On Monday, witnesses in Syria saw United States forces withdrawing from two positions in northeastern Syria: observation posts in Tel Abyad and Ein Eissa.
“Turkey will soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into Northern Syria,” the White House said in a statement released just before 11 p.m. [Sunday] in Washington. “The United States Armed Forces will not support or be involved in the operation, and United States forces, having defeated the ISIS territorial ‘Caliphate,’ will no longer be in the immediate area.”It's not clear how significant a military campaign Turkey is launching here. Erdogan's "safe zones" are supposed to span 300 miles along the Turkey-Syria northeast border while penetrating 20 miles inside Syria, all territory presently claimed by the Kurdish state of Rojava. Anthropologist and left intellectual David Graeber sees a genocide in the making, one with NATO fingerprints.
Rojava and the Kurdish-led SDF are a contradiction that Trump inherited from the Obama administration. The existence of Rojava is considered by Turkey, a NATO ally, an unacceptable threat. But Rojava provides the U.S. a substantial footprint to wage ghost wars in the middle east. Trump, in a show of hollow bombast last year, called for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, only to capitulate ultimately. Now, though, it does seem as if the Kurds have been double-crossed:
Last December, Mr. Trump called for a complete United States withdrawal from Syria, but ultimately reversed himself after a backlash from Pentagon, diplomatic and intelligence officials, as well as important allies in Europe and the Middle East.
Soner Cagaptay, the director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and author of “Erdogan’s Empire: Turkey and the Politics of the Middle East,” said in a telephone interview that a Turkish incursion uncontested by the United States would allow Turkey to cut another swath into Kurdish-controlled territory in Syria. That would give Mr. Erdogan a ready place to send hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees and prove yet again his influence with Mr. Trump on Syria policy.
“It’s quite a significant development,” Mr. Cagaptay said.
Many Syria experts criticized the White House decision and cautioned that American abandonment of its Kurdish allies could widen the eight-year Syrian conflict and prompt the Kurds to ally with the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad to combat the much larger and more technologically advanced Turkish army.
“Allowing Turkey to move into northern Syria is one of the most destabilizing moves we can do in the Middle East,” Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat and former Marine who served in the Iraq war, said on Twitter on Sunday night. “The Kurds will never trust America again. They will look for new alliances or independence to protect themselves.”
The announcement by the White House came as a shock to the S.D.F., Kurdish officials said on Monday. In a statement, the S.D.F. said that it had fulfilled its obligations in the efforts to reduce tensions with the Turks but that the United States had not.
The statement warned that a Turkish incursion could endanger the progress made to establish security in the wake of the battle against the Islamic State. It also called on Kurdish forces to “defend our homeland from the Turkish aggression.”
Mr. Erdogan has demanded a “safe zone” for his nation to run 20 miles deep and 300 miles along the Turkish-Syrian border east of the Euphrates. That area, he has said, would be reserved for the return of at least a million Syrian refugees now inside Turkey. Mr. Erdogan has threatened to send a wave of Syrian migrants to Europe instead if the international community does not support the initiative to send them back to Syria.
Since early August, the American and Turkish militaries have been working together on a series of confidence-building measures — including joint reconnaissance flights and ground patrols — in a 75-mile-long strip of that 300-mile border area.
American-backed Kurdish forces have pulled back several miles and destroyed fortifications in that area.
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