The Trump administration did not condemn Turkey last week after the country’s military began attacking Kurdish forces in northwestern Syria. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders exemplified the administration’s response: “We hear and take seriously Turkey’s legitimate security concerns,” she said on January 22, two days after the Turks began an air and ground assault on the city of Afrin.
On January 24, President Trump spoke with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and, according to a readout of the call provided by the White House, “relayed concerns” about the Afrin incursion and “urged Turkey to deescalate, limit its military actions, and avoid civilian casualties and increases to displaced persons and refugees.” Trump also told Erdogan “to exercise caution and to avoid any actions that might risk conflict between Turkish and American forces.”
The “legitimate security concerns” of Turkey refer to the ethnic Kurds in the country who are seeking an independent state. The Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG) militia force in Afrin is linked by Ankara to Turkey’s Kurdistan Worker’s party, or PKK, with which it has been in open conflict for decades. There’s no public evidence, however, that the YPG in Afrin launched any attack across the border before Turkey’s January 20 invasion.
So what prompted the aggression? The Turks blame a U.S. military proposal to train and arm a mostly Kurdish patrol force along Syria’s long border with Turkey. A spokesman for the American-led coalition fighting ISIS in eastern Syria confirmed Turkish media reports of plans for such a force. “The Coalition is working jointly with the Syrian Democratic Forces to establish and train the new Syrian Border Security Force,” Col. Thomas F. Veale told the Defense Post on January 13. “The base of the new force is essentially a realignment of approximately 15,000 members of the Syrian Democratic Forces to a new mission in the Border Security Force as their actions against ISIS draw to a close.”
But the Trump administration denies the plan ever rose past the level of a tactical discussion by military commanders. “There was never such a plan that had any policy approval,” a senior administration official said last week. “In fact, it wasn’t even considered here, in D.C., at the policy level. There may have been some blue-sky type thinking by the military planners at a tactical level based on the mission parameters that they had. But that was never put forward as a policy option.”
In fact, the official continued, “if there’s a proximate cause outside of Turkey for the launch of that operation, it is Russia,” citing a statement from Erdogan that he had an “agreement” with Russia related to the move on the Kurds in Afrin. The Russian defense forces near Afrin were moved away from the city shortly before Turkey’s incursion.
“You will note that there has been no engagement of Turkish aircraft by Syrian regime air defenses,” the official went on. “So we think the implication there is that the agreement that Russia made with Turkey was to guarantee that the Syrian regime air defenses would not prevent Turkish aircraft from flying missions over Afrin. So the conditions under which the operation kicked off, including large-scale air operations—that’s the result of Russia’s greenlighting the operation for Turkey.”
There are also internal concerns that explain Turkey’s decision to invade, says Eric Edelman, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 2003 to 2005. “All of this is driven by Turkey’s domestic political situation and Erdogan’s upcoming presidential campaign in 2019, about which he is extremely nervous,” says Edelman. “He’s worried about his reelection. Stirring up external enemies is a time-honored tradition for people like him.”
About the Kurdish forces in Afrin, the administration has had little to say except that they have “never been advised by the United States, equipped by the United States, trained by the United States, and have never had any U.S. forces embedded with them,” said the senior Trump administration official. He emphasized that the U.S. military draws a distinction between these two groups of Kurds: those fighting ISIS alongside the U.S. in the east and those opposed to the Assad regime in the west.
“No one outside the White House situation room is going to believe that,” thinks Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute. Rubin, an expert on the region, says the distinction between the two groups of Kurds is one without difference. “We really don’t have enough people inside Syria to accomplish anything if we don’t utilize the Kurds,” he notes. “The Kurds are our infrastructure there. They are the most effective and organized force against the Islamic State and other militants.”
Edelman says it’s implausible the Kurds themselves would draw such a fine line, and he fears the perception that the United States is leaving them high and dry in Afrin damages our position of influence in the region. “We’ve sold them out in the past. People in this part of the world have long memories. They’ve potentially got other folks they can make a deal with,” he says.
So what explains the administration’s hair-splitting over the Afrin incursion as Erdogan tilts further away from the United States and toward Vladimir Putin? The Islamist, anti-American Erdogan, whom Rubin calls a “paranoid dictator,” is an increasingly duplicitous ally, but an ally all the same. Turkey is a NATO member, remember. One view within the White House is that, for now, the alliance is bigger and more important than Turkey’s current president. Turkey skeptics like Rubin see it otherwise. “Thinking that by appeasing this sort of behavior we’re going to somehow win Turkey back, that’s insane,” says Rubin.
“Winning Turkey back” is the key phrase. Back from whom? Vladimir Putin, who has found another ally in Syria’s Assad regime, increasing Russia’s sphere of influence in the Mideast as the United States’ recedes. The Russian resort town of Sochi is hosting a Putin-led summit on Syria’s future at the end of January. Turkey is among the participants along with Iran (of whom Assad’s Syria is effectively a client state).
It’s the hope of the administration that the United States can continue to offer something to Turkey. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, speaking at the Hoover Institution on January 17, noted the threat of terrorism to Turkey from both a resurgent al Qaeda and the Kurdish PKK in the country’s southeastern corner. “We must have Turkey’s close cooperation in achieving a new future for Syria that ensures security for Syria’s neighbors,” said Tillerson in an appeal to mutual benefits.
At the moment, however, Erdogan isn’t buying. Less than 72 hours after Tillerson’s speech, Turkish planes were shelling Kurds in Afrin.
Michael Warren is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
