By Robin Wright
At 3 a.m. on Monday, Middle East time, the commander of American special forces in Syria—whose name is not public for security reasons—held a video teleconference with General Mazloum Kobani Abdi, the Kurdish militia commander who led the war against isis on behalf of the U.S. coalition. The commander had bad news. President Trump had decided—after a telephone call with the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—that the United States would stand aside if Turkey, as announced, soon invades northeast Syria. U.S. troops positioned in two key posts in Syria on the border with Turkey would immediately be withdrawn. Mazloum and his Syrian Democratic Forces, who lost some eleven thousand fighters in the grinding five-year war against isis, were on their own.
Mazloum recounted the conversation to me a few hours later. “The implications are catastrophic,” he said. “We told the Americans we would prepare for war. The Kurds will defend themselves. There is no place for us to go. So that means a war between the Kurds and Turkey. The Arabs also won’t accept a Turkish invasion, either.” The S.D.F., created under U.S. tutelage, includes both Kurds and Arabs.
There is also the problem, Mazloum noted, of the twelve thousand isis fighters captured by the S.D.F. “This decision increases the hopes within isis of rebooting the caliphate,” he said. “The prisoners in detention centers have good morale now. They hope that they are able to escape.” The S.D.F., which is not a state and gets little foreign assistance, has struggled to cope with the dregs of isis since the caliphate fell, in March. Eighty thousand isis family members, held separately in the al-Hawl detention center, have become more aggressive since Turkey signalled its intent to invade northern Syria, the general claimed. Al-Hawl has become a mini-caliphate, run largely by women shrouded in black niqab robes and veils.
Trump’s bombshell policy reversal was dropped in a six-sentence e-mail, shortly before 11 p.m. on Sunday. Turkey, the White House press secretary reported, would “soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into Northern Syria.” In brashly undiplomatic language, the Administration chastised European allies for not taking back the isis fighters from their countries—and warned that the United States would neither hold them nor pay for their continued detention. (Not that it ever did.) Turkey will henceforth be responsible for all isis fighters in the area who have been captured over the past two years, the e-mail warned.
The crisis has long been brewing. For years, Turkey has wanted to create a buffer zone inside Syria, both for its security and to resettle the more than two million refugees who crossed the border to flee Syria’s eight-year civil war. Even more, Erdoğan has wanted to wipe out the Kurdish militia in Syria which he views as a threat because of its ties to a Kurdish movement in Turkey. Kurds are the largest minority in Turkey and a large voting bloc; a militant faction has sought autonomy or an independent Kurdistan that would unite Kurds across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The United States held off Erdoğan as long as it needed Syria’s feisty Kurds to fight isis on the ground, with backup from American air power. All the other U.S.-backed rebel groups failed, disintegrated, or turned into warlords.
The abrupt policy shift triggered alarm in Washington, even among Trump’s closest Republican allies. Nikki Haley, the former Ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted, “We must always have the backs of our allies, if we expect them to have our back. The Kurds were instrumental in our successful fight against isis in Syria. Leaving them to die is a big mistake.” She used the hashtag “#TurkeyIsNotOurFriend.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, who is one of Trump’s confidants and golf buddies, called in to Fox News to complain that the President’s decision was “impulsive” and “short-sighted.” Later, on Twitter, Graham announced plans to introduce bipartisan legislation, with Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat of Maryland, to impose sanctions on Turkey if it invades Syria. The bill would also call for Turkey’s suspension from nato, the world’s largest military alliance. (Turkey provides the largest number of troops to nato, after the United States.) “This decision to abandon our Kurdish allies and turn Syria over to Russia, Iran, & Turkey will put every radical Islamist on steroids,” Graham tweeted. “Shot in the arm to the bad guys. Devastating for the good guys.”
Splitting sharply with Trump, the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, warned that a “supermajority” of senators had broken with the President on Syria policy. He called on Trump to “exercise American leadership” and reverse the plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria’s border. U.S. special forces only have about a thousand troops in Syria. Fewer than a hundred were moved from two observation posts along the border with Turkey, a senior Administration official said in a late-afternoon briefing. Mazloum said that the two border posts were in Sari Kani and Tal Abyad. But even a limited American presence has served as a psychological barrier in holding off Turkey to the north and, to the west, Iranian and Russian troops who are critical to President Bashar al-Assad’s ability to regain control of the other two-thirds of Syria.
John Allen, a retired marine general and former special Presidential envoy in charge of the U.S.-led coalition, called the White House move a “gut-wrenching” decision that hands over U.S. Syria policy to Erdoğan. He called it a betrayal of “the ally that worked hand in glove against the most abhorrent element on the planet—isis.” Now, Allen added, “it’s not about beating the enemy but about winning the peace.” Trump has slowly unravelled the prospects of stabilizing a strategic third of Syria by cutting off two hundred million dollars in aid and then vowing, last December, to withdraw all troops “with a vague promise that the Turks would be moderate” in the way they dealt with the Kurds. “There’s no question that won’t be the case now,” Allen said. “Basically, the Americans are getting out of the way.”
Syria has been a deeply contentious issue within the Administration since Trump took office. The former Defense Secretary James Mattis quit in anger after Trump announced his decision, last December, to end the U.S. deployment in Syria—again after a telephone call with Erdoğan—even as Operation Inherent Resolve, against isis, was still in progress. Brett McGurk, who succeeded Allen as special envoy, quit too. On Monday, he excoriated the President on Twitter. “Donald Trump is not a Commander-in-Chief,” McGurk tweeted. “He makes impulsive decisions with no knowledge or deliberation. He sends military personnel into harm’s way with no backing. He blusters and then leaves our allies exposed when adversaries call his bluff or he confronts a hard phone call.”
The President responded to the avalanche of criticism with a Twitter rampage, which only added to the confusion over his intentions. After the White House announcement on Sunday, which deferred to Turkey—albeit without endorsing an invasion—Trump threatened on Monday to destroy Turkey’s economy if Erdoğan moved militarily. “If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!),” the President tweeted. It was a strangely hostile comment given that Erdoğan said over the weekend that he had accepted Trump’s invitation to visit Washington next month.
Throughout the day, Trump’s frustration and fury were increasingly clear. In his tweets, he indicated that he is close to ending any U.S. engagement in war-torn Syria. “It is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home,” he tweeted. “we will fight where it is to our benefit, and only fight to win. Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to. . . figure the situation out, and what they want to do with the captured isis fighters in their ‘neighborhood.’ ” After an evening meeting with senior military brass, Trump told reporters, “At some point, we have to bring our people back home. And that’s what we’re doing.”
The President did get some support. On Twitter, Senator Rand Paul, a Republican of Kentucky, backed Trump’s vow to end engagement in Middle East wars. Robert Ford, the last U.S. Ambassador to Syria, acknowledged the heroic role that the Syrian Democratic Forces had played but noted that the S.D.F. and the U.S. had been allies because of a common incentive, not charity. “No one rolls out initiatives more clumsily than the Trump Administration,” Ford told me. But he said that the time had come to hand over the region’s future to its inhabitants. “The Americans have worked hard to shape the Middle East for the last thirty to forty years, and have had a mixed record,” he noted. There are limits to American influence and leverage—and nowhere is it more obvious than in Syria, he said. “Ultimately, a sustainable resolution will not come because of the U.S., but because of agreement among countries like Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and, yes, even the war-criminal Assad government.”
Mazloum was not so forgiving. Washington, he told me, didn’t abide by its commitments—and may pay an enduring price, too. “This decision is going to be harmful for U.S. allies, and U.S. interests, and U.S. institutions,” he told me. “It threatens the credibility of the United States.”
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