Is Trump Abandoning The Kurds?
By de Andréa
Opinion Editorialist for
‘THE BOTTOM LINE’
Posted October 16, 2019
If you would like to write me direct with a question or a
comment on this or other articles, you can email me at writedeandrea@hotmail.com
By now you've probably
heard the Communist Indoctrination Media say how terrible President Trump is
for abandoning "our allies," meaning the stateless Kurds.
Well I have reserved my opinion
until I have researched all the facts unlike the halfcocked, rush to judgment, useless,
Hate America Media.
The other side of the story:
In fact, Trump pulled 50 US troops out of harm's way and redeployed 250 others. All in a war created by President Obama, WHO BY THE WAY NEVER SOUGHT NOR RECEIVED CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL AS REQUIRED BY THE U.S. CONSTITUTION. But then Communist never regard any laws. And Muslims only obey Sharia.
Turkey my friend, is the bad actor here. Read this to understand more about this argument with a real’, though sometimes questionable, NATO ally that's gone rogue. And remember the Turks and the Kurds have been fighting for centuries. Oh, and the Kurds in general aren't technically our allies, so we actually have no dog in this fight.
In fact, Trump pulled 50 US troops out of harm's way and redeployed 250 others. All in a war created by President Obama, WHO BY THE WAY NEVER SOUGHT NOR RECEIVED CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL AS REQUIRED BY THE U.S. CONSTITUTION. But then Communist never regard any laws. And Muslims only obey Sharia.
Turkey my friend, is the bad actor here. Read this to understand more about this argument with a real’, though sometimes questionable, NATO ally that's gone rogue. And remember the Turks and the Kurds have been fighting for centuries. Oh, and the Kurds in general aren't technically our allies, so we actually have no dog in this fight.
No, we’re not selling out the Syrian Kurds.
But we should try to mediate their conflict with turkey.
Caught up in a conflict
between long-standing NATO ally Turkey and a recently engaged Kurdish tactical
partner in Syria, the Trump administration has accommodated the legitimate
security interests of Turkey by staging a partial pullback of U.S. special
operations forces in northeastern Syria.
It did so to get out of the way of a Turkish
intervention launched Wednesday.
Although critics of
the Trump administration have rushed to demonize and denounce the decision as a
“sellout” of the Syrian Kurds, that’s
not exactly true. Washington received no payoff from Ankara for stepping
aside, and is not “abandoning the Kurds,” as many Communist indoctrinated low
information critics in the Congress and Media contend.
Washington’s ad hoc partnership with Syrian Kurds never included a commitment to
help them in their long standing fight against the country of Turkey,
our ally. Only to fight the Islamic State, the terrorist army also known as
ISIS.
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 for
the last several hundred years.
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 those forces, the People’s Protection Units (YPG in its Kurdish
acronym) to resist the Turkish intervention.
In geopolitical terms,
that’s a logical and necessary decision.
The Kurds are not just
the Kurds.
Turkey has been a
long-term strategic ally that exercises major influence in the Middle
East. The YPG who helped the U.S. fight ISIS, is an offshoot of the
Kurdistan Workers’ Party however the (PKK in its Kurdish acronym), is a U.S.-and
a Turkish 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.
Although the Obama and
Trump administrations accepted the YPG as a newfound tactical ally in the war
against ISIS, neither administration embraced the PKK agenda regarding
Turkey.
Both administrations
stressed U.S. cooperation with the Syrian Democratic Forces, an ad hoc
anti-ISIS coalition in which the YPG influence was diluted by the participation
of Arab factions opposed to ISIS.
Trump
Warns Turkey’s President
President Donald Trump
on Oct. 7 warned Turkey against going “off limits” in Syria, and has
threatened to apply economic sanctions, which is very unusual against an ally,
if Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ignores the warning.
The President doubled
down on the sanctions threat Friday by authorizing the Treasury Department to prepare “significant
sanctions” against Turkey, if necessary.
That’s a far cry from
giving Ankara a “green light,”
as some critics contend.
Washington also stands
ready to act as an intermediary between its Syrian Kurdish partners and Ankara.
After Turkey has secured its border, a possibility exists that the United
States can broker an understanding that could mitigate friction between the
two.
Nor is the Trump
administration removing all U.S. troops from Syria at this time. 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.
Disagreements Over
Buffer Zone
The United States had
been negotiating with Turkey on creating a buffer zone in northeastern Syria,
in part, to avert a unilateral Turkish intervention, which Ankara long had
threatened.
But Erdogan,
apparently frustrated over the failure of the U.S. Congress to accede to his
demand for a zone 20 miles deep and 300 miles long along Turkey’s border,
pulled the plug on the negotiations.
Things came to a head
Oct. 6, when Erdogan told Trump in a phone call that Turkey was determined to
cross the border. After Erdogan stated that he would unilaterally
establish the zone by force, Trump agreed and pulled U.S. troops out of harm’s
way.
