martyrs, and to blackmail ordinary citizens.[52] In addition to orchestrating the Contras, the U.S. government also blew up bridges and mined Corinto harbor, causing the sinking of several civilian Nicaraguan and foreign ships and many civilian deaths.[53][54][55][56] After the Boland Amendment made it illegal for the U.S. government to provide funding for Contra activities, the administration of President Reagan secretly sold arms to the Iranian government to fund a secret U.S. government apparatus that continued illegally to fund the Contras, in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair.[57] The U.S. continued to arm and train the Contras even after the Sandanista government of Nicaragua won the elections of 1984 and that thing with the...

1983 Grenada In what the U.S. government called Operation Urgent Fury, the U.S. military invaded the tiny island nation of Grenada to remove the Marxist government of Grenada that the Reagan Administration found objectionable.[60][61] The United Nations General Assembly called the U.S. invasion "a flagrant violation of international law"[62] but a similar resolution widely supported in the United Nations Security Council was vetoed by the U.S. and that thing with the...

1989 Panama In December 1989, in a military operation code-named Operation Just Cause, the U.S. invaded Panama. President George H. W. Bush launched the war ten years after the Torrijos–Carter Treaties were ratified to transfer control of the Panama Canal from the United States to Panama by the year 2000.The U.S. deposed de facto Panamanian leader, general, and dictator Manuel Noriega and brought him to the United States, president-elect Guillermo Endara was sworn into office, and the Panamanian Defense Force was dissolved and that thing with the...

1991 Kuwait - The Persian Gulf War (2 August 1990 – 28 February 1991), codenamed Operation Desert Storm (17 January 1991 – 28 February 1991) commonly referred to as simply the Gulf War, was a war waged by a UN-authorized coalition force from 34 nations led by the United States, against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait. The U.S. led coalition repelled the Iraqi forces from Kuwait and returned the emir into power and that thing with the...

1991 Haiti. Eight months after what was widely reckoned as the first honest election held in Haiti, the newly elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was deposed by the Haitian army. The CIA "paid key members of the coup regime forces, identified as drug traffickers, for information from the mid-1980s at least until the coup.” Coup leaders Cédras and François had received military training in the United States. and that thing with the...

1991-2003 Iraq Following the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the U.S. government successfully advocated that the pre-war sanctions be made more comprehensive, which the UN Security Council did in April 1991 by adopting Resolution 687.] After the UN imposed the tougher sanctions, select U.S. officials stated in May 1991—when it was widely expected that the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein faced imminent collapse—that the sanctions would not be lifted until after Saddam's ouster. However, numerous U.S. officials subsequently clarified that the sanctions could be lifted if Iraq complied with all of the UN resolutions it was violating, but not just with UN weapons inspections.[76] Studies dispute the number of people who died in south and central Iraq during the years of the sanctions.However, an oil for food program was established in 1996 to ease the effects of sanctions. and that thing with the...

1994-2003 Iraq. The CIA launched DBACHILLES, a coup d'état operation against the Iraqi government, recruiting Ayad Allawi, who headed the Iraqi National Accord, a network of Iraqis who opposed the Saddam Hussein government, as part of the operation. The network included Iraqi military and intelligence officers but was penetrated by people loyal to the Iraqi government.[80][81][82] Also using Ayad Allawi and his network, the CIA directed a government sabotage and bombing campaign in Baghdad between 1992 and 1995, against targets that—according to the Iraqi government at the time—killed many civilians including people in a crowded movie theater.[83] The CIA bombing campaign may have been merely a test of the operational capacity of the CIA's network of assets on the ground and not intended to be the launch of the coup strike itself.[83] The coup was unsuccessful, but Ayad Allawi was later installed as prime minister of Iraq by the Iraq Interim Governing Council, which had been created by the U.S.-led coalition following the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In 1998 the U.S. enacted the "Iraq Liberation Act," which states, in part, that "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq," and appropriated funds for U.S. aid "to the Iraqi democratic opposition organizations. and that thing with the...

Iran After 2003, news outlets reported that the U.S. was supporting Iranian opposition groups. However, a later study of Iran–United States relations argued that while Israeli officials had proposed such "extreme measures," "Washington completely rejected these scheme and that thing with the...

2005-2017 Syria Starting in 2005, the US government launched a policy of regime change against the Syrian government by funding Syrian opposition groups working to topple the Syrian government, attempting to block foreign direct investment in Syria, attempting to frustrate Syrian government efforts at economic reform and prosperity and thus legitimacy for the regime, and getting other governments diplomatically to isolate Syria.[91] The Obama administration starting in 2009 continued such policies while taking steps toward diplomatic engagement with the Syrian government and denying that it was engaging in regime change. After the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the U.S. government called on Syrian President Bashar Al Assad to “step aside” and imposed an oil embargo against the Syrian government to bring it to its knees.[92] Starting in 2013, the U.S. also provided training, weapons and cash to Syrian Islamic and secular insurgents fighting to topple the Syrian government.[95][96]On the 30th March 2017, Ambassador Nikki Haley told a group of reporters that the US's priority in Syria was no longer on "getting Assad out." Earlier that day at a news conference in Ankara, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also said that the "longer term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people and that thing with the...

