President Trump has betrayed and cut loose our Kurdish allies in northeast Syria. He says he wants to extricate American soldiers from “endless wars,” but this week he relocated no more than 100 U.S. personnel from a place of relative peace — a place where Americans were not being fired upon. Sure enough, on Wednesday that place already was bursting into open warfare. Trump surrendered peace and effectively invited Turkey to invade and take the fight to the people who had been fighting on our side against ISIS.
Some 1,000 U.S. personnel remain in Syria anyway. Trump hasn’t removed them, despite his ignorant Twitter posturing, but he has left them in a place less stable than it was before he cowered in front of the Islamist Turkish thug, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. If the Kurds are unable to ward off the Turks’ vicious assault, it stands to reason that the first role they will abandon is that of jail keeper for 10-12,000 ISIS fighters. Once escaped, those ISIS fighters surely will terrorize the U.S. and its allies.
House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney, one of Trump’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill, summed up the situation concisely in a Tweet calling the situation “sickening.”
“Turkish troops preparing to invade Syria from the north, Russian-backed forces from the south, ISIS fighters attacking Raqqa,” she wrote. “Impossible to understand why @realDonaldTrump is leaving America’s allies to be slaughtered and enabling the return of ISIS.”
As Cheney accurately noted, the problem Trump let loose isn’t just that Turkey is attacking. The worst is that ISIS sleeper cells, in timing that appears coordinated and that at least was triggered by the obvious opportunity afforded them, already unleashed what has been described as a “large-scale attack” on Kurdish security bases. Not only does this give the lie to Trump’s repeated assertion that he “defeated” ISIS, but it shows that his decision has unleashed them. It isn’t just the Kurds who will suffer.
A bit beneath the radar, the abandonment of the Kurds also puts Israel at somewhat greater risk. Kurdish patrols throughout eastern Syria had effectively made it more difficult for Iran to send aid through Shi’ite areas of Iraq to the Hezbollah terrorists making mischief for Israel from the area of the Golan Heights. Now, with Kurds fighting for their own lives in northeast Syria, a corridor opens for Iranian-Hezbollah threats to Israel.
In sum, not a single discernible American interest was secured by Trump’s decision. The bloodbath that already has begun will be Trump’s fault.
