ثلاثة تحاليل وأراء سياسية من الهآرتس تتناول الغزو التركي لشمال سوريا/اليزابت تسوركوف: بذور تخلي ترامب عن اكراد سوريا كان زرعها اوباما/سيمون ولدمان: ترامب متواطئ مع اردوغان في عملية التطهير العرقي/زيفي برئيل: الحرب التركية على الأكراد هل هي فتح سريع أم أنها مستنقع سيغرقون فيه؟/Elizabeth Tsurkov/The Seeds of Trump’s Abandonment of Syrian Kurds Were Sown by Obama/Simon A. Waldman/Trump Is Complicit in Erdogan’s Ethnic Cleansing/Zvi Bar’el: Turkey’s War on the Kurds is a Quick Conquest or Quagmire?
Analysis/The Seeds of Trump’s Abandonment of Syrian Kurds Were Sown by Obama اليزابت تسوركوف/هآرتس: بذور تخلي ترامب عن اكراد سوريا كان زرعها اوباما Elizabeth Tsurkov/Haaretz/October 10/2019
Opinion/Trump Is Complicit in Erdogan’s Ethnic Cleansing سيمون ولدمان/هآرتس: ترامب متواطئ مع اردوغان في عملية التطهير العرقي Simon A. Waldman/Haaretz/October 10/2019
Analysis/Turkey’s War on the Kurds: Quick Conquest or Quagmire? زيفي برئيل/هآرتس: الحرب التركية على الأكراد هل هي فتح سريع أم أنها مستنقع سيغرقون فيه؟ Zvi Bar’el/Haaretz/October 10/2019
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Analysis/The Seeds of Trump’s Abandonment of Syrian Kurds Were Sown by Obama اليزابت تسوركوف/هآرتس: بزور تخلي ترامب عن اكراد سوريا كان زرعها اوباما Elizabeth Tsurkov/Haaretz/October 10/2019
Like the Democratic incumbent before him, President Donald Trump seems to believe that conflict is the natural state of things in the Middle East.
The looming Turkish offensive on northeastern Syria is the culmination of incoherent U.S. policy concerning the conflict in Syria, which has prioritized finding short-term fixes over attempting to address any of the dynamics driving the violence.
The scope of the Turkish invasion, made possible through the withdrawal of U.S. troops from parts of the border region, remains unclear. The offensive will likely precipitate mass displacement, and if the military action extends beyond the takeover of a few border towns, it could also result in demographic re-engineering, empower Iran and the Syrian regime, and deprive the United States of whatever leverage it had left in trying to shape the outcome of the civil war in Syria.
The Turkish operation is driven by fears of the growing strength of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the umbrella of militias that gained control of much of northeastern and eastern Syria owing to U.S. backing. The SDF is led by the Syrian Kurdish militia, the YPG (the People’s Protection Units, part of the Öcalanist-armed movement that has waged an insurgency against Turkey since the 1980s). According to the SDF, the force lost over11,000 fighters, men and women, in the campaign to liberate almost a third of Syria from ISIS control.
The outlines of the Turkish operation are unclear at this stage and hence the overall consequences are murky. Multiple fighters in the ranks of the Syrian factions that are set to participate in the offensive alongside Turkish forces told Haaretz that the scope of the operation will likely be limited to the capture of the town of Tel Abyad and possibly Ras al-Ayn.
Such an offensive is expected to involve the use of heavy artillery and lead to mass flight of the local population. The Syrian factions set to participate in the offensive, operating under the name the Syrian National Army, a Turkish creation, carried out large-scale looting in towns they have previously captured in northern Aleppo. This damage, however, will be nothing in comparison to what a deeper Turkish invasion would precipitate.
Turkey has threatened to carry out a much wider operation, effectively taking over the most densely populated towns and cities along the Syrian-Turkish border. The Turkish drums of war began beating louder after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan used his annual UN General Assembly speech to promote a plan for the return of 1 to 2 million Syrian refugees to northeastern Syria.
Such a return, he argued, could be made after Turkey creates a so-called “safe zone” in the region, 30 kilometers (19 miles) wide and 480 kilometers (about 300 mile) long. Turkey would take over the area and construct massive housing complexes that could house the refugees sent back from Turkey.
