European taxpayers will not subsidize Turkey’s plan to attack the Kurdish fighters that helped destroy the Islamic State and resettle the territory they hold with Syrian refugees.
“The EU will not provide stabilization or development assistance in areas where the rights of local populations are ignored,” Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s top diplomat, warned Wednesday.
That threat to deny financial aid draws on the playbook that U.S. and European powers have used against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, as Western powers have refused to finance the reconstruction of cities destroyed by the regime in the civil war. U.S. officials have touted such foreign aid as leverage to force Assad to relinquish power, but Mogherini is trying to deter Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s assault on the most important U.S. and European partners on the ground in Syria.
“Unilateral action on Turkey’s part threatens the progress achieved by the Global Coalition to defeat of Da’esh, of which Turkey is a member,” she said, using an alternative name for ISIS. “It is unlikely that a so-called ‘safe zone’ in north-east Syria, as envisaged by Turkey, would satisfy international criteria for refugee return as laid down by UNHCR … Any attempt at demographic change would be unacceptable.”
U.S. analysts believe that Erdoğan, who intends to resettle the Syrian refugees currently in Turkey into the northeast Syrian territory currently held by the Kurds, wants to establish proxy forces that can control the region after the formal withdrawal of the Turkish military. “Erdoğan’s model at this point is working through Islamist proxies,” Aykan Erdemir, a former Turkish lawmaker at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told reporters Tuesday. “Erdoğan’s project for northeast Syria is to have a Turkish controlled safe-zone where his proxies run the show.”
Erdoğan launched the assault earlier Wednesday after President Trump ordered the American special forces units operating alongside the Syrian Kurds to leave the area in order to avoid being caught in a crossfire. The presence of U.S. troops previously had deterred Turkey, a NATO ally, from carrying out the operation. Turkey regards the Syrian Kurds as allies of a rebel Turkish militant group that has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization for decades, but Western powers think they are crucial for preventing the resurgence of ISIS.
“A conflict along the Turkey-Syria border would serve the interests of all the bad actors in the conflict and in the surrounding region — whether that’s Daesh [ISIS], or al Qaeda, or the Iranian regime,” Joel Rayburn, the State Department’s special envoy for the Syrian conflict, said last week.
The controversy could worsen a U.S.-Turkey relationship that is already ailing from Erdoğan’s insistence on purchasing advanced Russian anti-aircraft defense systems.
“Such an action lacks international support and risks a precipitous decline in the U.S.-Turkey relationship,” Senate Foreign Relations Chairman James Risch, an Idaho Republican, said Wednesday. “Continued Turkish aggression will derail international efforts to maintain pressure against the Islamic State and will undoubtedly result in further humanitarian suffering.”