2011 Libya The US was part of a multi-state coalition that began a military intervention in Libya to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which was taken in response to events during the Libyan Civil War,[and military operations began, with US and British naval forces firing over 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles,[101] the French and British Air Forces undertaking sorties across Libya and a naval blockade by Coalition forces. Air strikes against Libyan Army tanks and vehicles by French jets were since confirmed and that thing with the...

2006-2007 Palestinian territories. In the Fatah-Hamas conflict, the U.S. government pressured the Fatah faction of the Palestinian leadership to topple the Hamas government of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. The Bush Administration was displeased with the government that the majority of the Palestinian people elected in the January Palestinian legislative election of 2006. The U.S. government set up a secret training and armaments program that received tens of millions of dollars in Congressional funding, but also, like in the Iran-contra scandal, a more secret Congress-circumventing source of funding for Fatah to launch a bloody war against the Haniyeh government.] The war was brutal, with many casualties and with Fatah kidnapping and torturing civilian leaders of Hamas, sometimes in front of their own families, and setting fire to a university in Gaza. When the government of Saudi Arabia attempted to negotiate a truce between the sides so as to avoid a wide-scale Palestinian civil war, the U.S. government pressured Fatah to reject the Saudi plan and to continue the effort to topple the Faniyeh government. Ultimately, the Faniyeh government was prevented from ruling over all of the Palestinian territories, with Hamas retreating to the Gaza strip and Fatah retreating to the West Bank and that thing with the...

Covert involvementsDuring the modern era, Americans were involved in numerous covert regime change efforts. During the Cold War in particular, the U.S. government secretly supported military coups that overthrew democratically elected governments in Syria in 1949, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973.

But other than these few things with these few things, I don’t see how you can say the US interferes much in other countries internal affairs!

A. Darius Kamali

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

Text

The question that has been eating away at me is this: How can one man have so much power that in one phone call shift the balance of power, in which we have lost countless American lives ( our blood and treasure) in the Middle East, enabling Russia, Iran, Turkey, ISIS and Assad, and in that single call effect hundreds of thousands of civilians and our allies (SDF) who fought by our side, losing thousands of people in the war(we've been fighting for 5 years) against ISIS and unleashing ethnic cleansing and genocide in one swell swoop. PLEASE 😌 SOMEONE ANSWER THIS QUESTION!!!!

Fact-checking Trump on the Kurds: Yes, they are more unsafe now. No, they aren’t more threatening than ISIS.

By Miriam Berger | Published October 19 at 8:00 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 19, 2019 |

President Trump has had lots of contradictory things to say about the Kurds, who until just two weeks ago were allied with the United States in northeastern Syria.

The Kurds, you may recall, are a stateless and predominantly Muslim ethnic group divided among Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. (Here’s a helpful primer on the Kurds and why Turkey is attacking them.)

Trump’s recent statements on the matter have been, to quote the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin, “highly unusual.” Other comments have been downright wrong or misleading.

Trump’s confusing take on the Kurds reflects other related inaccuracies he’s been touting, such as incorrectly claiming that U.S. soldiers in northeastern Syria were safe from Turkey’s invasion; in fact, Turkey attacked near a U.S. base. He also posited that he has “100% defeated” the Islamic State; in fact, the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate is no more, but the group is looking to capitalize on the current void to rebuild.

Here’s an analysis of how four recent Trump pronouncements involving the Kurds hold up.

Kurdish forces are “more of a terrorist threat than ISIS.”

At a news conference Wednesday, Trump claimed that Kurdish insurgents in Turkey (the PKK), who are linked to Kurdish forces in Syria and are locked in a decades-long separatist battle with Turkey, were “probably worse at terror and more of a terrorist threat than ISIS."

Turkey watchers were quick to point out two things: One, that’s just not true, and two, Trump’s comments were suddenly strikingly similar to Turkish government talking points.

A little background: The PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, has been engaged in a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish government, which has tried to stifle all things Kurdish. The PKK has deep ties to Kurdish militias across the border in Syria that joined together, along with some Arab militias, to form the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), i.e., the body the United States was until recently supporting in the fight against the Islamic State.

Various groups documenting global terrorism threats, however, have consistently placed the Islamic State very high on the threat scale because of the number and breadth of attacks against a wide range of targets. The PKK threat, experts say, remains low, as its attacks are more limited in targeting Turkey.

Nonetheless, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has cast the SDF and the related Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) all in the same terrorist light, in part to justify his incursion into Syria as a necessary terror-fighting mission.

To critics, though, Trump’s about-face comments appeared as yet another attempt by the president to rewrite history in favor of the United States pulling out troops and abandoning the Kurds in northeastern Syria.

The Kurds “aren’t angels.”

On Wednesday, Trump claimed of the Kurds: “As I said they’re not angels, they’re not angels.”

The president is correct on this point — literally and metaphorically.

According to Human Rights Watch, Kurdish authorities in northern Syria “have committed arbitrary arrests, due process violations, and failed to address unsolved killings and disappearances."

