It is difficult to
understand what the Biden administration is doing in northern Syria where its
allies, the Syrian Kurds, have been bombed to high heaven by Turkish forces.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has insisted that he also intends to mount a
land operation against America’s partners there.
اضافة اعلان
Although Turkey
for some time had been bombing and assassinating members of the US-allied
Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), this current offensive is different. It is
designed to deal the Kurds a fatal blow. What is incomprehensible is that
Turkish attacks are taking place within a few hundred meters of where US troops
and other officials are collocated with the Syrian Kurds.
To understand the
situation, we need to go back to 2014 when Daesh swept through northern Syria
and northern Iraq defeating a variety of forces, including those of the Iraqi
army and the autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region. President Barack Obama asked
Erdogan for help defending the Syrian-Kurdish town of Kobani that risked being
overrun by Daesh. Erdogan simply refused, preferring a Daesh victory to a
burgeoning Kurdish presence in northern Syria.
Obama, in turn,
turned to the SDF and other Kurdish formations to fight Daesh. US troops and
materiel were sent, and the American-Kurdish alliance successfully beat back
Daesh. The struggle against Daesh has continued as tens of thousands of
militants and their families were captured and are still being held in a
mammoth prison, named Al Hol. Daesh has endured, albeit in a much-diminished
format, seeking to make a comeback. Hence, the US forces have remained to this
day to help the Kurds keep the area under control.
This outcome was
unacceptable to Erdogan who tried his best to undermine US efforts there.
Turkey has from the beginning viewed the burgeoning US-SDF alliance as a
strategic threat. It fears that in a post-civil war Syria, this will culminate
in the Kurds gaining some form of autonomy.
Kurds have
already achieved autonomy and international recognition in the form of the
Kurdistan Regional Government, an autonomous component of federal Iraq. It came
about because of US efforts in the 1990s to protect Iraq’s Kurdish population
from Saddam Hussein’s murderous onslaughts. Turks are petrified that a similar
arrangement in Syria would encourage their own dissatisfied Kurdish minority to
agitate for the same.
Turkey has from the beginning viewed the burgeoning US-SDF alliance as a strategic threat. It fears that in a post-civil war Syria, this will culminate in the Kurds gaining some form of autonomy.
Erdogan’s
justification for his Syria offensives is that the SDF is a terrorist
organization because it is an offshoot of the Turkish PKK, the Kurdistan
Workers Party, an organization considered terrorist by Turkey and the US. The
SDF is ideologically close to the PKK but has never been engaged in terrorist
activities against Turkey and has focused on maintaining its place in northern
Syria. Erdogan also claimed that a recent bomb attack in Istanbul that killed
six people was perpetrated by the SDF.
This makes no
sense. Why would the SDF engage in such a sloppy act that achieves absolutely
nothing, and worse, risks its alliance with the US? Within an hour of the
event, Turkey had not only concocted a story blaming the SDF but claimed it had
found the perpetrators. Turkey’s Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu went further
and accused the US of being behind the bombing.
While it is
unclear who carried out the attack, Erdogan is using it for his own electoral
calculations. Turkey must hold elections by May 2023, and with the economy in
poor shape, inflation at 85 percent, and a general sense of weariness with
Erdogan’s 20-year rule, the Syria intervention is a way to put the already
incoherent opposition on the defensive and change the domestic narrative.
The US has been
mostly silent, other than issuing a few meek statements. The White House had
the power to prevent this by taking Erdogan on. With rare exceptions, US policy
vis-à-vis Turkey and especially Erdogan has sought to appease rather than stand
up to an authoritarian leader. The excuse has always been that as a NATO
member, Turkey is too important and that the US has too many other interests
there.
Finally, after
having allowed the airstrikes to go on for days, the administration had
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin call his Turkish counterpart to convince them
not to conduct the land operation. Then, American forces conducted conspicuous
joint patrols with the SDF to send a message. This may be too little too late
and does not thwart Erdogan from ordering a land operation in the future.
At two levels,
the US approach is a bankrupt policy. First, appeasement has not worked because
it has allowed Erdogan to bully the US. The daily diatribe from Turkish
government sources is virulently anti-American. Washington has remained silent
to the constant public abuse it receives.
Last year,
Erdogan personally attacked one of Biden’s most senior aides, accusing Brett
McGurk of supporting terrorism. A 2020 poll showed that 70 percent of
respondents named the US as the single greatest threat to Turkey. Washington
has only itself to blame for this as it never developed a counter narrative of
its own.
Second, the US
knows better. The SDF had nothing to do with the Istanbul bombing. Allowing
your allies, who spilled their blood fighting extremists, to be attacked
indiscriminately is morally wrong. If not for the SDF, Daesh may still be
there. Moreover, just like the Russians in Ukraine, Turks are targeting basic
infrastructure, some of which was built with US taxpayers’ money.
Especially after
the Afghanistan debacle, Washington ought to be careful about the kind of
message it sends to allies and foes in the region and beyond about its
trustworthiness. The image this crisis invokes is of a superpower’s military
and civilian personnel having to cower and seek shelter from its ally Turkey’s
bombardment.
Henri J Barkey is the Cohen Professor of International
Relations at Lehigh University and an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East
studies at the Council of Foreign Relations. Syndication Bureau.
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