An offensive 30 kilometers deep into northeastern Syria would entail grave human rights abuses. Civilians will flee en masse to avoid being killed by artillery and street battles. My interviews with locals indicate that the civilians who do not pick up weapons to defend their homes will attempt to flee to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which is already hosting 1.1 million registered displaced Iraqis and Syrian refugees. Based on past experiences in Efrin, a Kurdish enclave captured by Turkey and its Syrian factions in 2018, Turkey will likely allow or encourage Arabs to settle in homes once owned by Kurds, altering the demographic makeup of the region.
Such a deeper offensive will also serve as a boon for the Bashar Assad regime, Iran and ISIS. The SDF would be forced to withdraw forces from the southern provinces it currently holds, particularly oil-rich Deir Ezzor, allowing the regime and Iran to advance into the area. Alternatively, the prospect of a deeper Turkish invasion may cause the YPG to hastily reach a “reconciliation” agreement with the Assad regime, allowing the Syrian Army and Iranian-backed militias to take over this resource-rich region.
In either scenario, ISIS — which is already launching daily hit-and-run attacks in SDF-held Deir Ezzor and imposing protection taxes on trade — will be able to reassert itself. Areas under regime control in Deir Ezzor and the Homs desert witness even greater violence, with sophisticated and highly deadly ISIS attacks.
A regime and Iranian takeover of northeastern Syria and its oil will effectively end whatever leverage the United States still possessed in trying to shape the outcome of the war in Syria. The Americans will have nothing to offer to the regime in return for concessions on issues the U.S. cares about such as an Iranian presence in Syria or the fate of the tens of thousands of political prisoners languishing in regime prisons. Trump, who likes to consider himself a great negotiator, unilaterally disarmed the U.S. of its pressure tools.
How did America reach a situation in which it is about to squander most of the gains it made in the war on ISIS? The U.S. administration, both under Barack Obama and Trump, did not attempt to develop a long-term strategy concerning Syria. After muddling through the first years of the uprising and war, the Obama administration settled on a policy solely focused on defeating ISIS in the battlefield. The root causes that allowed ISIS to flourish in Syria and Iraq, such as the oppressive, corrupt and discriminatory regimes ruling these countries, were apparently deemed too complicated to be addressed or mitigated.
The seeds for Trump’s decision to allow for the Turkish invasion were sown under the Obama administration, when the Democratic president and his team decided to limit their involvement in the civil war. Only after ISIS invaded Iraq in mid-2014, carried out a genocide against the Yazidi community and beheaded foreign hostages did the Americans decide to directly intervene in the war in Syria by backing the YPG, starting in September 2014. The United States abandoned the plan to rely on Arab rebels to take on ISIS — in part due to the rebels’ refusal to commit themselves to fighting ISIS alone — while ignoring the Assad regime, responsible for most civilian casualties and destruction in Syria.
The tactical assistance to the YPG shifted to a partnership, with the Americans deploying special forces in areas under the control of the group. The United States encouraged the YPG to include non-Kurdish fighters in their ranks — leading to the creation of the SDF, which now counts about 70,000 fighters in its ranks.
The growing strength of the SDF increasingly became a source of great concern for Turkey, particularly after domestic political changes and the breakdown of peace talks in 2015 between Ankara and the PKK (the Turkish, and leading, branch of the Öcalanist movement). The Americans attempted to partially assuage Turkish fears, but did not invest much effort in trying to restart talks between the PKK and Turkey, which could have reduced Turkish-YPG tensions.
Trump initially pursued Obama’s policies, despite coming into office promising to end costly entanglements abroad. The only change was to double down on sanctions against the Syrian regime. Rhetorically, the Trump administration adopted a bellicose position toward Iran, unlike Obama, but U.S. policies on the ground in this regard remained largely identical to Obama’s, leaving it to Israel to deal with the Iranian buildup in Syria.
In December 2018, however, even as ISIS continued to hold territory in Syria, Trump tweeted that the United States would be pulling its forces out of Syria. This decision was then largely reversed by the State Department and the Department of Defense, which are overwhelmingly opposed to such a pullout due to its disastrous repercussions. The bureaucrats were able to reign in Trump’s worst impulses on Syria and tried to mitigate the effects of the reduction in U.S. forces in the region and the elimination of all stabilization funding to the war-affected region. But as Trump’s recent declaration shows, earnest bureaucrats cannot forever keep a petulant president from re-inserting himself into the decision-making process.
But even the logic pursued by the Obama administration of narrowly focusing on the counter-ISIS mission would have led to a U.S. withdrawal once ISIS’s territorial “caliphate” was destroyed, leaving the SDF in the lurch. Even if the United States had mediated negotiations over autonomy between the Assad regime and the SDF, as advocated by former Obama administration officials, the regime’s track record shows that under Russian pressure, it has only allowed limited autonomy inside a handful of formerly rebel-held towns in Daraa.