Then again, much of the same, and much worse, has been reported about Erdogan, who has earned repeated praise from Trump nonetheless.

The Kurds are “much safer” now.

In the same statement Wednesday, Trump said that Turkish-Kurdish fighting “has nothing to do with us” and that the "Kurds are much safer right now, but the Kurds know how to fight.”

The current quagmire with Turkey in northeastern Syria actually has much to do with the United States and has most decidedly made the Kurds more unsafe. (It’s true, though, that the Kurds know how to fight.)

Kurdish and American military and intelligence forces had repeatedly warned the president that his sudden withdrawal of U.S. troops would destabilize the region, leaving the Kurds at risk of attack from Turkey and vulnerable civilians yet again in harm’s way.

Since 2015, a small contingent of American soldiers on the ground had been helping Kurdish-aligned forces fight the Islamic State. They had also served as a buffer protecting Syria’s Kurds from Turkey, which felt threatened by the semiautonomous Kurdish administration set up in 2013 amid the unrest in Syria.

The quick U.S. withdrawal of troops consequently left the door open for Turkey to invade, while shutting the door on Kurdish fighters and civilians seeking safety. Humanitarian aid groups had to withdraw from the area Monday after Turkey started to attack and the Kurds, desperate for reinforcements, made a deal bringing in the Syrian government to help.

The area is now a minefield of power struggles mixed with fickle alliances — Turkey and Syrian Arab militias vs. the Kurds vs. the Syrian government vs. the Islamic State. On top of it all, Russia, aligned with the Syrian government, has moved in to fill the United States’ shoes as the new power broker.

After days of bloodshed, tens of thousands of Syrians have been displaced or become refugees, as a tentative cease-fire took hold Friday.

Turkey and the Kurds are just kids in a sandbox.

After Vice President Pence, Erdogan and Kurdish forces agreed to a five-day cease-fire Thursday, Trump boasted of his diplomacy philosophy. “Sometimes you have to let ‘em fight for a while," Trump said. “Like two kids in a lot, you’ve got to let them fight and then you pull them apart.”

This is a misleading depiction of the political situation on several fronts, according to academics and policymakers. The tired Western trope of Middle Eastern people needing to “fight” it out overlooks the role of U.S. policies in politically and economically destabilizing the region. And critics from across the political spectrum have tagged the cease-fire as a complete capitulation to Turkey.

***********

Kurds’ Sense of Betrayal Compounded by Empowerment of Unsavory Rivals

Abandoned by the U.S., Kurdish forces are doubly angry at who is seeking to replace them: Turkish-allied Syrian fighters the United States had long rejected as extremists, criminals and thugs.

By Ben Hubbard and David D. Kirkpatrick | Published Oct. 18, 2019 Updated Oct. 19, 2019, 3:23 AM ET |

New York Times | Posted October 19, 2019 |

DOHUK, Iraq — The United States had encouraged its Kurdish allies to dismantle their defenses in northern Syria, saying it would make it easier to assure Turkey that the Kurds posed no threat. So in recent months, according to three American officials involved, the Kurds blew up tunnels and destroyed trenches, leaving themselves vulnerable as the United States promised that it would have their back.

Now, a week after President Trump’s decision to pull American support from them, the sense of betrayal among the Kurds, trusted allies now being forced to flee under assault from Turkey, is matched only by their outrage at who will move in: Turkish soldiers supported by Syrian fighters the United States had long rejected as extremists, criminals and thugs.

“These are the misfits of the conflict, the worst of the worst,” said Hassan Hassan, a Syrian-born scholar tracking the fighting. “They have been notorious for extortion, theft and banditry, more like thugs than rebels — essentially mercenaries.”

The sudden empowerment of Turkish-backed Syrian militias is yet another swift turnaround in Syria’s eight-year-old war, and it was unleashed by President Trump’s decision to pull United States troops out of the way for a Turkish military incursion.

The deadly battles since have not only cracked the partnership between a Kurdish-led militia and the United States and allowed the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian backers to advance. They have also given new leeway to Syrian fighters once considered too extreme or unruly to receive American military support.

The fighting in northeastern Syria has now pitted against each other two forces that have played very different roles in Syria’s war.

On one side is the Kurdish-led militia known as the Syrian Democratic Forces that the United States partnered with to fight the Islamic State. Until last week, the S.D.F. was the United States’ only significant ally left in Syria, although Turkey saw the group as terrorists for its links to a Kurdish guerrilla organization that has fought the Turkish state.

On the other side are Turkey and a group of Syrian militias it is counting on to do most of the on-the-ground fighting.

Grandly misnamed the Syrian National Army, this coalition of Turkish-backed militias is in fact largely composed of the dregs of the eight-year-old conflict’s failed rebel movement.

Early in the war, when the United States still hoped that Mr. al-Assad would fall, the military and the C.I.A. sought to train and equip moderate, trustworthy rebels to fight the government and the Islamic State.

A few of those now fighting in the northeast took part in those failed programs, but most were rejected as too extreme or too criminal. Some have expressed extremist sensibilities or allied with jihadist groups. The majority, though, have no clear ideology and turned to Turkey for a paycheck of about $100 a month.

