Turkey attacked U.S.-backed forces in Iraq and Syria without giving American troops enough advance warning to leave the area, the Pentagon revealed Wednesday.
“We had forces within six miles of the strikes,” Air Force Col. John Dorrian, the spokesman for the counter-Islamic State efforts in Iraq and Syria, told reporters Wednesday. “It was an unsafe way to conduct operations.”
Turkish officials alerted the U.S. military to the impending strike “less than an hour” before the raids on U.S.-backed Kurdish forces took place, while adding only a vague description of where the attack would occur. That ensured that American leaders wouldn’t be able to warn the targets of the strikes, but it also meant that troops on the ground in Syria couldn’t take defensive moves.
“There was an inadequate amount of time to clear all of our forces away from what is a very significantly sized area, so we didn’t have exact fidelity on where the strikes would occur and not an enormous amount of time to have our forces react,” he said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has complained repeatedly about the U.S. working with Kurdish forces, particularly in Syria, because he regards those fighters as affiliates of a Kurdish separatist movement in southern Turkey known as the PKK. Turkish officials justified the surprise airstrikes as a necessary attack against PKK fighters intermingled with the other Kurdish forces.
“[T]errorist targets have been struck with success,” the Turkish military said Tuesday.
The State Department condemned the bombings on Wednesday. “This is a very complex battlespace — we’re cognizant of that and we’re also cognizant of the threat that the PKK poses to Turkey,” deputy spokesman Mark Toner told reporters. “Turkey cannot pursue that fight now at the expense of our common fight against the terrorists that threaten us all and that obviously means ISIS.”
Dorrian reiterated that protest, emphasizing that Turkey killed “partner forces” that are “integral” to ground operations against ISIS.
“There was less than an hour of notification time before the strikes were conducted,” he said. “That’s not enough time. And this was notification, certainly not coordination, as you would expect from a partner and an ally in the fight against ISIS.”