Rebels who have left these towns have been arrested by the regime and assassinated. This experience is unlikely to be repeated in an area covering a third of Syria. The regime could have just waited out the United States and retaken SDF-held areas, reinstituting its full control over internal security — a top priority of the regime.
TRUMP: “When I took over our military, we did not have ammunition. I was told by a top general, maybe the top of them all, ‘Sir, I’m sorry sir, we don’t have ammunition.’ I said, I will never let that happen to another president.”
Trump, similarly to Obama, seems to believe that conflict is a natural state in the Middle East, unsolvable. Kurds and Turks are “natural enemies,” he said Monday, and conflict between them can only be “held off.” Obama infamously stated that “the Middle East is going through a transformation … rooted in conflicts that date back millennia.” Such a cynical and essentialist perspective provides Western elites with an easy excuse for inaction or empowerment of strongmen. The resulting policy means that none of the root causes of instability and violence in the Middle East are addressed, namely the kleptocratic and oppressive regimes of the region, forcing the United States to launch occasional interventions when violence begins spilling over.
The United States has been humbled by its experience in Iraq. But the trauma from a misguided war of choice should not lead it to resort to myopic, short-term policies, which at times produce great violence and suffering, as the looming Turkish invasion shows.
*Elizabeth Tsurkov is a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a Research Fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking. Follow her on Twitter: @Elizrael
Opinion/Trump Is Complicit in Erdogan’s Ethnic Cleansing سيمون ولدمان/هآرتس: ترامب متواطئ مع اردوغان في عملية التطهير العرقي Simon A. Waldman/Haaretz/October 10/2019
What Turkey’s president is openly planning is the forced exchange of one ethnic population for another. That’s Ethnic Cleansing 101. And Trump rolled over to let it happen
The Trump administration’s decision to immediately withdraw U.S. forces from the Syrian border and allow Turkish troops to invade is not merely the abandonment of the West’s Kurdish allies, but a warrant for ethnic cleansing.
Trump’s mind was apparently made up after a telephone call with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump’s press secretary then released a statement which read, “Turkey will soon be moving forward with its planned operation into northern Syria. The United States Armed Forces will not support or be involved in the operation, and the United States forces, having defeated the ISIS territorial “caliphate,” will no longer be in the immediate area.”
And with those words, the White House washed its hands of the fate of Syria’s Kurds and the future of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Kurdish forces who lost thousands of soldiers while fighting to defeat ISIS, the scourge of the civilized world.
The rise of ISIS was made possible by Ankara’s inaction when, from 2013-14, hordes of international militants, fanatics and psychopaths, not to mention truckloads of weapons, crossed Turkey’s border into Syria, on the so-called Jihadi Highway.
Now, the U.S. is handing over ISIS duties to Turkey. However, it is doubtful whether the West’s fair weather friend has either the willingness or the competence to take effective control over rowdy jails overcrowded with battle-hardened ISIS prisoners, desperate to escape and re-establish their medieval empire.
Before Trump’s decision, the U.S. and Turkey had agreed to establish a security corridor, a “safe zone” inside the Syrian-Turkish border. The U.S. wanted the zone to be just a few kilometers inside of Syrian territory along a 480km border stretch with Turkey. However, Ankara insisted it be a full 30km deep, and was incensed by U.S. foot-dragging. Turkey threatened unilateral action – and Trump rolled over.
Why the need for a 30km “safe zone”? Turkey wants to push the YPG as far back as possible to prevent, or at least have a buffer, against an autonomous Kurdish enclave dominated by the YPG’s political arm, the Democratic Union Party.
Ankara sees these groups as one and the same as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an internationally proscribed terrorist group waging a decades-long war against the Turkish state which claimed over 40,000 lives.
Kurds living in Athens protest near the Turkish embassy holding banners showing Turkish president Erdogan morphing into an ISIS fighter. October 9, 2019
Kurds living in Athens protest near the Turkish embassy holding banners showing Turkish president Erdogan morphing into an ISIS fighter. October 9, 2019AFP
However, another reason for Turkey’s zeal for establishing a large buffer zone is so it has room to resettle millions of Arab Syrian refugees currently living in Turkey. The presence of these refugees while Turkey experiences its worst economic crises in decades is deeply unpopular across Turkish society. It was even a contributing factor for the unprecedented hammering of Erdogan’s ruling party at local elections last spring.