Some have documented records of looting property, displacing civilians and committing other abuses during earlier Turkish-backed incursions into Syria. Fighters for many of the groups routinely chant racist slurs against the Kurds, Syria’s largest ethnic minority, calling them atheists or pigs.

Within days of Mr. Trump’s assent to the Turkish-backed latest advance, human rights groups accused the militias of indiscriminate attacks on residential areas and killing civilians, including a prominent Kurdish politician.

“They are basically gangsters, but they are also racist toward Kurds and other minorities,” said Elizabeth Tsurkov, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “No human should be subjected to their rule.”

To American diplomats and army officers involved in Syria, the idea that Washington is allowing a loyal American partner to lose ground to the Turkish-backed militias is a painful new twist in a betrayal of the Kurds that could echo for years, if not decades, and make it harder for the United States to ally with local forces to fight common enemies.

“What local partners are going to work with the United States now, after this?” said Dana Stroul, the co-chair of a congressionally sponsored bipartisan Syrian Study Group.

Some American officials express deep shame over the abandonment of the Kurds and say that United States policy inadvertently left them diplomatically and militarily vulnerable to the Turkish attack.

“The extent of our betrayal over the last year has been so immoral that it has shaken me to my core,” said one diplomat working on Syria, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of punishment for speaking out. “We have turned everyone in Syria against them and now we are dismantling our once-ally, bit by bit, and feeding the pieces to their enemies.”

As the Islamic State shrank, losing its last patch of territory in March, some Trump administration officials said publicly that the roughly 2,000 United States troops in Syria would remain, not just to prevent a jihadist resurgence, but to pressure Iran to leave the country and Mr. al-Assad to make political concessions.

The S.D.F.’s leadership understood those to be long-term projects that could keep American forces in Syria for years, and agreed to an American demand that they freeze talks with Mr. al-Assad’s government, an American foe.

The United States also sought to quell Turkish anger over the United States’ partnership with the Kurds and the new power it gave them in Syria. This summer, Washington put in place a plan aimed at convincing Turkey the Syrian Kurds were not a threat that included requiring the Kurds to blow up tunnels, dismantle berms and dig up ammunition caches put in place to prepare for a potential Turkish attack.

The Syrian Defense Forces “removed all defenses from the border region (at US request) on assurance that Turkey would NOT attack,” Brett McGurk, the former special envoy for the coalition fighting against ISIS, wrote last week on Twitter.

The United States also ran joint air and ground patrols with Turkey inside Kurdish-held territory and posted footage of them on social media.

Many of the Kurds’ commanders opposed the program, fearing that it would expose their defenses and leave them vulnerable. But the leader of the S.D.F., Mazlum Kobani, reassured them that they could trust the United States to guarantee their safety, according to two United States officials.

But when Turkey attacked last week after Mr. Trump pulled United States troops out of the way, the Kurds’ vulnerabilities became clear.

“You tricked us!” Mr. Kobani yelled in a tense meeting, according to United States officials with knowledge of the exchange.

Indeed, Turkey focused its incursion on the areas it had visited with United States troops, raising suspicions it used the patrols not to decrease tensions, but to plan its attack.

“This did give Turkey the ability to have a deep level of reconnaissance that has helped in some ways with the invasion,” said Nicholas Heras, a Middle East security fellow at the Center for New American Security who has visited northeast Syria and met with S.D.F. leaders.

As the battle escalated and the United States swiftly pulled its troops out of the way, the Syrian Kurdish leadership scrambled to find new allies and reached out to Damascus, but not from a position of strength.

“It put them in a position where the S.D.F. was essentially approaching Damascus on its knees,” Mr. Heras said. “When you are trying to negotiate under the bombs, all the actors you are trying to negotiate with will assume you are desperate.”

On Friday, there were conflicting reports on whether the Syrian Kurdish fighters had begun withdrawing from the border area. But United States and Turkish officials expected that the Turkish-backed militias accused of abuses in other parts of Syria would soon take over the contested zone.

“We are turning areas that had been controlled by our allies over to the control of criminals or thugs, or that in some cases groups were associated or fighting alongside Al Qaeda,” said Ms. Stroul, of the Syrian Study Group. “It is a profound and epic strategic blunder.”

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Trump abandoned the Kurds in Syria. Could Taiwan be next?

By John Pomfret | Published October 18 at 7:04 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 19, 2019 |

When President Trump was trying to explain why he abandoned the Kurds to Turkish forces, upending the geopolitical situation in the Middle East and driving a stake through the heart of a longtime American ally, he noted that developments in Syria had nothing to do with the United States. The terrorists there, he said, were “7,000 miles away.” No Americans were in harm’s way. Why should Washington get involved?

At more than 7,800 miles from Washington, Taiwan is even farther away than Syria. And at just over 23 million, there are about half as many Taiwanese as there are Kurds.

Could an unscripted phone call between Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping greenlight a Chinese invasion of Taiwan? Given Trump’s impulsive nature, that chilling scenario — and its baleful ramifications — can’t be ruled out.

