Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu (L) waves to the media before a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (R) at the State Department in Washington, U.S., November 20, 2018. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s comment
on October 10 that, “the Turks have a legitimate security concern” on their
border with Syria cuts sharply across the grain of conventional wisdom in
Washington and other transatlantic capitals.
Indeed, Ankara’s military incursion into northern Syria is
receiving nearly universal condemnation across the transatlantic community. US President
Donald J. Trump’s acquiescence to Ankara’s “Operation Peace Spring” during an
October 6 phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is being
portrayed as abandonment of all Kurds in Syria. Meanwhile, many observers in
Washington lament the betrayal of the US’s “Kurdish ally,” the Peoples
Protection Units (or YPG), who, as
former US National Security Advisor Susan Rice
noted on “The Late Show” with Steven Colbert on October 8 “…for the past four
years, have been fighting on our behalf with our equipment to defeat ISIS.”
These characterizations miss the point for several reasons.
First, Turkey’s military operation in northern Syria does
not target “the Kurds” writ large, but rather, a single Kurdish militia, the YPG.
In April 2016, while testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee, then US
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter conceded
under pressure from Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that the YPG is an affiliate
of the PKK, a group recognized as a terrorist organization by the United States
and the European Union.
Secretary Pompeo was thus speaking consistently with
longstanding US policy when he mentioned Turkey’s legitimate security concerns
in northern Syria.
In fact, Washington and Ankara have been working for over eighteen
months to devise a joint approach to neutralizing the YPG’s threat to Turkey.
The centerpiece has been a so-called “safe zone” in northern Syria, where YPG
militants would be forced to withdraw from the Syria-Turkey border and joint
ground and air patrols by US and Turkish troops would restore and then maintain
stability.
Based on my discussions with some of my former senior State
Department colleagues late last week, Ankara and Washington were very close to
finalizing a broad agreement on the design and implementation of the safe zone,
as well as other issues. A key remaining point of disagreement was how far the
safe zone would extend into Syria, with Turkey demanding twenty miles and the United
States insisting on five to ten miles. The United States also balked at
Turkey’s demand for operational control of the safe zone.
In the end, Erdoğan appears to have lost patience with US
resistance to these points and informed Trump of Turkey’s intention to launch a
military incursion into northeast Syria.
Rather than opposing this military operation, Trump
instead decided to remove the handful of US troops based at observation posts
in northern Syria out of harm’s way, implicitly recognizing the security
concerns cited by his Turkish counterpart as justified.
Second, neither the YPG nor its parent political organization, the PYD, can legitimately claim to represent Syria’s entire Kurdish population. The PYD/YPG has established a Marxist-Leninist regime in northeast Syria, where the PYD/YPG’s forced conscription of men and boys, corruption, authoritarianism, and devotion to the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, is prompting growing consternation among local Kurds.
Third, the YPG has been fighting for a range of its own objectives in addition to working with the United States to defeat ISIS. The PYD/YPG’s underlying goal is to consolidate its military and political control over northeastern Syria into an independent statelet based on its extreme leftist ideology. That is not to denigrate the organization’s battlefield prowess nor its crucial role in defeating the ISIS caliphate. But, as US Special Envoy to the Coalition Combatting ISIS, Ambassador James Jeffrey, noted last December, Washington’s relationship with the YPG is a transactional one, namely, the defeat of ISIS.
Finally, Ankara’s stated twofold objective of Operation
Peace Spring is to eliminate what it views as a terrorist threat along its
border and to establish a stable and relatively safe region within Syria in
which to resettle up to a third of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees currently
residing in Turkey. Erdoğan announced in a speech on October 10, these former
refugees will return to their original homes, thereby restoring the approximate
pre-war ethnic balances in northeast Syrian towns.
The United States has an interest in Turkey achieving these
goals.
If, on the other hand, Ankara decides to exceed these goals, it will be hard-pressed to finance and sustain the logistical lines required for a major military campaign. Furthermore, a large-scale military operation in Syria would risk bogging Turkey down in a protracted battle with both a resurgent ISIS and the Assad regime. These factors provide strong incentives for Ankara to limit Operation Peace Spring to a counter-terrorist and stabilization operation across a relatively small swath of Syria’s territory along its border with Turkey.
Matthew Bryza is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and Global Energy Center. He served as a US diplomat for over two decades, including as US ambassador to Azerbaijan and deputy assistant secretary of European and Eurasian affairs.
Related reading:
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An October 6 phone call between US President Donald J. Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan resulted in a partial withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria and Trump’s endorsement of Turkish plans to send their own military forces into the region.
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The United States must continue to build its systems of alliances and partnerships across the Middle East, but Washington’s change of policy toward the Syrian Kurds “will make it more difficult to build partnership in the future,” General Joseph Votel said.
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Atlantic Council experts respond to the withdrawal of US troops from northeastern Syria, Turkish military action, and the road ahead on a members and press call.
Transcript
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Atlantic Council
Ankara is justified in trying to secure its border, Matthew Bryza argues, but must not get bogged down in a major military campaign.
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