Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s recent outburst of anti-American rhetoric was simply a product of public opinion in his country, according to the NATO member’s top diplomat.
“Our declarations [were] not declarations of enmity,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters during a joint press conference with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. “We should be voicing the opinion of the Turkish public, because we are representing them. And the declarations that we made were just ramifications of the popular thought in Turkey.”
Erdogan threatened U.S. forces in Syria with an “Ottoman slap” if they persisted in partnering with Syrian Kurds. The YPG, as the Kurds are known, have proven crucial to the U.S.-led coalition’s fight against the Islamic State, but Erdogan fears they could join with a group of Turkish Kurds that have long been designated as a terrorist group for waging a separatist war against the Turkish central government. Turkey has launched a military campaign in northern Syria against the Kurds, raising the risk of potential clashes between the United States and a NATO ally.
Tillerson defended the U.S. entrenchment by saying it was necessary to prevent the resurgence from ISIS. But though he didn’t promise an immediate withdrawal, he emphasized that a U.S.-Turkish working group would develop a security plan.
“[T]he U.S. has left a troop presence in Manbij to ensure that that city remains under control of our allied forces and does not fall into the hands of others,” he said. “So that will be a topic for discussion in terms of how we go forward to ensure Manbij remains within our control because of its strategic importance.”
Cavusoglu hinted at the possibility of a joint Turkish-American effort to hold northern Syria.
“If Manbij is 95 percent Arab town, it actually does not make any sense that YPG is going to provide security there, because that will mean that there will not be any stability there,” the Turkish diplomat said. “And once YPG leaves that and after we have the trust established, we will be able to take steps together with the United States of America, but now YPG needs to leave that zone, and this is a commitment that the United States of America has made to us, and we will be talking about the implementation of how this promise will be kept.”
The call for trust-building was a reference to promises made by the Obama administration that the Kurds would withdraw from the city of Manbij, which sits at a strategically significant location near the border between Turkey and Syria. The Kurds captured Manbij from ISIS in 2016, stoking Turkish fears that they would try to form an independent state on their border.
If implemented, the offer to replace Kurdish forces with Turkish allies could be a significant shift in U.S.-Turkey relations. “Turkey sees that cooperation with the United States in Syria could be a way to sideline all the YPG forces there,” former Turkish parliamentarian Aykan Erdemir, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Examiner.
Manbij was recently the scene of a tense stand-off between pro-Turkish militias and American forces in the city. “You hit us, we will respond aggressively,” Lt. Gen. Paul Funk told the pro-Turkish militias, according to the New York Times. Erdogan replied by saying that U.S. forces had “never experienced an Ottoman slap.”
To replace such a stand-off with heightened cooperation within a fraying alliance could be a diplomatic victory for the United States. That’s especially true as Tillerson has outlined a plan to prevent a resurgence of ISIS in Syria by holding the territory taken from the terrorist group and preventing Syrian President Bashar Assad — backed by Russia and Iran — from expanding the Assad’s regime’s control of Syria and provoking more fighting in the Syrian civil war.
But the risk remains that Erdogan will prioritize the destruction of the Syrian Kurds over any long-term cooperation with the United States. “We’ve seen that Ankara has a really bizarre relationship with Tehran and Russia, where, at times, they are at odds; but other times they seem to be coordinating very closely,” Erdemir said. “If Turkey has the option of driving all YPG Kurds away and handing that territory to Russian or Iranian influence, I don’t think Turkey would be too opposed to the idea.”
Tillerson expressed confidence about the allies’ long-term unity. “There’s no daylight between Turkey and the U.S. objectives: defeat ISIS, stabilize the country, create stabilization areas so eventually refugees and internally displaced persons can begin to return home,” he said. “[A]nd support the political solution for Syria that will result in a whole, independent, democratic Syria with no special demarcations dividing Syria and with the Syrian people selecting their leadership through free and fair elections. And we all share that same objective.”