A Chinese attack on Taiwan, especially one with U.S. acquiescence, would roil East Asia. It would cause the United States’ Asian allies, from Japan and South Korea to the Philippines and Australia, to suspect Washington’s commitment to their security, and would embolden North Korea. If successful, the invasion would crush an Asian democracy and propel China’s naval interests far into the western Pacific, setting the scene for Chinese domination of the region for years to come.

Since China’s Communist revolution in 1949, the U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s security has been the main reason why China has not attempted an invasion. China’s government claims that Taiwan is part of China, even as Taiwan has had its own government, army and economic and political system. Since the late 1980s, Taiwan has transformed itself from an authoritarian state into a vibrant democracy, and China’s demands that Taiwan come to heel have fluctuated from shrill to moderate and back again.

To threaten Taiwan, China has deployed missiles in Fujian province, which is 110 miles from Taiwan’s coast. China’s military modernization has focused on creating the conditions for a successful invasion, including the development of aircraft carrier-killer missiles to ward off the U.S. Navy. China has also meddled in Taiwan’s political system, churning out an endless stream of fake news from bots and trolls that swarm Taiwan’s unregulated social media.

To entice Taiwan, China has offered a “one country, two systems” formula to the island’s people, promising to maintain their capitalist and democratic system. However, given China’s string of broken promises in Hong Kong, which was also offered a “one country, two systems” model, uniting with Beijing has zero traction in Taiwan.

Since rising to the top of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, Xi has intimated that he believes taking over Taiwan would be the enterprise to cement his legacy. In a saber-rattling speech on Jan. 1, Xi announced that China would not “abandon the use of force” when it came to Taiwan and that China was prepared to take “all necessary measures” to unite with the island. Xi reiterated these threats on Oct. 13 in a speech in Nepal, warning that attempts to separate China would result in “crushed bodies, shattered bones.” Chinese sources have observed that the desire to be the Chinese leader that absorbs Taiwan played a role in Xi’s decision to force through an amendment of China’s constitution last year that allows him to serve as president for life. The Chinese Communist Party will observe its 100th anniversary in 2021. What better way to celebrate the centenary than with a unifying war?

In 1979, the United States dropped its recognition of Taiwan in favor of recognizing the People’s Republic of China. Nonetheless, successive U.S. governments have supported the island. The Taiwan Relations Act mandates U.S. support for Taiwan’s defense. Since the 1980s, the United States has sold Taiwan tens of billions worth of weapons.

Inside the Trump administration, there remains significant support for Taiwan. Newly appointed deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger and Randall Schriver, assistant secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs relations, are just two of the well-informed and stalwart backers of the island’s security and safety.

But what about Trump? As he is on issues throughout the world, the president remains a wild card. Soon after the 2016 election but before he was inaugurated, Trump took a congratulatory call from Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen. But at other times, observers have worried that Taiwan could become a hostage in trade negotiations with China.

There is some indication that his staff understands how dangerous the president could be. In late August, just weeks before Trump fired him, national security adviser John Bolton declassified a presidential memo on U.S. arms sales to Taiwan written on Aug. 17, 1982, by then-President Ronald Reagan. In the memo, Reagan concerns himself with a communique signed that very day by the United States and China that on paper seemed to commit the United States to decreasing its arms sales to Taiwan. Reagan wanted subsequent presidents to understand that the United States should not waver in its support of the island. Reagan directed subsequent presidents to assure that “Taiwan’s defense capability relative to that of the PRC will be maintained.”

Sources inside the Trump administration have observed that by invoking Reagan, Bolton appeared to be trying to make it more difficult for Trump to abandon Taiwan. But whether the president got the memo is anybody’s guess.

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American civilians who fought in Syrian Kurdish units against ISIS watch a dream unravel

By Dan Lamothe | Published October 18, 2019 11:28 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 19, 2019 |

Dozens of American civilians and other Westerners who fought alongside Syrian Kurdish militias against the Islamic State are probably still in northern Syria following a Turkish military incursion, raising concerns about their safety and questions about their legal status if they attempt to return to their home countries.

The group has included U.S. veterans seeking to continue their fight against Islamist extremism, but also adventurers, Marxists, socialists and humanitarians who saw hope in the autonomous, pro-democracy movement that Kurdish leaders said they want to build in a place they called Rojava. Some Westerners moved there permanently, while others carried out something akin to a military deployment.

The Westerners had little time to react after the Trump administration said Oct. 6 that it would not stand in the way of the Turkish offensive, which targeted Kurdish militias that partnered with the U.S. military to fight the Islamic State. The Turkish military launched its offensive a few days later, prompting Trump to order the withdrawal of all 1,000 U.S. troops from northern Syria as violence spiraled out of control.

On Thursday, Vice President Pence announced an agreement in which Turkey would stop its offensive for five days while the United States helps facilitate the withdrawal of Kurdish fighters from a key border area near Turkey. President Trump hailed the deal as a win, but some members of Congress and security analysts said it could amount to a second betrayal of the Kurds if it does not guarantee their safety.

Thomas McClure, a British volunteer with the Syrian Kurds, said it is “really hard to say” how many Westerners are still living in Syrian Kurdish enclaves, but estimated it could be more than 100. Some are still part of the Kurdish militias, he said, and scores of others provide medical care and carry out other tasks.