What is Erdogan and his government’s answer to the YPG Kurdish forces security question and the political problem of hosting millions of Syrians? A good old dose of ethnic cleansing.
In 1993 Andrew Bell-Fialkoff defined “ethnic cleansing” in a seminal Foreign Affairs essay, written as the world was left reeling by the return of concentration camps to Europe, only this time against Bosnian Muslims rather than Jews.
According to Bell-Fialkoff, ethnic cleansing is the “expulsion of an ‘undesirable’ population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations.”
The UN fears that a Turkish incursion into Syria would lead to the mass displacement of the region’s Kurds, which would in effect open up space for Turkey’s plan to resettle two million Syrian refugees in this “safe zone” and perhaps another one million in territory beyond. However, the vast majority of Syrian refugees in Turkey are Sunni Arabs and not originally from the area of the planned resettlement, which is mainly Kurdish.
In other words, what’s being planned is the forced exchange of one ethnic population for another. That’s Ethnic Cleansing 101.
And nobody can plead ignorance. This is exactly what happened last year when Turkish backed forces invaded Afrin. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled while Turkey, by its own admission, Arab Syrian refugees into the area, as many as 300,000.
And yet, Turkish authorities are energetically working to promote the resettlement “safe zone” plan. President Erdogan even announced the idea at the United Nations while other leading Turkish officials have called for U.S. and European support for what is essentially a project of ethnic cleansing.
Although Western officials have not endorsed the plan, they need to universally, unequivocally and publicly condemn it.
Sure, Trump is now warning Turkey that he will wage an obliterating economic war if in his “great and unmatched wisdom” Turkey does anything untoward, but the damage has already been done. Ankara’s biggest deterrence for invading, the presence of U.S. forces, has gone.
If implemented, Erdogan’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Syria is sure to be remembered alongside Saddam Hussein’s genocidal al-Anfal campaign in Iraq, and Hafez Assad’s Arab resettlement policies and Baathist denials of Kurdish rights, not to mention Turkey’s attempts to demographically reengineer Kurdish regions during the 1920s and 1930s and the brutal nature of Turkey’s war with the PKK.
It will also be remembered that the White House was complicit.
*Dr Simon A. Waldman is an associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and a visiting research fellow at King’s College London. He is the co-author of “The New Turkey and Its Discontents” (Oxford University Press, 2017). Twitter:
Analysis Turkey’s War on the Kurds: Quick Conquest or Quagmire? زيفي برئيل/هآرتس: الحرب التركية على الأكراد هل هي فتح واحتلال سريعين أم أنها مستنقع سيغرقون فيه؟ Zvi Bar’el/Haaretz/October 10/2019
An effective war of attrition can enlist public opinion in Europe and the United States, and above all, stoke a mass protest in Turkey itself as its number of soldiers killed rises.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s declaration of the launch of a campaign against the Kurdish districts in northern Syria was accompanied by airstrikes on the city of Tal Abyad east of the Euphrates. The tactical plan of the war is still unclear, but starting it at Tal Abyad shows that the strategic intent is to take over the regions east of the Euphrates and from there continue west to link up with the Turkish forces that took control of the city of Afrin in March 2018.
Thus Turkey crossed the Americans’ red line, which so far has meant an attack-free zone as determined by agreements between Turkey and the United States.
Turkey is wasting no time, and with the departure of the American forces and President Donald Trump’s backtrack on his commitment to the Kurds, the Kurdish zone has become a hunting ground. Thousands of Kurds are fleeing their homes and the Kurdish political and military leaders have declared an emergency and a general call-up.
According to reports by Kurdish spokespeople, Kurdish forces have stopped fighting the Islamic State, and they have no intention of continuing to hold thousands of ISIS male and female prisoners who have been in custody for months in temporary detention centers in the Kurdish area.
Shortly after the Turkish operation inside Syria had started, Turkish soldiers stand at the border with Syria in Akcakale, Sanliurfa province, southeastern Turkey, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2019.
According to Mazloum Kobani Abdi, commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the largest armed militia that was established with U.S. assistance, the war against the Islamic State and the guarding of the detention camps has become a “secondary goal.” His soldiers, Abdi said, are now committed to fighting the Turkish occupation and protecting their families in the villages and towns in danger of falling to the Turks.
