THREAD. It’s too early to have a full understanding of what’s been agreed and what will now happen. My initial reactions:
1. Turkey is a more important strategic ally, regionally, than the Kurds. Emotion can easily obscure that hard reality.
1. Turkey is a more important strategic ally, regionally, than the Kurds. Emotion can easily obscure that hard reality.
2. From an official Turkish pov, the U.S. attempt to distinguish between the PKK, with which Turkey has been fighting a ‘hot’ war for 20 years, and the YPG, was always infuriating sophistry. Most U.S. policy makers would say the same in private.
PKK, and its Syrian affiliate, YPG, took to arms in response to sustained discrimination and deprivation of rights, over decades. Many opportunities to redress those underlying grievances have been missed over past decades. IMO, the Turkish govt. is more at fault than the Kurds.
Turkey has every right to ensure its territorial integrity. It does not have the right to deny Kurdish identity and political agency within the Turkish polity. Attitudes on that have evolved within Turkey.
Some form of regional power sharing and quasi-autonomy in Turkey’s SE shd now be negotiable. Whether any discussions of this have happened in context of the Syria military arrangements is one of my questions at this stage.
In the absence of a power sharing agreement within Turkey itself, the effect of the arrangements just announced will be to drive the YPG to the PKK’s side in the Kandil mountains and to add fuel to the PKK-Turkey conflict.
The U.S. should, at minimum, be committed now to serving as an honest broker betw Turkey and PKK/YPG. Otherwise, what we’re preparing to do to YPG in Syria will be unconscionable.
Finally, release of ISIS (Daesh) prisoners to Turkey is highly problematic, if we sincerely want to remove those fighters from the battlefield and degrade Isis’ fighting capability for the long term.
Just as our maintenance of a distinction between PKK and YPG has been a ‘polite lie,’ so has been Turkey’s pretense of being at war w/ ISIS. Turkey allowed Daesh fighters to flow to Syria, gave medical help to wounded Daesh fighters in Turkish hospitals, allowed all kinds of gear
and explosive materiel to be sold to ISIS in Turkey, allowed thousands of Turks to be recruited in openly maintained recruitment centers in Turkey, quickly released almost all arrested ISIS operatives in Turkey, and even engaged in a profitable oil trade with Daesh.
This aspect of the agreements announced today gives me the most pause.
Turkey’s geographic ambitions in northern Syria remain unclear. There are romantic nationalists close to Erdogan who speak nostalgically of the time when places like Mosul were Ottoman.
For the time being, however, I think Turkey’s plan is to create a buffer zone in Northern Syria into which it can dump many of the 3mm Syrian refugees now in Turkey. That will rid the govt. of serious budgetary pressures, and contribute to an ethnic cleansing of Kurds.
I see little sign that the U.S. has done more than accede to longstanding Turkish demands. We need to know more about what may lie beneath the arrangements just announced. On its face, it looks like a ‘bug out,’ plain and simple. END.