“I haven’t heard of anyone trying to leave now,” said McClure, who said he has been in northern Syria for about 18 months, mostly answering questions from the media. “Everyone is here with the knowledge that the situation can change fast, and it can go downhill fast, and that it’s important to not just leave when things get bad. Our work here is needed.”

The situation is especially complicated because of Turkey’s status as a NATO ally.

Westerners who traveled to Syria to fight against the Islamic State as civilians typically joined the People’s Protection Units, Syrian Kurdish units commonly known as the YPG. They formed the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces that partnered with the United States in its counterterrorism campaign in Syria.

However, the YPG also has ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a Turkish group that is known as the PKK and labeled a terrorist organization by both the Turkish and U.S. governments. The United States has drawn a distinction between the YPG and the PKK, but Turkish leaders do not and consider the Kurds a security threat at their southern border.

U.S. officials warn American citizens that they are subject to prosecution if they become enemy combatants abroad. But no U.S. citizen has been charged with a crime for joining the YPG, which has seen more than 10,000 of its fighters killed against the Islamic State. Nearly a dozen American civilians have been killed while fighting alongside the YPG, the group has said.

American volunteers have long considered the lack of prosecution to be tacit acceptance, if not approval, of their actions. But the situation has grown more dicey as Turkey has sought to clear Kurdish forces from northern Syria, pitting a NATO ally against a close U.S. counterterrorism partner.

Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman, said each situation is “evaluated on its individual facts and circumstances.” However, he said, traveling abroad to take up arms in a foreign group is “a very bad idea, and we strongly discourage it.”

The State Department said in a statement that it warns private citizens against traveling to Syria to engage in combat and that those who do so face kidnapping, injury or death.

“The U.S. government does not support this activity, and our ability to provide consular assistance to individuals who are arrested, injured or kidnapped, or to the families of individuals, is extremely limited,” the statement said.

River O’Mahoney Hagg, a Californian who fought alongside the YPG in 2016 while recording video for a documentary, expressed frustration with the increasingly dire situation the Kurds have faced, including the execution of civilians by pro-Turkish forces. He worked in a medical unit before returning home, treating Kurdish fighters and civilians alike.

With Turkey’s assault on northern Syria, Hagg said, the situation on the ground has changed. He estimated that about 100 Western volunteers have assisted the YPG over the past few years.

“I want to cry,” he said. “I want to yell. I want to kick a hole in the wall. I can’t go fight Turkey. I can’t go. It’s a NATO country. I can’t go pick up arms against a NATO country. American volunteers can’t go and help our friends.”

A Canadian friend of his that is still in northern Syria reached out a few days ago with a message for her mother, he said.

“She says to me, ‘Tell my mom that I love her and that it was worth it,’ ” Hagg said, choking up. “It’s messed up, right? To hear that when it’s my own president who’s betraying these people!”

Hanna Bohman, a former volunteer from Canada who has returned from northern Syria, criticized Trump for abandoning the Kurdish forces. While the coalition against the Islamic State has often been described as U.S.-led, she said, it actually has been led on the ground in Syria by Kurdish fighters.

Bohman said many of the women she fought alongside in the all-women Kurdish unit known as the YPJ have been killed in the past few years. Those who are alive do not want to leave.

“I keep telling them: ‘Try to get out of there,’ ” she said. “But they say, ‘This is our land. We can’t run away from this.’ ”

Susan Shirley, whose son Levi was killed as a member of the YPG in 2016, said a small, but tightknit group of Westerners who joined the YPG and their families have stayed in touch. They have watched the decisions made about northern Syria this month with horror, she said.

“Everything they fought for, was it for nothing?” she asked. “I developed a lot of respect for the Kurdish people after Levi was killed, and I did my own research. Rojava is almost like this impossible dream that came true in a part of the world where it couldn’t happen, but it did. To see that just snuffed out like this is hard — and it’s on our watch.”

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Fighting continues in Syrian border town despite Turkish agreement to halt offensive

By Kareem Fahim, Sarah Dadouch and Asser Khattab | Published October 18, 2019 7:25 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 19, 2019 |

ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday warned that Turkey’s military offensive would resume within days if Kurdish fighters do not fully withdraw from a buffer zone, even as ongoing violence in at least one Syrian border town imperiled a cease-fire brokered by the United States.

There were also indications on Friday that the United States and Turkey had not come away from their negotiations with the same understanding of what they had agreed to in signing the vaguely written deal.

“If the U.S. can keep its promise made to us, at the end of the 120 hours, the issue of the safe zone will be resolved,” Erdogan told a gathering of foreign news media in Istanbul, referring to the length of a pause in the offensive agreed upon by Turkey and the United States on Thursday.

“If the promises are not kept,” he added, “our operation is going to continue from where we left off.”

Turkey agreed to pause its eight-day military operation after Vice President Pence led a U.S. delegation to Ankara on Thursday and met with Erdogan. A 13-point agreement said Turkey would permanently halt the offensive after 120 hours — or five days — if Syrian Kurdish militias, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), withdrew from an area of northern Syria that Turkey refers to as a safe zone.