The military option for Abdi’s forces is to persuade the Syrian army to join the Kurdish forces to fight Turkey, but Syria probably won’t want or be able to open a new front against Turkey, especially with Russia indifferent to the Turkish invasion. Russia did promise to try to mediate between the Kurds and Turkey to prevent massive bloodshed, but as far as Russia is concerned, a temporary Turkish occupation could later ensure the transfer of the conquered area to Syrian President Bashar Assad and spur the political process that Moscow is promoting.
Turkey’s Vietnam?
A more realistic option is for the Kurds to start a broad guerrilla campaign against the Turkish forces, one that will turn the Kurdish region into Turkey’s Vietnam. This modus operandi is the specialty of the Kurdish forces, which are facing Turkey with no air support and limited armored strength. It may also be expected that the Kurds will try to move the fighting into Turkey via mass attacks and direct hits in Turkish population centers, like the attacks the PKK, a Kurdish guerrilla movement, has carried out in recent years.
Time is a significant factor in this battle, especially for the Turks. The more massive the campaign and the quicker it reaches a decisive conclusion, the easier it will be for Turkey to evade growing international pressure. But the Kurds are in no hurry. A long and effective war of attrition can enlist public opinion in Europe and the United States, and above all, can stoke a mass protest in Turkey itself as its number of killed soldiers increases.
To avoid casualties in a ground war, Turkey has given the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army the mission of taking the territory, and according to spokesmen for this militia, the Kurds are to be hit with “a heavy hand and major firepower.” But this territory has a border more than 450 kilometers (280 miles) long and a depth of about 30 kilometers; thus there will be no choice but to bring in Turkish armored forces and infantry.
The chance of a quick diplomatic solution depends on the intensions of Russia, the only power that can effectively pressure Turkey and halt the onslaught. But Russia has so far issued watered-down statements calling for a diplomatic solution. It has promised, but not committed itself, to bring the Kurds into diplomatic talks from which they have so far been excluded by Turkey’s demands.
Russia may be waiting to see how the military campaign proceeds, which has so far been roundly criticized by Iran, to decide whether it will side with the Kurds and the Syrian army. Or it might wait to see if Turkey will take over the northern districts and then negotiate for Turkey’s withdrawal, and bring in Assad’s army to take over without a fight, if the Kurdish forces are defeated.
U.S. policy 2.0
While the United States, which has renounced its commitment to the Kurds, has threatened to destroy the Turkish economy if it crosses the red lines agreed on by Trump and Erdogan in their strange phone conversation, this threat is apparently hollow, just like Trump’s warnings to punish Turkey for purchasing S-400 missiles from Russia.
The American policy, if it can be called that, is almost completely a quote of the policies of President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger toward the Kurds in the early ‘70s. A report by the Pike Committee, established by Congress in 1976 to investigate the CIA’s conduct vis-a-vis the Kurds, noted at the time: “The president, Dr. Kissinger and the foreign head of state [the shah of Iran] hoped that our clients [the Kurds] would not prevail. They preferred instead that the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources [of Iraq]. This policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue fighting … ours was a cynical enterprise.”
Ford wasn’t the last U.S. president to deliver a resounding slap to the Kurds. George H.W. Bush called the massacre of Shi’ites and Kurds by Saddam Hussein an “internal matter.” The desperate letters sent by Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani to the American president and to Kissinger went unanswered. Now, too, the Kurds have no one to appeal to in the United States, whose president has said that his country should “get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars,” and that entry into the Middle East was the biggest mistake the United States ever made.
Not only has American backing disappeared, the Kurds in Syria can’t depend on Kurdish solidarity from outside Syria to help them. There is a deep ideological rift between the Kurdish leadership in Iraq and the leadership of the Syrian Democratic Party, the party of the Kurds in Syria, which suspects that the Kurdish leaders in Iraq intend to take over the Kurdish movement in Syria. The Kurdish region in Iraq has strong economic and diplomatic ties with Turkey and its leaders have joined the Turkish struggle against the PKK.
The Kurds in Syria don’t seek to establish an independent state, and the Kurdish government in Syria has adopted a system of direct democracy, unlike the patriarchal hierarchy in Iraq. At the beginning of the war against the Islamic State, the Kurdish leaders in Iraq offered to send forces to help the Kurds in Syria, but the latter refused out of fear that such forces would become a permanent garrison.
The Kurds’ concern now is that the Turkish war against them will be dubbed an “internal war,” or at most will win the Kurds international sympathy because of the expected harsh humanitarian implications. Thus it could turn “the Kurdish problem” in Syria into an episode that will take away their ability to negotiate over their rights and standing when the time comes for negotiations and discussions begin on a new Syrian constitution.
