Washington’s ad hoc partnership with Syrian Kurds never included a commitment to help them fight Turkey. dailysign.al/2phDKI5 @DailySignal
@DailySignal Although critics of the Trump administration have rushed to denounce the decision as a “sellout” of the Syrian Kurds, that’s not true. Washington received no payoff from Ankara for stepping aside, and is not “abandoning the Kurds,” as many critics contend.
@DailySignal Washington’s ad hoc partnership with Syrian Kurds never included a commitment to help them fight Turkey, only to fight the Islamic State, the terrorist army also known as ISIS.
@DailySignal The United States still supports Syrian Kurds against ISIS, just as it supports Iraqi Kurds and the Iraqi government against ISIS. But Washington has remained neutral with regard to Turkey’s complaints about the threats Syrian Kurds pose to Turkey.
@DailySignal To be more specific, the Pentagon continues to support the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces against ISIS. It has declined, however, to work with the largest Kurdish armed faction within the those forces, the People’s Protection Units (YPG in its Kurdish acronym)
@DailySignal The YPG is an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK in its Kurdish acronym), a U.S.-designated terrorist group that has waged war against Turkey off and on since 1984 in a bloody separatist insurrection that has claimed more than 40,000 lives.
@DailySignal Although the Obama and Trump administrations accepted the YPG as a newfound tactical ally in the war against ISIS, neither administration embraced the YPG/PKK agenda regarding Turkey.
@DailySignal The Pentagon has pulled back about 50 special operations troops from the Turkish-Syrian border, and up to 230 U.S. troops—out of the roughly 1,000 deployed in Syria—have been redeployed to the south, but remain in eastern Syria.
@DailySignal Although there has been much handwringing over the administration’s failure to support the Kurds against Turkey, it’s difficult to see how battling a NATO ally would have preserved American credibility as an ally.
@DailySignal Pentagon officials denied breathless press reports that they had been blindsided by the president’s action, revealing that Sec Def Mark Esper and Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, actually had participated in the president’s phone call with Erdogan.
@DailySignal What some U.S. officials may have been surprised by was Trump’s tweet about a total U.S. withdrawal from Syria to end what he called “endless wars.” They know that the enemy gets a vote in ending any war, and ISIS by no means has given up fighting.
@DailySignal ISIS has returned to its underground roots, but remains a potent threat to regional security and a long-term threat to US security if it regroups. Islamist extremist forces that morphed into ISIS already made a disastrous comeback in Iraq in 2014 and could do so again in Syria.