If that order had not
been given, there was a significant risk that U.S. troops would have been
caught up in the fighting or even drawn into a military clash with
Turkey.
Although there has
been much handwringing and armchair criticism 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.
Pentagon officials on
Tuesday denied breathless press reports that defense officials had been
blindsided by the president’s action, revealing that Secretary of Defense 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.
What some U.S.
officials may have been surprised by was Trump’s tweet about a 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.
Holding ISIS at Bay
U.S. vigilance will be
necessary to block the terror group’s comeback. Trump must listen to his
national security team and avoid declaring a premature end to war against ISIS
and creating a vacuum as Obama did.
ISIS has returned to
its underground roots, but remains a potent threat to regional security and a long-term threat to U.S.
security if it can regroup. The Islamist extremist forces of Al-Qaeda
القاعدة that morphed into ISIS Islamic State of Iraq and
the Levant الدولة الإسلامية في العراق والشام
(which includes all of the Middle East and some say the world), already made a disastrous comeback in Iraq in 2014 and
could do so again in Syria.
The underlying political conditions of Obama facilitated
the rise of ISIS remain in Syria—anarchy, dysfunctional government, and the
systematic repression meted out by the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad.
Washington must be careful not to contribute to a power vacuum that would make
an ISIS resurgence easier.
The inspector general
for the coalition to defeat ISIS warned in
a report in August that ISIS has established “resurgent cells” in Syria and
launched bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, and suicide attacks in areas
liberated by the Syrian Democratic Forces.
Turkey is not in a
position to guarantee that ISIS will not return. It would have to fight its way
through the Kurds to get at ISIS.
Erdogan, who has
turned a blind eye to the infiltration of foreign Islamist extremists into
Syria through Turkey, always has viewed the Kurds as a bigger threat to Turkey
than ISIS.
For better or worse,
the Syrian Democratic Forces are a necessary partner in the struggle against
ISIS. Not only does it have skilled and motivated fighters on the ground,
but it controls more than 20 prisons and camps that hold about 12,000 ISIS
fighters and 58,000 of their family members and supporters.
Press question to President Donald
Trump October 12, 2019
Question: I just have a question
about turkey. Are you — how serious are you about being a mediator
between the Kurds and the Turks?
Answer: The president, so, turkey and the Kurds have been fighting for hundreds of years. We are out of there. But we have a tremendous financial strength, which I’ve helped a lot with, because our country has become much stronger since I’ve been president, by many trillions of dollars. And if turkey does something that they shouldn’t be doing, we will put on sanctions the likes of which very few countries have ever seen before.
Answer: The president, so, turkey and the Kurds have been fighting for hundreds of years. We are out of there. But we have a tremendous financial strength, which I’ve helped a lot with, because our country has become much stronger since I’ve been president, by many trillions of dollars. And if turkey does something that they shouldn’t be doing, we will put on sanctions the likes of which very few countries have ever seen before.
As
for Pelosi’s claim in a meeting with Trump today that “Trump had a meltdown,” I
hope by now you know that you can’t believe ANYTHING that the Communist say
especially comrade leader Pelosi. Others
in the meeting said Pelosi sabotaged the meeting to make it unproductive and then
stormed out.
And
bear in mind that there very few in the government that have any real true
understanding of the Muslim mind or the history of the Middle East for that
matter. Personally in my opinion Donald Trump came into office with a substantial
understanding of Islam as well as world trade policies. I know that he has
studied both for many years.
THE BOTOM LINE: U.S., Turkish and Kurdish diplomacy is needed.
The United States will
have to withdraw from Syria eventually. The real issue here is whether Washington has made arrangements to adequately
protect U.S. interests; namely, preventing an ISIS resurgence, blocking
expansion of Iranian influence, and reaching a political settlement in Syria
that eases the humanitarian situation and allows the return of refugees.
The Turkish
intervention complicates efforts to attain those goals, but does not make them
impossible to achieve.
It’s not too late to
salvage an acceptable situation in eastern Syria if the administration can tamp
down the fighting between Turkey and the People’s Protection Units and maintain
counterterrorism ties with the Syrian Democratic Forces.
Washington should push
for a cease-fire in northeastern Syria and reach a clear understanding with
Ankara about the size and purpose of Turkey’s new buffer zone.
The long-term goal
should be to broker a sustainable understanding between Ankara and the Syrian
Kurds, similar to the understanding that it brokered between Ankara and Iraqi
Kurds.
Without such an
understanding, Turkey’s intervention will push the Syrian Kurds into the arms
of Russia and the Assad regime. Such an outcome would undermine U.S. national
security interests in the region, while promoting those of Iran and ISIS.
Think about it…
Thanks for listening my friend. Now
go do the right thing, pray and fight for truth and freedom.
-
de Andréa
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