The agreement amounted to a stunning victory for Erdogan, who not only persuaded the Trump administration to accept the safe zone — a concept that Washington and Ankara have argued about for years — but also made the United States the guarantor of the Kurdish fighters’ withdrawal.

Turkey views the Syrian Kurdish militias as terrorists because of their ties to the insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey. The safe-zone proposal is aimed at pushing the militias farther from Turkey and creating an area where Turkey proposes to resettle hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees.

The challenges of enforcing the agreement quickly became apparent Friday as the SDF accused Turkey of failing to observe the cease-fire. Mervan Qamishlo, a spokesman for the SDF, said that it was not withdrawing yet from the buffer zone “because the Turkish side has not yet committed to the agreement” and was still bombing the border town, Ras al-Ayn, including the town’s hospital.

Smoke could be seen rising from Ras al-Ayn in footage broadcast by CNN early Friday. Journalists for the Associated Press reported shelling and the sound of gunfire.

Erdogan denied Friday that violence was continuing in the area. President Trump, in a tweet Friday afternoon, said Erdogan told him in a phone call that “there was minor sniper and mortar fire that was quickly eliminated.” Trump added: “He very much wants the ceasefire, or pause, to work.”

The National Army, a Turkish-backed umbrella group that united Syrian rebel factions ahead of the offensive, also denied that there was any fighting or shelling in Ras al-Ayn.

A civilian near Ras al-Ayn said the bombardment continued through the night and into Friday morning. “There have been no airstrikes so far, but neither the bombardment nor the clashes have ceased,” he said in a telephone interview, declining to give his name for security reasons. “We are among the few dozens of families that have stayed in the area, but we have our car ready and we may still leave, despite the cease-fire.”

He said most residents had already fled, adding, “I don’t think they are going to come back.”

As part of the cease-fire deal, the White House agreed to refrain from imposing new economic sanctions on Turkey, and to reverse sanctions that were imposed earlier this week, once “a permanent cease-fire was in effect,” Pence said. But other unresolved issues remained.

It was not clear whether Turkey and the United States had come to an understanding about the size of the safe zone, which is not laid out in the text of the agreement. U.S. and Turkish officials concur that it will extend about 20 miles south of the Turkish border. But they

say different things about its width.

Erdogan said Friday that the area stretched for 275 miles, from Jarabulus to the Iraqi border, pointing at a map displayed behind him that showed a corridor stretching across much of northern Syria. Asked if the Trump administration had agreed, he said: “This is what we proposed. They did not say anything negative vis a vis the proposal.”

A senior U.S. official said that Erdogan had “always defined the safe zone in that way. We never have.” According to the official, the Kurdish fighters would retreat from a zone in a much smaller area between the Syrian border towns of Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, which are about 60 miles apart in the middle of northeastern Syria. “As the Turks have agreed,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

The safe zone will be “primarily enforced by the Turkish Armed Forces,” the agreement states. A U.S. military spokesman said Friday that U.S. forces would not patrol the safe zone.

Erdogan said Friday that Turkey did not intend to keep its forces in Syria “forever.”

“Not at all,” he said. “What we want is to make sure this area is cleared of terrorist elements, and at least 1 million refugees in Turkey can return to their own villages.” At the same time, the map he displayed for journalists showed a line of blue boxes in the safe-zone corridor — sites where Turkey would set up “observation posts,” Erdogan said.

The Turkish offensive rattled Ankara’s Western allies and put Trump on the defensive, after he was criticized for the perception that he approved Erdogan’s military operation during a phone call between the two leaders a few days before the offensive began. The White House denied that there had been any greenlighting and released a toughly worded letter Trump sent to Erdogan, on the day of the offensive, showing that Trump tried to persuade the Turkish leader to relent.

“Don’t be a fool!” the letter concluded.

Erdogan repeatedly praised Trump as he spoke about the agreement on Friday. But he singled out the letter, saying it “did not go hand in hand with political and diplomatic courtesy.”

“We haven’t forgotten it,” he added. “It would not be right for us to forget it.”

Dadouch and Khattab reported from Beirut. Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.

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(CEYLANPINAR, Turkey) — Russia moved to fill the void left by the United States in northern Syria on Tuesday, deploying troops to keep apart advancing Syrian government forces and Turkish troops. At the same time, tensions grew within NATO as Turkey defied growing condemnation of its invasion from its Western allies.

Now in its seventh day, Turkey’s offensive against Kurdish fighters has caused tens of thousands to flee their homes, has upended alliances and is re-drawing the map of northern Syria for yet another time in the 8-year-old war.

Russia moved quickly to further entrench its role as a power broker after U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the pullout of American forces in northeastern Syria. The American move effectively abandoned the Kurdish fighters who were allied with the U.S. and cleared the way for Turkey’s invasion aimed at crushing them.

Desperate for a new protector, the Kurdish administration struck a deal with the Russia-backed government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose forces on Sunday began moving into Kurdish-administered areas to shield them against Turkey.

Syrian troops waved flags after they rolled into Manbij, a flashpoint town west of the Euphrates River that Turkey had been aiming to capture and wrest from Kurdish control. Video by Russian journalists with the troops showed what appeared to be an abandoned outpost where U.S. forces had been stationed.

