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200 troops is too small to advise, assist, accompany SDF units, so US forces won’t be “touching” their Kurdish/Arab partners in this current iteration of the plan. The idea, of course, is for British and French troops to monitor and report on a proposed safe zone
This appears to have come from bottom up Congressional pressure, so it will to be left to DoD to come up with the manning requirements for a 100+100 (NE and Tanf) force in Syria. Presumably, and per what is being discussed with Ankara, the idea is for the USAF to remain
The USAF would then be tasked with denying access to outsiders, ie the Russians/regime/Iranians, in ways similar to what became policy after the Su-22 shootdown in Tabqa and the rather tense resolution of Russian objections to the river as the demarcation line
It is unclear if the British and French will sign up for this, given how badly they were burned in mid-December and then trashed ever since. Also, it is unclear how the 100+100 will factor in to the US-TR dialogue, which remains at a stalemate, over control over the safe zone
Akar is in town today, and US folks were in Turkey earlier this week, and will go again next week. So dialogue is continuing, but I honestly wonder if at levels lower than RTE if it is possible to reach compromise, given what the US is asking TR to accept.
Obviously we don’t know what RTE and Trump discussed last night, and history tells us it can get pretty, uhh, unscripted on those calls, so things could change rapidly. But there is a “flying by the seat of our pants” sense to this 100+100 approach that could just blow up.
And seriously fail to move the needle on the objection of all the parties involved — French, British, Turks, Kurds — over a concept, a safe zone, that remains dependent on an open-ended USAF presence to defend against outside incursions. Only time will tell, prediction is folly
But the main obstacles to a broader compromise remain, as does the inability to actually grapple with what it is that the US presence is meant to do … and how buying a bit more time (with a skeleton crew) contributes to that political end goal. <end>