A U.S. military spokesman, Col. Myles B. Caggins, confirmed U.S. troops had completed their pullout from Manbij. During the withdrawal, contacts were kept open with the Turks and Russians to ensure the several hundred American forces there got out safely, U.S. officials said.

U.S. troops have had outposts in Manbij since 2017, when they went in to avert a battle over the town between Turkish and Kurdish fighters.

Now Russia was playing that role. Outside Manbij, Russian troops patrolled front lines between Turkish and Syrian army positions to keep them apart, Russia’s Defense Ministry said.

“No one is interested” in fighting between Syrian government troops and Turkish forces, said Alexander Lavrentyev, Moscow’s envoy for Syria. Russia “is not going to allow it,” he told Russian state news agencies.

Kelly Craft, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters Washington is “deeply concerned” that Russian troops are patrolling between the two sides.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu spoke to U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper to discuss “issues of mutual interest in the context of situation in Syria,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a brief statement, without elaborating.

Russia has been a staunch ally of Assad for decades and entered the Syrian conflict in 2015, providing air power that eventually turned the tide of the war in his favor. The Russian military has shipped weapons to Damascus, trained thousands of troops and put its advisers in key Syrian military units.

In the first week of the Turkish assault, at least 154 fighters from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have been killed, as well as 128 fighters from Turkish-backed Syrian factions , according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitor of the war. It said at least 69 civilians have been killed in Syria. Turkey says six of its soldiers have died, as well as at least 20 Turkish civilians killed by Kurdish mortar fire across the border.

Despite the Syrian and Russian deployments, Turkey insisted it would capture Manbij. Asked on Sky News if Turkey’s military was willing to fight Assad’s army, Vice President Fuat Oktay said, “We hope it’s not going to happen, but again we are determined to get control over Manbij.”

Mortar fire from Manbij killed two Turkish soldiers and wounded seven others, the Turkish Defense Ministry said. An Associated Press team later saw up to 200 Turkish troops along with armored vehicles crossing near Manbij and Kobani, a border town that is not yet secured by Syrian forces. Farther east on the border, Turkish and Kurdish forces were in heavy battles over the town of Ras al-Ayn, captured by Turkish troops days earlier.

A U.S. official said the approximately 1,000 U.S. troops being withdrawn from northern Syria will reposition in Iraq, Kuwait and possibly Jordan. The U.S. forces in Iraq could conduct cross-border operations against the Islamic State group in Syria as they did before creating the now-abandoned partnership with Syrian Kurdish-led forces, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive planning for a U.S. pullout.

After opening the way for the Turkish assault with its pullout, Washington is now trying to restrain its fellow NATO member.

Trump on Monday announced sanctions aimed at Turkey’s economy. The U.S. called on Turkey to stop the offensive and declare a cease-fire, while European Union countries moved to broaden an arms sale embargo against their easternmost ally.

Trump was sending Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser Robert O’Brien to Ankara to try to begin negotiations to stop the fighting. Pence said Trump spoke directly to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who promised not to attack the border town of Kobani, which in 2015 saw the Islamic State group’s first defeat in a battle by the U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters.

Erdogan made clear, however, that he had no intention of halting the Turkish offensive. “They say ‘declare a ceasefire.’ We could never declare a ceasefire,” he told reporters.

The U.N. Security Council planned a closed meeting Wednesday on the situation, requested by Germany and other EU members. “Everybody hopes that … we can do something to bring back the parties to the peace process,” said the current Security Council president, South Africa’s U.N. Ambassador Jerry Matjila.

NATO ambassadors also will meet on Wednesday in Brussels on Turkey’s offensive, said alliance Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

Erdogan defended Turkey’s offensive in a column in the Wall Street Journal, urging the international community to support Ankara’s effort to create what it calls a resettlement “safe zone” for refugees in northeastern Syria, or “begin admitting refugees.”

“Turkey reached its limit,” Erdogan wrote of the 3.6 million Syrians in his country. He said Turkey’s warnings it would be unable to stop refugee floods into the West without international support “fell on deaf ears.”

Turkey said it invaded northern Syria to create a zone of control the entire length of the border and drive out the Kurdish fighters, which it regards as terrorists because of their links to Kurdish insurgents in Turkey.

Instead, after the Kurds’ deal with Damascus, a new de facto carving up of the border appeared to be taking shape.

Turkish forces control the beginnings of a truncated zone roughly in the center of the border about 100 kilometers (60 miles) long between the towns of Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ain.

Syrian government troops were moving into or increasing their presence in areas on either side of that enclave, including Manbij to the west and the cities of Qamishli and Hassakeh in the far northeastern corner of Syria.

Though they gain protection from the Turks by the deal with Damascus, the Kurds risk losing the virtual self-rule they have enjoyed across the northeast — the heartland of their minority community — ever since Assad pulled his troops from the area seven years ago to fight rebels elsewhere.

The U.N. humanitarian aid coordinator said at least 160,000 civilians in northeastern Syria have been displaced amid the Turkish operations.

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newstechreviews · 5 years